Why Blue Zones Were Key to Getting My Health Back

Welcome back to?another edition of The Plastic Human where we examine the human condition and explore ways to make your experience more passion-based so that you can live that optimal life that you’ve always dreamed of!

Now that we have moved through a general landscape of consciousness, it’s time to explore how the experience of having an experience can be optimized...

Today, we are diving into Blue Zones. Five years ago I would have been asking the question you might be asking now, "What are Blue Zones and why exactly do I need to know about them?"

At the time, I was in a high-stress career working on the largest and highest-profile deal in the country. It was a 3-year project in the making and I barely had time for anything else in my life other than seeing it through.?I didn’t think much about what I was sacrificing because my narrative was so focused on how ‘important' this was to me and to the company.?

The truth about my reality at the time was that I was so far away from living in a Blue Zone lifestyle, that I got the exact opposite results of what they get.

Many of you know who follow me and my content know that my body crashed at the end of landing that sale.?It was one of the scariest moments of my life. And the one that made me go into a deep investigative journey into what went wrong. When your body says no and gives up on you - it’s a very clear sign that maybe you were living in a sub-optimal way.?I knew at that point something needed to change. And with some type of intuitive guidance, a thought came into my presence. This thought said:

Kira, if you want to get better, you have to BE better.?

I had no idea what it meant.?I was so tunnel-visioned in my life, my career, and getting to the next "thing". I had no desire to look at my past, to review my traumas, and to admit that I was using work as a distraction for something much deeper.?

Blue Zones

On my journey back to reconnecting to my body and heal it, I found an article by a National Geographic journalist at the time, Dan Buettner.?The article moved through his journey of leading a National Geographic expedition to uncover the secrets of longevity.?It spoke about 5 highly unique places around the world where the natives of the regions lived to be 100+ years old.

But what struck me the most, was that not only were they living to be 100+, they were doing it with significantly reduced diseases and their bodies were not degenerating at the rate that we see in the west. So, Dan and his team of scientists, anthropologists and demographers set up camp, got to work, and were able to get to the root of why these people not only lived to be 100+ years old, but did it with a whole lot of health on their side.?

What they discovered changed the way I lived and worked ever since I picked up that article, and has been the one contributing factor that has given me my life back. I’m not perfect at it by any means, but now I have a roadmap and I can see where I go off, so I can get back on. It was so powerful for me personally that I thought it fitting to share it as my first article into beginning the journey of experience optimization.?

What they found, was that more than genetics, there were nine key factors that worked together to create the recipe for health and easy aging. As it turns out the human mind-body is made for longevity in the right environments under the right conditions. And I was not even close to giving what my mind-body needed in order to get the payoff of a full well-lived life. As a matter of fact, many of us aren’t.?

Western cultures specifically have built and shaped a society that is the inverse of these communities, and so we get inverse results. There was one time where we arrogantly touted that our medical infrastructure was what was causing us to live long lives. Blue Zones is evidence that it isn’t medicine’s advancement that gets us there, it is something far more simple than that. The big dark truth that Western Medicine doesn’t talk about is that although we are living longer (although we have declined in recent years), we are living sicker. We are on medication longer, and we have become highly dependent on the system and have turned away from trusting our own bodies and the healing magic that it is. We have in many ways designed a sickness culture that erodes our relationship to ourselves and our naturally healing bodies.

What Dan showed with his team was that there was evidence of cultures that baked in highly nuanced activities that created longevity. Now, his team works in over 50 cities across the US alongside policymakers, schools, corporations and individuals to significantly improving health and lowering healthcare costs. They call it, creating Blue Zones Project Communities and it’s all about using innovative, systematic, environmental approaches to well-being that optimize policy, urban and building design and social networks.

What they found is that when you put the focus on nine specific activities and build it into social settings and the environment of the setting, it creates higher change towards the right types of health-inducing behaviour than putting the responsibility solely onto the individual. Why? Because we are socially motivated and small tweaks in our environment make it easier for us to adopt new or learned behaviours that optimize health and wellbeing. Their work has been featured in media spanning CNN, NPR and New York Times.

Purpose

Having a sense of purpose is worth 7 years of extended life according to scientists in the Blue Zone study. At The Passion Centre, Inc. and the research we have done we look at Passion in a simple way. Passion = Meaning x Investment. And Purpose, is Passion shared. Or said another way doing something you find meaningful and being of value to someone else who also finds it meaningful.?

This is a key element of one Blue Zone in Okinawa Japan. They have been famously responsible for the Ikigai model which looks at what a person loves, what they are good at, what the world needs and what they can get paid for as a defining feature of being of service inside of their community.?

These simple tweaks in our understanding of how to leverage our inner worlds to be of service in the outer world is a beautiful demonstration of creating positive, value-based human networks. If our bodies reward us by giving us an extra 7 years, why aren’t we talking about this more?!

I can spend an eternity talking about this subject, but all good things must come to an end.

If you are looking to dive a bit deeper and understand more about these 9 characteristics we are hosting a virtual event next week, Thursday (7/29), partnering with Blue Zones to bring Nick Buettner, VP of Product and head of the Blue Zones Project to the stage.?

The top 3 things you will learn:

1. Live a longer, better life through the Power of 9?

2. Be a change agent and help better your community

3. Discover how your purpose can be put to work

We invite you to sign up HERE or see the flyer below for more info. Hope to see you for this life changing talk!