A temple that must be clean and in order. If it isn’t, we display a poor relationship with ourselves, and our well-being reflects that accordingly. Pain is an exceptional tool for timely warning—it is also a signal of deeper disorder to come if we don’t take action. A higher-quality life requires a certain amount of effort, persistence, and learning. Exploration allows us to better organize ourselves and our environment.
Modern people have “thick skin.” They are less sensitive to others, to the influence of powerful environmental stimuli (advertising, media, commerce, noise), and to themselves. The skin can be described as the outer boundary of personality, which in more and more people becomes exaggerated, forming a hardened wall that serves as a defense against the world, but also isolates the individual from themselves and their sensory self. In such a personality, the wall becomes a strong mask, able to withstand intense pressure while maintaining upright posture and a smile on the face—despite a chaotic relationship with time, energy, and surroundings.
Such a personality is considered successful and more adapted to the wild modern world, but this state—due to the physical laws mentioned above—cannot be sustained for long without increasing pain and the emergence of diseases of modern times. Sooner or later, someone who is strong, active, productive, overly upbeat, yet shallow and dependent, collapses under stress and pressure, and slips into burnout, chronic fatigue, depression, autoimmune diseases, and dementia.
This person has low-energy, undernourished skin; a weak and fragile boundary that makes them vulnerable to energy overload from the environment. Their mode of defense is withdrawal from the world—into isolation or the virtual world of social media—and a psychotic relationship with their surroundings. They become depressed, burned out, chronically exhausted. To summarize this aspect of environmental influence on life: a person finds themselves in serious trouble when overstimulated but unequipped to effectively direct the surplus energy—energy generated as a reaction to an unrealistic relationship with the environment—in a way that would make the environment less tense and stressful. In other words, to create different relationships that would respect their real bodily capacities and the cyclical need for calm and low external pressure, which alone enables a parasympathetic state even when not physically exhausted.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, nor can the amount of energy lost in a balanced exchange be greater than the energy gained. This means that the body’s internal reaction to the state of the environment, regardless of the ego’s denial, must be expressed in one form or another. If energy is not expressed appropriately and effectively through movement and through active emotional expression (anger, love, joy), it remains trapped within or beneath the surface, causing instability, asymmetry, and inefficiency in the system. This leads to entropy, which the system must alert the conscious mind to—through a signal strong enough to be felt as pain—and inform the ego that the current state must change.
To properly and effectively influence the above-described reality of modern life, I have developed 30-day programs in which I can teach and guide you in what is needed to shift from a chronically thick-skinned and rigid body into a more dynamic, spontaneous, and authentic being—one who can use the modern world more skillfully and live in it, not just survive.
