A Contemplative Approach to Health Mastery

A new direction for 2025

I’ll begin with an assertion:

Long-term health, fitness and well-being aren’t solely achieved through a gym membership, a fitness app or a New Year’s resolution to follow a certain diet. They are achieved by cultivating a personal health philosophy. Our own set of beliefs, principles and practices which forms the foundations of our self-identity and guides our daily choices.

This of course all depends on having the good luck to avoid the various nasty misfortunes that can strike anyone down at any time.

Relaunch:

Today’s relaunch of Ordinary Mastery and my plan for the following year’s articles are based on this idea. It’s the idea that good health doesn’t come overnight with a quick fix, but through repeatedly making good choices, day after day, that are aligned with a belief system and attitude that we’ve cultivated over many years.

I took an unplanned hiatus from this newsletter through 2024 while I was busy working on other things. I have plenty of half-finished long-form articles which never saw the light of day because they take a lot of work and I lacked the bandwidth to attend to them fully.

However, I’ve decided to return to this Ordinary Mastery project in 2025 with a renewed focus and a different approach. I intend to spend the year focusing solely on the idea of health mastery.

Mastering health, fitness and well-being

Mastering health, fitness and well-being is a path that many of us try to follow throughout our lives with mixed success. It’s a path I’ve been following for the past 35 years. I’ve stuck to it well and it’s an area upon which I have reflected deeply enough to feel I can talk about it with authenticity. It is the most ordinary of paths in that it involves the everyday routine of showing up, doing a workout, and eating the right things. Yet its ordinariness does not make this path an unchallenging or unremarkable one. The simple ordinary act of sticking at something, day after day, especially when there is a certain amount of unglamorous drudgery to endure, is something that eludes many people because it requires an attitude of mastery to overcome the plateaus and setbacks while avoiding the distractions and temptations that lure us away from the path.

What I will be sharing over 2025 are the kinds of philosophies and ideas I muse on regularly which have helped me to sustain a strong momentum over many years. These will be contemplative pieces rather than a prescriptive ‘how to’ approach.

I won’t be telling you what exercises to do and what foods to eat as there are so many resources online already sharing this kind of advice. I will simply be exploring different ways to think about health and fitness mastery which I hope people will find interesting and motivating when applied to their own lives. I intend to post these contemplative pieces every day. They will be between 250 - 500 words long to make them easily consumable.

Online group contemplations

If there is sufficient interest, I will create some opportunities for people to delve deeper into these contemplations in online groups. In the beginning, these would likely be ad-hoc groups and I may evolve these into more structured groups for people seeking significant changes in how they are approaching their health and fitness.

Such groups would offer support in designing a personal approach to fitness which is challenging but realistic, social accountability and support, and structured self-inquiry through a series of contemplative group sessions. These groups wouldn’t be for people looking for health secrets or quick-fix motivation, they would be for people wanting to take their health seriously and build up a long-term health practice, as well as creating lasting supportive relationships with others on a similar path.

Health is a foundational practice

This won’t be for everyone but hopefully, it will offer an alternative to what is usually offered in the health and fitness space and brings an inspiring angle to support people on their own journeys, whether they are just starting out on a path of health mastery, or are already some way down the road.

“All things being equal, physical fitness contributes enormously to energy in every aspect of our lives.”

George Leonard

Through exploring the application of mastery principles to health and fitness, I hope to be able to draw parallels to the paths towards mastery in other domains. I believe that the discipline I’ve developed in adhering to my own health and fitness practices transfers well to other activities in life in which I’m seeking a degree of mastery, as well as giving me the required energy and motivation.

I’ve managed to develop an unwavering belief in myself as someone who will get out tomorrow and do a workout, whether that’s a run, a cycle, or some callisthenics in the garden. I have faith that this will also be the case 5, 10 or 20 years from now, assuming I have the functional capability - and I believe this all comes not just out of habit but from years of musing on my personal philosophies which I will ponder and develop here in the coming weeks and months.

Wishing you a healthy and happy 2025.