Integral Healthful Aging: My Noetic-Based Checklist
I am sharing My Integral Healthful Aging Checklist in response to requests from people searching for a simple guide for living a healthful aging lifestyle, and those interested in comparing their current lifestyle with what I have come to see are my key essentials for healthful aging.
By way of background, up until my middle sixties I enjoyed good health. I attributed my good fortune to my regular practice of deep meditation, affirmational visualizations, biofeedback, aerobic and anaerobic exercise, positive self-talk, dreamwork, listening to my body, environmental health, a loving spouse and interest in lifelong learning especially on the leading edge of the integral natural sciences (includes consciousness studies).
Then twelve years ago at age 66 I was stunned to find that my body's metabolism had changed and quickly began to show early classic symptoms of unhealthful aging: small strokes (hospitalized twice), heart arrhythmia, borderline diabetes, a pre-cancerous skin lesion, high blood pressure, high bad cholesterol (LDL), low good cholesterol (HDL) receding gums, early signs of glaucoma and cataracts, lower energy and erectile dysfunction.
While not fearful of death, I don't want to spend my last days in this body vegetating in a nursing home. So, I quickly scoured the literature on healthful aging for research which could help me stop, even reverse, my symptoms of deterioration commonly associated with older age.
To make a longer story shorter, after much searching and personal experimentation, in 1997 I came up with an integral lifestyle formula which has worked miraculously for me. All my maladies disappeared or stopped in their tracks within six months of embarking on my new integral healthful aging regimen as outlined later in this paper. So today, nearly chronological age 79, I hereby pass along my checklist for readers who may want to seriously experiment to see if it will also work for them.
Generally, the guiding principles underlying my integral healthful aging lifestyle are four-fold: 1) Nature’s nutritional formula; 2) Our mind-body-biosystem; 3) Self-management; 4) and belief in our timeless life-between-temporal lives and our purpose on Earth.
1) Nature's Nutritional Formula. I have come to see one secret seems to lie in understanding nature’s nutritional formula for optimal human health. The formula first shows itself in mothers’ milk, the milk each of us (if we were lucky) had access immediately after our biological birth. Mothers’ milk is made up of approximately 30% protein, 30% monounsaturated fat, and 40% carbohydrates. It turns out, as verified by researchers at the University of Illinois, M.I.T., Boston University, and other places, this formula can be applied to adult nutritional regimens.
2) Our Mind-Body-Biosystem. A second secret lies in the reciprocal nature of the mind-body-biosystem relationship. By that I mean that what we do to the body – the nutrition and exercise we give it – affects our mind-brain, and reciprocally, what we think and feel affects the biochemistry of our bodies. Both affect the way we perceive and value our biosystem and reciprocally the health of our biosystem – the air we breathe, the cleanliness of our water, etc. -- affects our individual and collective health.
3) Self-management. We have more control, not complete control, but more than earlier generations thought concerning the health of our bodies. While about 48% of our bodies – height, hair and eye color, etc. -- is determined by our inherited DNA, approximately the other 52% is up to us. And recent cellular research shows what we choose can affect some of our DNA as well. So, we can manage, or learn to manage, our thoughts, our nutrition and exercise, and what we do to our environment. Any of those factors we fail to manage, manage us. We can learn to manage to our choice to accept our self-management responsibility for managing them.
4) Belief in our timeless life-between-temporal lives and our purpose on Earth. Another key feature of my integral healthful aging lifestyle is the positive long range perspective inherent in the knowledge that we are fundamentally immortal spirits having a temporary biological body experience. As such, there is empirical research evidence that each of us entered our mother’s womb with a pre-planned plan for this incarnation, a plan we came to fulfill during our current biological lifetime, one we will use as our criteria for evaluating our soul’s progress upon return to our life between lives. Recovering my memory of my self-determined life plan has been a strong positive motivating force for living my life with healthful purpose, integrity, optimism, and energy.
My inspiration for this integral noetic approach to healthful aging has come primarily from the research of Harvard medical researcher and cardiologist Herbert Benson; nutritionist Ann Louise Gittleman; University of Illinois Urbana nutrition researcher Donald Layman; former Stanford cellular biologist Bruce Lipton; University of Arizona holistic physician and professor Andrew Weil; post-Darwinian evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris; former M.I.T. biochemist Barry Sears; psychiatrist/psychosynthesist Roberto Assagioli; University of California Irvine transpersonal psychiatrist Roger Walsh; transpersonal psychologist Frances Vaughn; University of Michigan successful aging researchers John Rowe and Robert Kahn; Harvard healthful aging researchers Thomas Perls and Margery Silver; Integral Institute mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme; life between lives regression hypnotherapist Michael Newton; Institute of Noetic Sciences integral psychology scientist Dean Radin; University of Virginia psychiatrist and reincarnation scientist Ian Stevenson; the visualization techniques of psychiatrist Donald Wilson and medical information from my personal physician Paul Baecher.
My Integral Self-Management Checklist.
Each item on the checklist is an objective written in the form of a visualization of intended results. Well proven for their effectiveness in the annals of Olympic sports psychology, visualizations have provided me with an effective way to integrate, expedite, and reinforce essentials of healthful aging into my lifestyle.
My checklist is organized as follows: Integral Healthful Aging Objectives; General Action Plan; Stress Management; Moderate Exercise; Healthful Aging; Mind-Soul Options; Biosystem Health; Appendix A. Balancing Eicosanoid Hormones; Appendix B - What About Vitamin and Mineral Supplements; Appendix C - Foods More Favorable to My Integral Healthful Aging; Bibliography and Suggested Reading
In the event you are unable to access this attachment you may request an email copy by writing to me at omnimind@admin.umass.edu
