Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

Long-time readers and others exploring my work may be interested to know I have begun an in-depth review of my book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life, which was first published in 2015 and is the second book in my comprehensive natural health trilogy.

As you may know, the Seven Keys primarily explores natural health promotion socially – in particular across seven domains of modern life, as its title suggests – and details use of my health-optimizing Natural Strategy Method in each domain.

Already, I have reviewed and updated all 288 of the exhibits and tables in this graphic-rich book. These updates aim at improving the quality and clarity of the book’s graphics, and also reformatting them in a style more closely aligned with the other two trilogy books, Our Three Natural Paths and Nature’s One Commandment. From a practical standpoint, I found that updating the book’s exhibits, first and in quick succession, surfaced several areas for added care during the larger review process.

Up next is a review of the Seven Keys’ fairly extensive text. My expectation is that review of the book’s introduction, seven chapters, and epilogue each will take about two months. With time off for my usual summer backpacks, this  should lead to publication of the changes in late 2025. I will provide an update to this post when the revisions are completed.

Let me end by saying that this review of the Seven Keys has been very satisfying so far. We don’t always have the ability to revisit our work a decade later in time, but it can be very gratifying when we do. This of course owes to the potential to improve or evolve our prior efforts, and equally to sense how we ourselves may have evolved and perhaps improved in time as well. In any case, I would recommend the effort, if it is available and useful to you.

As always, thank you for your support and promotion of my work to introduce the opportunity of consciously health-centered natural life and endeavor, across our modern world.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Mark Lundegren

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

I am pleased to announce publication of my newest book, The Natural Way.

This new work is notable in being by far the shortest of my books, comprised of 100 paragraphs or stanzas across 100 pages. Long-planned, this intentionally brief and highly accessible book was created to introduce and summarize, for a general audience, the essential themes and ideas from my more rigorous natural health trilogy.

Long-time readers of my larger trilogy books are likely to be surprised with the format and tenor of The Natural Way, though not with any of its ideas. In fact, the outline for The Natural Way began with the tables of contents of the three books of my trilogy. Overall, The Natural Way closely follows the trilogy’s order and progression of topics, and presents all of its key themes and proposals.

Still, The Natural Way is a very different book than my earlier ones, again reflecting my goal of reducing or distilling the trilogy into a brief set of ideas and proposals about our natural health – one that nearly anyone can appreciate, and bring into their life and surroundings. Notably absent are my earlier books’ detailed discussions of health science research and its application, graphical exhibits and models, in-depth explorations of natural health in principle and practice, and previously abundant reference cites.

Instead, and as you can explore for yourself, The Natural Way is structured as a series of short and somewhat artful twelve-line stanzas, each introducing crucial ideas from my trilogy and explaining their basic rationale. These include our opportunity for a new and renaturalized understanding of our health, the waiting potential for this approach to be made conscious and overriding in our lives and settings, and the expected consequences or even liberation these changes are likely to bring to modern life.

Importantly, The Natural Way also introduces and provides overviews of the seven health tools from Our Three Natural Paths, use of the health-optimizing Natural Strategy Method from The Seven Keys of Natural Life, and essential ideas about the natural order or priority of human goals and ideals from Nature’s One Commandment.

At the same time, even with this close distillation and faithfulness to my natural health trilogy, I feel the need to emphasize once more that The Natural Way is remarkably different from my comprehensive trilogy books, and once more deliberately so. This will be important for anyone coming from the trilogy to the Natural Way, and of course from The Natural Way to the trilogy series.

To close this introduction to the new book, let me end by saying that I am delighted to be able to offer The Natural Way to my readers, old and new. For years, as I worked to refine and complete my natural health trilogy, I have understood the need or potential to augment these more ambitious books with one aimed primarily at a popular or more general reader.

With publication of The Natural Way, this need has been addressed, I am pleased both with the overall result and opportunity to write in a very different style, and I encourage you to take up the new book’s broad challenge of beginning each day, the natural way.

Thank you for your new or ongoing interest in and support of my work.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

I am pleased to announce publication of my new book, Our Three Natural Paths, which is available in both electronic and paper formats.

As I have posted about before, this book initially began as a natural health website, called HumanaNatura, that I began work on in 2002. The HumanaNatura website evolved over time to offer a broad and interconnected set of science-based natural health ideas, guidance, and practices.

Our Three Natural Paths specifically includes, expands, and refines the earlier HumanaNatura Personal Health Program and Community Health Program, along with various supplemental materials and supporting tools from the now-retired website. Importantly, the book also is joined by the free companion Three Paths Community Health Program, and Three Paths Community Assessment Worksheet, which together provide a comprehensive, holistic, and ongoing system for evaluating and improving health conditions in modern communities of all types and sizes.

In all, and as with the original website project, Our Three Natural Paths introduces a new, essentializing, and more universal sense of natural health than is common today, and examines the implications of this revised and deeper outlook on health for personal and communal life. From this foundation, Our Three Natural Paths then provides a practical set of health tools – from enabling health awareness and fitness practices to consciously health-minded life and community – to aid progressive personal understanding, discovery, and realization of our modern health potential.

Key themes in Our Three Natural Paths include the centrality of health in all of evolving nature, the imperative of probing action and learning to health progression, the importance of historical and environmental awareness for the mastery of modern individual and collective life, the powerful and often unexpected impacts of relatively simple health practices, and our natural opportunities for transformed life waiting in ever more informed, attentive, cooperative, and health-minded life overall.

Though most of the content of HumanaNatura’s natural health programs has found its way into Our Three Natural Paths, this material has been revised significantly and its format is somewhat different as well. Key changes include: 1) putting the project of personal and collective health into a larger and I think more helpful and motivating context, 2) reformatting and expanding the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program’s four natural health techniques into seven natural health tools, 3) substantial revisions to the Personal Health Program’s Natural Eating section, including updates to the OurPlate dietary model, and 4) extensive updates to the earlier Community Health Program and Community Assessment Worksheet.

Notably, Our Three Natural Paths also completes a larger three-book series, my natural health trilogy, exploring health personally, socially, and philosophically. The other two books in the series are The Seven Keys of Natural Life and Nature’s One Commandment. Owing to its origins, although Our Three Natural Paths is the third of the three books to be published, sequentially it is the first in the series.

With Our Three Natural Paths and its in-depth exploration of natural and modern health in individuals, families, and communities, I have sought to produce the definitive personal health guide of our time, and one with enduring lessons for people, groups, and our species in all times. Against these decidedly high expectations, I would encourage you to explore this ambitious book, and its often life-changing ideas, proposals, and practices.

Thank you for your new or ongoing interest in and support of my work.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

As September of 2022 begins, I am in the midst of final proofreading of my third book, and am on track for its publication in early 2023.

Regular followers of my updates will know that the project involves conversion of my HumanaNatura website and natural health programs into book form. Some of this material dates back to 2002 and all of it has undergone multiple iterations over the years. Notably, these changes now include fairly substantial new revisions and refinements to this material, as I have worked to create the book and finalize this extended project exploring modern personal health.

What may be less clear is that the new book also will complete a long-planned three-book series, and in particular will form the first of the three books in the series, even as it is the last of the works to be published as a book. This natural health trilogy of mine is a long-term effort I have been working on for several years, and successively explores nature and health at a personal, social, and philosophical level. The other two books in the series and progression are The Seven Keys of Natural Life and Nature’s One Commandment, each already published but likely to be modestly updated by me during 2023 and 2024.

If you are not familiar with the HumanaNatura website, and its health programs and supporting materials, the above graphic is a screenshot of its longstanding home page. For much of the past twenty years, the site has offered personal guidance and assessment tools for exploring and promoting naturally healthy modern eating, exercise, lifestyle, and community. Most of this material will live on in the new book, and the HumanaNatura website will be closed down with the book’s publication (the website’s companion blog will continue on, however). If you want to tour or download materials from the soon-to-be-retired website – http://www.humananatura.org – the next few weeks would be the time.

I will provide another update on the new book, notably including its title, when publication is imminent. In the meantime, expect to find me at work, finalizing this project and moving toward completion of my three-book series, throughout the fall of 2022 and into 2023.

Thank you for your new or ongoing interest in and support of my work.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Follow Mark On Facebook and Twitter

I am pleased to announce publication of my new book, Nature’s One Commandment.

More than three years in the making, Nature’s One Commandment is the philosophical companion to my earlier and more practically-minded book, The Seven Keys of Natural Life. This new book seeks to expand both popular and technical appreciation of the natural phenomenon of health, its central place in evolving life and systems, and its core attributes, demands, lessons, and opportunities.

Nature’s One Commandment begins with the ready observation that human experience is marked by recurring ideals, values, norms, or common aims – from happiness and justice to honesty and growth. These valuations may vary in strength and scope by person and culture, but overall prove persistent and indeed inextricable from our humanity and natural place in the world.

More importantly, the book then explores at length how and why one ideal naturally supersedes, underlies, permeates, and informs all other values and goals, human and beyond. This probing work of philosophy extends my earlier ideas to show that all ideals are naturally nested within and subordinate to life’s most essential challenge – the health or advancement of organisms in time.

In the book, I consider twenty-four perennial ideals, examining how each naturally arises and can aid life, but is not a complete end and even may limit health. Emerging across the chapters are several crucial themes: understanding and measuring health, changing natural value and values, the nature of individuality and sociality, and the natural interconnection and frequent synergy of all recurring ideals.

From beginning to end, Nature’s One Commandment explores how and why health is the most essential or ultimately selected natural quality or ideal, among all possible qualities and ideals, and the crucial implications this has for human life, priority, and action, today and always.

Across this broad exploration of modern and natural life, there are historical and scientific discussions of each ideal, offering the curious reader a rich compendium of insights regarding the ideals and aims that guide us all, each day and across our lives.

Whatever ideals, values, or goals principally drive or inspire you, I would encourage you to review Nature’s One Commandment, and consider its many lessons and central premise that health ultimately waits at the core of all we do.

Thank you for your new or ongoing interest in and support of my work.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Tell others about Mark and the transformative Natural Strategy method!

Like Mark On Facebook or Follow On Twitter

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks re-working and improving the early materials on this site, describing my Natural Strategy method and planned workshops and retreats, and speaking and media work.

It’s a work in progress, one that I first envisioned about a year ago while beginning work on the new sixth edition of HumanaNatura. As such, the new materials you see are not perfect or final, but I think they are ready for prime time. In the least, they are good enough so that I cannot use them as an excuse not to start doing interesting strategy posts, and to begin a larger project spanning this new area of focus for me.

If you are interested in following the development of this blog and the larger body of Natural Strategy ideas and techniques it will introduce, here’s a quick preview of what to expect:

#1 Posts – look for at least weekly posts on personal and organizational strategy here…discussing specific techniques and learnings from my workshops, highlighting good ideas and practices when I find them (or they are sent to me), and translating my growing focus on translating the principle of natural progressivity into modern life and work practices.

#2 Marketing – good or new strategy ideas really don’t make a difference until they get into the world and improve the functioning of people and groups. With this idea in mind, I’ll be creating 2-3 marketing campaigns in the next few weeks to introduce my Natural Strategy programs. If you have a similar to-do in your work, I’ll be favoring creativity and a few compelling propositions over large advertising outlays…so maybe my work can aid yours (and vice versa).

#3 New Book – with the new blog ready, next week I will start outlining a new book spanning my seven workshops. I see this project as important not just as a publicity vehicle, but also because the workshops all revolve around some central ideas and have a natural integration or progression to them…but in ways that are not perfectly clear until it is somewhat carefully described. After eight months of intensive editing work on HumanaNatura, I am not really ready for the demanding work (at least for me) of writing again, but fortunately the outlining portion of the book project will take at least until the end of the year. Most likely, I will not put fingertips to keyboard until January.

Feel free to subscribe and follow along as I develop my new blog and begin this larger body of work to communicate my Natural Strategy techniques. And definitely please comment or send a note with your ideas, if and whenever you want. I’d enjoy hearing from you.

Health & best wishes,

Mark

Like Mark On Facebook or Follow On Twitter

Having spent the last eight months working on the new sixth edition of HumanaNatura, I am finally and happily turning my attention to this site.

It’s long-planned work that is now squarely in my overdue column.

Over the next few days, I’ll be making refinements to the content you see, in preparation for active use of the site beginning right away!

Feel free to follow along as I edit the site, and yes, please comment or send a note with ideas if you want.

Thanks & best wishes,

Mark