From the US vantage point, what is a “democracy”? In today’s Orwellian vocabulary, it means any country supporting US foreign policy. … The antonym to “democracy” is “terrorist.” That simply means a nation willing to fight to become independent from US neoliberal democracy.
-Michael Hudson, “America Escalates its ‘Democratic’ Oil War in the Near East,” Counterpunch, 6 January 2020
Click here to read my recent article on the situation in Ukraine (published in Medium.com)
IS IT POSSIBLE TO…
Reach your genetic potential in 6 months?
Sleep 2 hours per day and perform better than on 8 hours?
Lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing?
Indeed, and much more. This is not just another diet and fitness book.
-from the homepage for THE 4-HOUR BODY: AN UNCOMMON GUIDE TO RAPID FAT- LOSS, INCREDIBLE SEX AND BECOMING SUPERHUMAN436
Continue readingWhat Does it Mean to be Fit?
For years I’ve been uncomfortable associating the human body with fitness. Maybe because the marketed image of what a fit person is supposed to look like has little to do with Charles Darwin’s original conception of the word. Maybe because like other marketed images, the ones propagated by the fitness industry so rarely materialize in real life. Maybe because nature kills off those who are “weak” and “unfit” and in doing so, separates the chaff from the wheat, so to speak. Meanwhile, the strong and fit prosper just like on those wildlife shows where indomitable predator devours old, sick, or newborn prey. At least that’s how the popularized version of Darwin’s theory of evolution goes.
A famous failed Austrian artist took the popular idea and ran with it. He almost made it to Stalingrad. He killed some people along the way.
Continue reading“I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as “conscious” or “spiritual,” who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity.”
—Charles Eisenstein1
(The following is a short excerpt from my latest book, Slowing Down to Run Faster: A Sense-able Approach to Movement)
Continue reading“The last time a nationwide movement for racial justice provoked such a defensive posture with regard to tradition (i.e. “the good old days”), civility (i.e. absolute police power), and law and order (i.e. more absolute police power), the bodies of three missing college-aged Civil Rights organizers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, were found beneath an earthen dam in Mississippi.”
(from the article)
Click here to read my latest article (published in Medium.com).
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 22 of The Mass Psychology of Fittism (Undocumented Worker Press: ’15)
The Foot
To understand how humans might have looked, felt, moved and behaved before we entered the modern to postmodern era—that is, before the advent of liquid crystal display monitors and multinational shoe corporations—it is instructive to turn once again to Mr. Darwin, the environments in which our human genome developed, and cultures in which efficient and varied movement continues to flourish.
For those of you who knew one of my earlier websites, you may wonder why Radically Transformative Fitness has been re-named Slowing Down Faster.
“[In the] humanistic conception, with its roots in the Enlightenment… education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water, but rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way… in other words, providing circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.”
-Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Mis-Education
What is learning?
What is improvement?
What is Slowing Down Faster?
by Edward Yu
Slowing Down Faster could be considered the art of learning how to learn or, put another way, the art of learning how to improve. Slowing Down Faster is in this manner a radical departure from conventional approaches to learning and improving because where Slowing Down Faster emphasizes exploration, thereby encouraging people to learn how to learn and learn how to improve, conventional approaches focus on mimicking and performing, which commonly results in trying to learn and trying to improve.
Continue reading“[Darwin] valued questions over answers, curiosity over conviction, and perseverance over test of ideas that were so implausible that other people never thought to take them seriously.”
-Frank Sulloway, Born to Rebel
What is learning?
What is improvement?
What is Feldenkrais?
“To improve, we must first discover where we are contradicting ourselves.”
A short article on running (and a few other things)
By Edward Yu
Why is it that even after heeding expert advice we rarely improve? Is it because we don’t know how to follow directions? Do we simply lack the willpower to maintain a strict training regimen? …or is there a problem with the advice?
Continue reading