Inner Fitness: Healthy Deviance

Week of December 11, 2021

1. Intro to Healthy Deviance: From Chronic Depletion to Empowered Flow
   The nature of the Unhealthy Default Reality (our real-life version of “The Matrix”); the vicious cycle it creates for health seekers; our “unseen problem” and the renegade solution offered by Healthy Deviance; scientific findings on the phenomena of “Ego-Depletion” and “Learned Helplessness” and where they might be showing up in your life.
   Tool/Exercise: Weird Symptom Checklist: Are You Breaking Yourself?
   
2. Healthy Deviance — Nonconformist Competency 1: Amplified Awareness
   The health-and-sanity-preserving importance (and challenge) of paying attention to what is going on in and around you in the midst of nonstop distraction; noticing the signals your body is giving you; the value of cultivating awareness and willingness rather than focusing on what we commonly think of “willpower.”
   Tool/Exercise: Renegade Ritual: Morning-Minutes Practice
   
3. Healthy Deviance — Nonconformist Competency 2: Pre-emptive Repair
   The power of getting ahead of accumulating damage that is done to your bodymind just by virtue of living in the midst of a pro-inflammatory culture; avoiding states of reactivity and vulnerability; building vitality, resilience, and autonomy in micro-doses.
   Tool/Exercise: Renegade Ritual: Ultradian Rhythm Breaks(URBs)
   
4. Healthy Deviance — Nonconformist Competency 3: Continuous Growth and Learning
   The necessity and reward of embracing a “Growth Mindset” around health and self-improvement; getting comfortable with the natural tension between where you want to be and where you are, between what you want to know and do, and what you are capable of right now; building on existing strengths and areas of success and identifying areas of opportunity (as observed from abbreviated Life Wheel exercise).
   Tool/Exercise: Renegade Ritual: Nighttime Wind-Down
   
5. Healthy Deviant Know-How: The Survival Skills of the New Era
   An overview of the broad base of key skills and literacies (beyond “diet and exercise”) that one needs to be healthy in an unhealthy world, and how to move beyond information-overload toward selective experimentation and practice; Healthy Deviance as a Flow experience.
   Tool/Exercise: Your Hierarchy of (Healthy Deviant Skill) Needs

 

Pilar Gerasimo is an award-winning journalist and a pioneering social explorer. Her passion: cultivating what she calls “Healthy Deviance” — the art of being a healthy person in an unhealthy world.

Best known for her work as founding editor of Experience Life magazine, which today reaches more than 3 million people nationwide, Pilar formerly served as executive editor of Healthy Living for The Huffington Post and is now Chief Creative Officer for The Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City.

Pilar is the author of an award-winning chapbook, Being Healthy Is a Revolutionary Act: A Manifesto for Thriving in a Mixed-Up World, and the creative force behind the popular mobile app: 101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy. She also co-hosts a top-rated weekly podcast called The Living Experiment.

Pilar lives on an organic family farm in Wisconsin with her pit bull pal, Calvin. Her new book, The Healthy Deviant, will be published in January 2020 by North Atlantic Books.