“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver
The Checklist Life
There is a blessing that comes with getting older: the recognition that living a checklist life is empty and meaningless if we don’t have context for why we do what we do.
Got to the gym. Check. Ate the right meal. Check. Took the supplements. Check.
But what’s missing in all of that checking off? There’s something about who we are—our values, what really matters most to us—that gets lost when wellness becomes merely transactional. It can’t simply be about looking good. It has to be about something deeper.
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle named this deeper aim: eudaimonia—often translated as happiness, but more accurately understood as human flourishing. He defined it as “an activity of soul in accordance with virtue in a complete life.”
Notice: it’s not a state to achieve or a box to check. It’s an ongoing activity of the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—aligned with our deepest values, practiced over a lifetime.
When Success Becomes Violence
Wayne Muller, in his book Sabbath, writes something that stopped me in my tracks:
“A ‘successful’ life has become a violent enterprise.”
He describes how we have lost the essential rhythm between work and rest—a rhythm that exists in the heartbeat pausing between each life-giving beat, in the lungs resting between exhale and inhale, in the seasons quieting from summer’s growth into winter’s necessary dormancy.
“Because we do not rest,” Muller writes, “we lose our way. We miss the compass points that would show us where to go, we bypass the nourishment that would give us succor. We miss the quiet that would give us wisdom.”
This is where the wellness industry often fails us. It feeds us more: more programs, more protocols, more optimization, more retreats promising answers. But in the relentless pursuit of wellness, we can become unwell. We look everywhere but within.
The Perfect Diet Paradox
Consider the wellness world’s obsession with diet. From raw vegan to paleo to carnivore to highly specialized elimination diets—people don’t know what to eat anymore. The confusion has become madness.
But let’s say someone does master one of these dietary approaches. They’re eating perfectly, making fresh juices, crafting the ideal smoothie. And yet they carry unresolved trauma in their body. They harbor angry thoughts. They spread venom into the world from wounds that have never healed.
What good is the perfect diet if we are spiritually fractured?
This is the deeper question. When we are disconnected from ourselves, how can we access that sacred space Viktor Frankl wrote about in Man’s Search for Meaning—named one of the ten most influential books in America by the Library of Congress, with over sixteen million copies sold? From his experience surviving Nazi concentration camps, he observed: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
But how can we feel into that space—how can we connect to our own inner wisdom—if we’re still caught up in perfecting what the world says is right for us versus what we know is right for us? When we’re constantly chasing the next protocol, the perfect diet, the right supplements, we miss the quiet voice within. We’re so busy following external authorities that we can’t hear our own inner guidance.
Mind, body, and spirit are not separate areas of life we optimize independently. They are one integrated whole. And the integration point—the place where they meet—is in that space Frankl described. This is what I call the sweet spot: the space where we stop reacting to what others tell us we need and start responding from our own inner knowing.
How It All Connects
The science bears this out in ways that are both humbling and hopeful.
Environmental toxins—glyphosate in our food supply, heavy metals in our soils, mycotoxins in water-damaged buildings—damage the gut lining. This creates permeability that allows inflammatory molecules into the bloodstream. These travel to the brain via the vagus nerve, affecting mood, cognition, and our capacity for spiritual connection. The liver becomes overwhelmed trying to process what doesn’t belong, impacting hormone production and detoxification pathways.
Meanwhile, chronic stress from this physical dysfunction dysregulates the HPA axis—the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system that governs our stress response. Stress hormones further damage the gut, creating a vicious cycle.
But here’s what fascinates me most: when we heal our relationship with ourselves—when we learn to trust our inner wisdom rather than constantly seeking external answers—we begin to break this cycle. The nervous system calms. The stress response normalizes. The body’s innate healing intelligence can finally do its work.
Removing What Doesn’t Belong
There’s a story about Michelangelo and the statue of David. When asked how he created such a masterpiece, he reportedly said that David was always there inside the block of marble. All he had to do was remove what didn’t belong so that this perfect being could emerge.
This, to me, is quintessential to my work, to my life, the idea of wellness and human flourishing. We don’t need to add more. We need to chip away what obscures our natural radiance.
Human flourishing is what happens when we remove what gets in our way of being healthy and happy—the toxins, yes, but also the limiting beliefs, the trauma patterns, the endless seeking outside ourselves for answers that can only be found within.
Learning to Hear the Inner Ding
I spent years studying with teachers who claimed authoritative knowledge on healthy living. What I eventually realized was that their positions were predicated on their life experiences—not mine, and not yours.
Michael Singer’s work changed something fundamental in me. He wrote The Untethered Soul while the federal government was indicting him—and through that crucible, he never flinched. He had already mastered the understanding that we are not our thoughts. Through meditation and surrender, he overcame the mental chaos that most of us believe is simply who we are.
When I learned that I am not my thoughts, really learned, I began to hear something else—what I call the inner ding. That subtle knowing in the body that says yes or no. This is what’s best for you. This isn’t.
The more I cultivated a relationship with my inner guidance, the stronger it became—like going to the gym, but for intuition. Standing in the kitchen with all the ingredients to make the “perfect” smoothie, but feeling the body say: actually, not today. Learning to honor that.
You cannot hear your own inner wisdom if you’re constantly moving in the world looking for answers from other people. There’s a reason all world religions and mystics speak of being in this world but not of it. The time alone—the sabbath rest that Muller describes—is when we start to hear our own inner teacher guiding us.
What I Would Tell My Younger Self
If I could speak to my younger self, I would say: You are radiant. You were always gorgeous, just as you are. Go within. You and only you know what’s best for you…
Yes, experience life. Read and learn and study from those who resonate with you—but only to help you know better who you are, what you love, what matters most to you. Because all those teachers out there, the many who say they’ve got your answers? They teach answers to those questions based on their life experiences. Not yours.
You have one wild and precious life. Pursue happiness—not a checklist life, but genuine flourishing. Yes, cultivate healthy habits, because if we’re distracted by chronic illness and symptoms, we cannot live our most fully expressed life. But never forget that the goal is not the habits themselves. The goal is the radiant being those habits are meant to serve.
The Holistic Path
Mind, body, and spirit are not three separate projects. They are one integrated whole, and changes in one area inevitably affect the others. Emotional stress creates physical tension. Poor physical health clouds mental clarity. Spiritual disconnection leaves us grasping at quick fixes that never satisfy.
The holistic path addresses root causes rather than symptoms. It asks not “how do I fix this problem?” but “what is this problem trying to tell me?”
Aristotle reminded us that “one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a person blessed and happy.” This is a lifetime practice. The inner ding grows stronger. The noise quiets. The marble falls away.
And what emerges is what was always there: your radiant, flourishing self—living well, in harmony with your deepest values, fully expressed in your one wild and precious life.
“Everything that we choose, we choose for the sake of something else—except happiness, which is an end.” — Aristotle
