Luke Storey and Ben Greenfield discuss aligning health with nature while keeping modern life. Luke argues humans get sick by abandoning ancestral practices like sun gazing and cold exposure. Ben agrees ancestral habits help but says you don't have to reject all technology, just use it selectively.
Yeah, well, it's funny you frame it like that because I think, you know, my view of all human pathology is really a deviation from nature and natural human ways, right? So the hunter gatherer, connectivity and intimacy and human support and love and affection, physical touch. All of those things combined with the loss of our connection to the land, I think that's at the root of all pathology, both emotional, spiritual, and physical. And so a good experiment would be to actually go immerse yourself in nature with no props. You know, alone, I guess, would be, you know, the real warrior's way to do it, but with a couple loved ones. You know, like you have family, kids and whatnot. To go out there and really experience what it's like to be in true wholeness and completion in the way that we were designed. It seems like as we've deviated further from that, then all of these props become necessary. I always say to people when they write. Cause people write in are like people that have this scarcity mindset, often that are like, well, I can't be healthy because I can't afford the biocharger or the infrared sauna or whatever. And the first thing I say is, yes, you can, if my ass can figure this out. I didn't even graduate high school and I'm doing it. So it's just a mentality thing more than anything. But more than that, I always say, you really don't need any of that shit if you have the discipline to align yourself with nature. Sun, gaze at dawn. Sun, gaze at dusk. Get in some cold water, get hot, move your body a bit, do some breath work, meditate. Most of the things that really move the needle are free, but people don't want to do those because they want a quick fix. It takes more discipline to do that than pop some modafinil. And, yeah, you know.
I would never.
Freaking want to be a caveman.
Nor would I want to live in a tent. Like, if I had to choose, I would not want those things because our. Our modern life is pretty freaking magical. We live like kings. And then sometimes we find in our whole. Especially, you know, if you're. If you're steeped in the. In the paleo, the ancestral community. Oh, ancestral man or woman wouldn't have done this. They wouldn't have done that. They wouldn't have gotten on an airplane. You know, they would have traveled by covered wagon across the US and half the family would have died as they traveled 3,000 miles to go see grandma. But I'm not going to get on airplane because that's unhealthy and subjects me to radiation, or I have an entire emperor's worth of library at my fingertips, but I'm not going to access it that much because I don't want to get irradiated by WI fi. You have to draw a line somewhere and accept the fact that a lot of the conveniences of modern life, despite having a few biological downfalls in terms of them being evolutionary mismatches, that perhaps our cell membranes and other parts of our body have not yet been able to fully adapt to, present a wide range of blessings and conveniences that I think sometimes because we have this nostalgic view of how good ancient life must have been, we neglect to appreciate. And I've certainly been guilty of that.
On my own show and in teachings or speaking, saying that we need to be as close to Earth as possible and as ancestral as possible. When in fact I think that you can, to a certain extent, have the best of both worlds. You can marry ancestral living to modern science. Make some good educated decisions. Yes, don't strap a WI FI enabled meditation neural feedback device to your head and sit there for an hour with rampant levels of EMS EMF floating around your brain. But if you got some Bluetooth enabled Muse headband or something like that that you're putting on for 10 minutes a day because it's assisting you with steepening the curve or lowering the steepness of the curve of your meditation practice or something like that, go for it. Embrace technology. Embrace something that our caveman ancestors wouldn't have done. And I think that many of us would be healthier and better off because of that. That's.
Yeah, that's. That's a really keen observation. You know, someone was asking me yesterday if I go, if I do, you know, like, backpacking legit, not like put on a backpack and hike a mile up a hill, but like, go out for nine days.
Yeah.
With your backpack. I'm like, that is the. Like, I would rather do anything other than that. You know, it's like, well, where's my chili pad? I mean, what if the ground, you know, what if it's too hot or too cold?
If.
What if I'm uncomfortable for just a few minutes? So I am absolutely guilty of.
Excursions like that do help you appreciate the chili pad, though.
It's just the ground's too hard. Are you kidding me? I value my sleep. But it is about for me also a balance, but also acknowledging that the reason that so much of these props and things like that are needed in order to Just sustain and evolve in a new way is because the deviation from our natural life way is so far off. But there's also no going back. And if you become domesticated like I absolutely have, I'm not going to live in the woods in a cabin with no electricity. It just ain't going to happen. It would be, I don't know. Well, you don't know until you try it. But it would be, it would be like the life of the renunciate. You know, the monk who just drops everything. Like spoke of David Hawkins, he did that. He left a huge practice in New York City as a psychiatrist of 50 years and just abandoned all his finances and everything and just moved to Sedona with a pickup truck. That's one path. But then eventually you're going to have to start building a life back up probably and re entering the world in order to carry whatever it is that you learn.
Many people have that all or nothing approach. They say, oh well, I need to go live in a cabin in the woods forever or sell all my belongings and become a monk forever.
I do think that brief excursions here and there into those uncomfortable scenarios are very developmental for character and do really help you to appreciate the pleasures in life that you might have lost your full mindfulness around in terms of appreciating and being present with them. That piping hot cup of coffee in the morning that you grab and suck down while you're hunched over emails on your computer that you barely appreciate anymore, even though it arrived to you from fricking South America selectively roasted and hand picked and all the jet fuel that got burnt to bring it up to you and you just suck it down morning after morning after more without being aware of it. You go camping without any coffee for a week, you come back and you might be a little bit more appreciative of that cup of coffee. And so I think that for self awareness and for appreciating a lot of these modern pleasures in life, that extracting yourself on a regular basis having. There's a wonderful book that I'm taking my family through right now called the Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. And every two weeks we visit a different topic within that book. The topic last week was teachability. The topic this week, fittingly enough is unplugging. There was everything from charity and service to worship to self examination and a host of other topics that came before that. But one was retreat. The value, and we see this over and over again in great philosophers and thinkers and authors of having some structured scheduled retreat each year in which you do escape a lot of the modern conveniences of life. And in many cases it is accompanied with things that go quite well, that pair quite well with a retreat, particularly fasting, prayer, silence, solitude. Study these things that a retreat better enables us to do when we are free of distractions.
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