Dolly, here's a non-exhaustive list of why I will always love you:

Her Origin Story, An Invitation Home

In Appalachia, the common rags-to-riches story goes like this: get out of the hills, make money, and don’t come back. But Dolly didn’t slam the screen door behind her. Flipping stereotypes, she reframed destitute poverty into beauty and resourcefulness with one of her greatest hits “Coat of Many Colors”. She kept her accent, celebrated her roots, and mythologized her heritage as she launched herself into stardom.

Lacquered with nostalgia, her childhood stories stayed deeply specific yet spoke to a universal longing. Her melodies articulated what perhaps all of us deeply crave: a simpler time, belonging to a tribe, and an indigenous anchoring to land. I’d argue that the longing for home speaks to a core wound of colonialism. In a lesser known song, “Sha-Kon-O-Hey,” a Cherokee word meaning “the land of blue smoke,” she goes beyond her canonical “My Tennessee Mountain Home” to celebrate the Cherokee and the magic of the Smoky Mountains. Was it her version of a land acknowledgment? I don’t know, but of course, she donated the proceeds to the non-profit Friends of the Smokies.

She knew how hungry her audiences were for her sense of belonging, so she invited everyone in, both through her songs and through the fantastical front porch she built: Dollywood. I highly recommend the trip to bask in her mythology, binge on cinnamon bread, get queasy on the rides, and remember her words: “Never ignore your roots, your home, or your hair.”

She Refused to Be Owned

When Dolly was 20, scrounging around Nashville for work and pay, Porter Wagoner “discovered” her and hired her as his cute little sidekick on his popular TV show. When her solo recordings eclipses his songs on the charts and she angled for more creative growth and his dominion over her was threatened. What could be more terrifying than a woman knowing her own worth? It was especially remarkable for a woman in 1974, coming from poverty, to trust what bubbled up inside her instead of what a powerful man dictated.

In perhaps the most pivotal moment of her career, she declared her creative emancipation and wrote “I Will Always Love You.” In one song she escaped his control, likely broke his heart, and soothed him on her way out. It’s also one of the most iconic songs of an era. It went on to sell over 20 million copies worldwide, earned more than $10 million from the Whitney Houston recording alone, and remains one of the best-selling singles of all time. She even turned down Elvis, who wanted to record it but insisted on retaining 50% of the publishing rights. She turned down Elvis!

She knew her worth and didn’t allow her creativity to be contained. Every time an interviewer tried to put her in a box, she used her wit to escape it. Instead of resting on her country music career, she moved into acting, producing, and entrepreneurship. Her breakthrough role in “9 to 5” was deeply transgressive, ahead of its time, and still fabulously entertaining. She fulfilled the male sex symbol fantasy while simultaneously fulfilling the female fantasy: getting revenge, building a matriarchal workplace, and getting high with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. A snake handler of chauvinism.

A Master of Her Light

Crediting her Christian faith, she tapped into deep reservoirs of inspiration and propulsion to create. She released 49 solo albums, starred in 12 major theatrical feature films and over 10 made-for-TV films, and made hundreds of television appearances, all while producing countless projects behind the scenes. Always writing, thousands of her songs remain unrecorded. She brought out the light in other artists too, with countless collaborations, including legendary duets with Kenny Rogers and Miley Cyrus. A perpetual entrepreneur even late into her 70s, she recently forged brand deals with Duncan Hines, published a cookbook with her sister, and opened a truck stop in Tennessee. Road trip anyone?

How her creative force and ability to generate wealth could easily be lost behind the glossy lipstick and big hair. But those rhinestones were not just her outfits, they were how she shined light into deep shadows of shame and despair. Especially in her early lyrics, she illuminated suicide, domestic violence, single motherhood, and poverty. Over decades she built a persona big and shiny enough to welcome folks from around the world, everyone from the evangelical truck driver to the Gen Z non-binary barista. As a master of her light, she never reflected something as jarring as an actual mirror. Instead, she was more like a giant disco ball, drawing in the glow and refracting out dancing rainbows that made us all feel a bit more shiny.

She transformed her light into sustenance through her charitable efforts. Funding vaccine research and pediatric health initiatives, supporting Black Lives Matter, fighting against AIDS, she bent the arc of justice towards the righteous. Possibly the most radical of her efforts was to build her Imagination Library in an age of banned books, education cuts, and massive manipulation of the undereducated. Through a lifetime in the spotlight and massive cultural shifts, she was a constant North Star.

She Understood the Assignment: Bring Joy

When I attended her Hollywood Bowl nconcert in 2016, she was 70 years old, sang all her greatest hits, told stories, and played over 15 instruments (including the flute!)

Despite the fact that she’s always writing new music, she was not going to make us endure any of her new, unfamiliar material. Instead, she delivered maximum joy to our very diverse crowd. She didn’t have anything else to prove, she just wanted to put on the best show possible, and closed the final encore with a resounding “9 to 5.” Best sing-along ever.

Was She Even Real?

Nope, she was very fake. Top-heavy and tottering around on tiny heels, she sang, played guitar with acrylic nails, and exuded her version of glamour with absolute ease. Early on she adopted the aesthetic of the tramp, the sexualized and scorned woman (which often disguised that she was the smartest person in the room). Although she evolved with the times and remained relevant, she never reinvented herself. She carried that big hair, full makeup, and bedazzlement for over 60 years.

But drag can be a real drag, so how did she make it look so easy? We never saw a crack in the caked-on foundation. There was never a paparazzi pic of her in sweats, no wig, no makeup, no smile. Jane Fonda recounted traveling on Dolly’s tour bus, staying in her house, and sitting around the breakfast table with her husband, but said she never saw Dolly “without her full regalia.” If it was just a schtick, how could she carry it that long?

Was she real, made up, or just made of makeup? The fact that we will never know is part of the mystique.

As much as she projected herself into the spotlight, she was also deeply private. She never buckled and did an Instagram Live of her beauty routine, so she remained a mythical creature. Beyond all the plastic surgery, her almost cartoonish image of the divine feminine made her one of the most beloved, and also one of the most authentic, entertainers in history. She became and remained what she imagined herself to be, giving us all a lesson in “if you can believe it, you can do it,” the philosophy central to her Imagination Library.

Bittersweet Memories, That’s All I’m Taking with Me

The buxom bombshell and feminist trailblazer, the devout Christian with a die-hard LGBTQ following, the hillbilly and international phenom, all her contradictions can’t even be summed up. To say that she was an icon or philanthropist doesn’t suffice. A trickster, a mystic, a saint doesn’t quite do it either. Her ability to be irresistible yet impossible to contain was inherent to her magic. Beyond any yogic text or self-help book, I learned more from her about transcendence, being a force of creative regeneration, and crafting my own heroine’s journey. Should she be on our currency? Of course. Should we make 9/25 (9 to 5) a national holiday? Duh. Anointed to Southern sainthood? I’m in. Nashville is already renaming its airport after her (the first airport in the US to be named after a woman!). All I know is that the more we keep the spirit of Dolly alive, the more joy we feel.

The Trolls at The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

Maine does not mess around with summer gardens and the epitome is the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. The gardens showed a deep commitment to showcasing botanical beauty and making that accessible to a range of abilities and ages. Thoughtfully designed to handle crowds, enchant us in the butterfly garden, wow us with the dalia display, and delight the (inner) child in the children’s garden. But the highlight was Thomas Dambo’s Trolls. Between 13 to 30 feet tall and built from recycled wood, each of the five trolls evoked a part of the tree, from the roots to the leaves., These expressive, welcoming, and magical figures call folks to the outer trails and into a sense of wonder. With over 170 trolls around the world, Dambo and his team work with 100s of local volunteers to gather scrap wood and build the installations. A brilliant creative endeavor of community building, mystical storytelling, and that ecological education.

E-biking in Acadia

We hiked and drove through Acadia’s spectacular coastal forests, but the absolute highlight was e-biking. With a pedal-assist battery, we rode about 26 miles around the park with hundreds of other riders that day. Definitely a workout, but still very do-able for those of us who don’t get on bikes very often. Being on two wheels was the best way to appreciate the Rockefeller legacy. John D. Rockefeller Jr. purchased and preserved over 10,000 acres of land, built 57 miles of carriage roads, and 17 bridges. (An age when the gilded class actually felt an obligation toward the common good!) The e-bikes preserve the history, distribute the crowds, and create greater accessibility to the outdoors. Thank you, big oil money, for enabling thousands of us to go car-free!

Eating the Lobstah

To enjoy the lobster, I had to accept that it feels like being in a foreign country with a doozy of an exchange rate. Lobster rolls and fries at roadside stands, Forage Bagels in Portland, but the real highlight was the tasting menu at Aragosta. Any time I can put myself at the table of a female chef, in this case the renowned Devin Finigan, serving the best of the season, I’m in. Especially when traveling, I’m willing to pay for good food.

Carving out a vacation while self-employed, while the storms of grief never stop raging, isn’t easy. But I needed to unplug more than I realized and refill with wonder for the natural world, creativity, and summer’s bounty.

I completed a self-prescribed fitness challenge to show off, er... test my strength, mobility, and stamina. Over a week, I completed:

• Maxed out my deadlift at 226 lbs

• Maxed out my one-arm overhead press with a 55 lb kettlebell

• A full backbend

• A full split on each side

• A kettlebell snatch test: swinging a 30 lb bell overhead, alternating arms, 100 times in just over 4 minutes without setting it down

Woo-hoo! During a very busy summer, this is a reminder that I can still push the edges of my physical abilities. Check out my bone density, muscle mass, elastic joints, and VO2 max! I feel blessed that every week I’ve got the energy to teach 7-9 classes, train over 10 clients, and run the many facets of my retreat business. When I carve out downtime, I’m traveling and hiking nearby mountains whenever I get the chance.

For my entire career, I’ve endured the chatter that we constantly need to be doing something different, something more, and perfecting the body. The new diet that makes us hangry AF. The new fitness trend that leaves us injured. The new supplement that’s a waste of money. The constant need to be doing more instead of knowing how to nap. We might convince ourselves that pursuing purity or perfection is taking care of ourselves. But signing up for yet another detox just makes us finicky, high maintenance, and an unfortunate guest at a dinner party.

Heading into my 50th year, I can’t dick around with trends, take my abilities for granted, or pass on life’s pleasures. I need solid and delish meals as much as deep rest to get through my day. I need a movement practice that can flex between mellow mobility and maxing out a lift. I need folks around me whose spirit feeds me. Doggedly sticking to the deep basics is why I’m not burnt out, broken, or brittle. It’s why I can keep doing this work.

The deep basics are simple, not easy. But consistently tending to quotidian self-care is also radical. If someone is well fed, well rested, and well supported, there’s a lot less BS you can sell them. If every day we tend to where we are wounded, insecure, aging, and gloriously imperfect, we are better able to hold a container for others. It’s a reminder that we can all metabolize stress, get stronger, and, with encouragement, endure more than we imagined.

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The deep basics enable us to face upheaval, still enjoy life’s pleasure, and, most importantly, be of service. The real strength isn’t lifting a barbell, it’s being with folks facing profound grief. The flexibility isn’t the backbend, it’s adapting a class to include 25 different bodies. The endurance isn’t pushing a kettlebell overhead for one more rep, it’s watching the world burn and still showing up to teach.

After 25 years of strength training, I familiar with the bravado of the weight room and have noticed bro wellness culture manspreading into our politics, psyches, and postures. Every day I’m doing my own resistance training to reclaim and democratize the tools of strength training.

I’ve built a career out of understanding how we move and how we keep moving. I deal with achy, frazzled, and fatigued bodies every day. I respect the effort to carve out the time to make it to my online Movement Medicine classes, in-person yoga classes, or strength training classes, so I want that time to be effective. My classes present a range of body types, often in the same room: the grandmother concerned about bone density, the stressed lawyer parenting young kids, and the 40-something trail runner trying to stay in the game. My personal training clients usually are completely new to strength training, have complex injuries, or medical issues.

When fitness, especially strength training, is always sold as a way to achieve the perfect ripped, sculpted body, my job is to see beyond the facade and read movement patterns. Strength training is one of the most profound healing tools available. Regardless of age, ability, or body type, I’ve committed to making it as accessible, inclusive, and effective as possible.

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This is my process:

Step One: Peel Off the Straitjacket of Stress

Often we need to do less before we can do more. To endure the workday, the caregiving, and the daily deluge of rage and grief, we armor up. But schlepping around protective and restrictive layers of stress gets heavy. Cortisol spikes, the jaw clenches, hip flexors lock up, and shoulders brace in hypervigilance. An “out of shape” body is often both wired and tired.

To have the excess energy to exercise, we need the privilege to stop working, the ability to say no to other obligations, and the bandwidth to redirect our metabolic resources. Often times the hardest part of a yoga class is just getting there.

To shed the exoskeleton of stress, I begin my classes with squirming: wiggling in a lunge, swinging the arms out, and rolling out the neck. Officially called “mobility” by fitness trainers, this is not just about physical aches and pains but the emotional safety for a body to express itself, to feel beneath the bracing, and to play again. In the wise words of Beyoncé, “release the wiggle.” We will never get stronger until we drop the emotional baggage.

Step Two: Train (In)Tension

We need to loosen up and let that shit go. We also need to tighten up and get shit done. The foundation of strength training is knowing where and how to tense up to be powerful levers. We need tension. It gets us out of bed in the morning and helps us carry the weight of our responsibilities. Existing in tension between what’s available and what’s possible is how we imagine and build something beyond ourselves.

When teaching strength techniques, I help students understand where there is too much tension, often in the front of the hips, and where there is not enough tension, like in a rounded upper back. Optimal tensegrity is a matter of knowing where we need mobility and where we need more stability. It sounds fancy, but it’s really just knowing which parts need more WD-40 and what needs duct tape.

Working and living in front of screens makes our minds mushy and our spines slouchy. It’s how many of us earn a paycheck, so our movement routines must realign and ready us for more variety and intensity. I’ve seen many folks walk into a weight room, start doing bicep curls with a hunched back, and then wonder why their shoulders get injured.

Too much seated screen time can make us more fragile, reactive, and hungry for a quick fix. More dynamic physical and emotional postures prevent injuries, allow us to lift heavier, lean into the creative stretch, and maybe even increase our ambiguity tolerance.

Step Three: Movements > Muscles

For years, bodybuilding defined weight training by dividing the body into individual muscle groups to flex, bulk up, tone, or sculpt. But bodybuilding is a subjective sport based on how the body looks, not on actual strength. Chopping ourselves into pieces to fix and fixate on doesn’t actually make us stronger and leaves too many folks out.

To build measurable strength, the body organizes into movement patterns, not muscles. Among strength and conditioning pros, the consensus is that there are around seven functional movement patterns: hinge, squat, push, pull, press, rotate, and carry. When I’m coaching strength training, the functional framework is scalable to various ability levels, addresses aging, prevents injury, and applies to everyday activities like getting off the toilet and putting your bags in the overhead bin on the plane. For example, the hip hinge is a deadlift, a movement I teach in yoga, and what we need to get out of a low chair without loudly grunting.

As a fitness trainer, I use these patterns as an assessment to build a program around what’s called progressive overload. If these movements are pain-free, we up the intensity by increasing the weights, duration, frequency, speed, or range of motion. Basically, do the hard, basic things over and over. My job is to keep it fun.

Step Four : Know the Difference Between Fitting In and Being Fit

The healthy human genome has a gloriously diverse expression. Even Olympic athletes of various sports have a broad range of body types. But for my entire lifetime, the fitness industry has sold us a commercialized, trending body type. From the aerobics craze and Special K diets to ab sculpting and detoxing, the industry constantly rebrands itself, always undermining our self-image.

Social media fueled that contagion, and now we see “strong, not skinny” trending on TikTok, targeting both men and women. Let’s be clear: the ideal is both very thin and heavily muscular, the kind of look celebrity culture holds up as aspirational. I would be more dismissive of the grotesque extreme of influencers, but my very average-sized friends are now popping GLP-1s.

As the patriarchal reins tighten, we should all stay busy chasing a look that absurdly performative, plastic, and pornographic. Guys are trying to look like UFC fighters, and grandmothers are trying to fit into beauty standards built for teenagers. Remember: you aren’t doing enough, you don’t have enough, and you aren’t enough. The ubiquitous ideal is supposed to keep you always reaching, with credit card in hand, for more.

Attempting to get washboard abs or stop the aging process will drain your bank account, fry your nervous system, blow out your knees, and turn you into an insufferable narcissist. If anything “works,” it will only be temporary. Maybe you won the genetic lottery and inherited the morphology that’s currently en vogue. Enjoy the party while it lasts. But if you are young, able-bodied, and athletic, don’t confuse that privilege for meritocracy.

Step Five: Exercise Your Agency

Beyond squats or push-ups, when we carve out the time to sort ourselves out and get into gear, what we are really doing is exercising our agency. Often I don’t really feel like doing anything, but I still drag myself into the gym, reminding myself that a “something is better than nothing” workout still counts.

The wellness hoopla constantly reminds us that we really should be doing more. More high intensity breathwork intervals, more myofascial optimization protocols, more protein-infused, adaptogenic hydration. The all-or-nothing downward spiral leaves us paralyzed and powerless.

The trick is finding the wiggle room under the overwhelm. The key to consistency is mostly sub-max lifts, greasing the groove of basic movements, and lots of mobility. This is not just a smarter way to train — it also coaxes me out of victim mode, effectively metabolizes emotion, and reminds me that I can deal with life.

If all this strength training business feels like too much, just going for a walk refreshes our perspective and renews our resolve.

The Strongest People

Athletes show us what’s possible with the human body, but the trailblazers who reshaped oppressive systems of power do the hardest resistance training. I doubt Harriet Tubman ever protein maxxed, but she did know how to survive in the forest, forage for edible and medical plants, and travel long distances on foot while freeing enslaved people. Susan B. Anthony never supplement stacked or PR’d her squat, but she did stick to a simple walking routine and summoned the core strength to fight for the 19th Amendment.

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Does that mean all these modern tools of wellness and strength training are excessive? Maybe.

As I’ve asserted my entire career, it’s not the tools, it’s how we use them. Yoga could fixate on perfect poses. Strength training could dominate the body. Healthy eating could become policing every bite. Our bodies are either perpetually imperfect commodities always needing to be optimized, or they are perfect vessels to do meaningful work for as long as we can.

Despite existing in an inherently extractive and quickly crumbling, economic system, our wellness practices remind us that we can regenerate our energy. Even when it all feels like too much, we have daily routines that remind us that a little something, done consistently, eventually makes a big difference. That’s how we get stronger.

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She was the best mother-in-law I could have hoped for: warm, welcoming, and a great sense of humor. Joining her family, I got what was most important to me: shared progressive, compassionate politics and an appreciation for good food. Thanksgiving meant Elaine’s fabulous apple and pumpkin pies. Chanukah always had her rich brisket and crispy latkes. How do other families spend time together if they don’t kvetch about current events over good meals?

Elaine stayed curious and kept learning her whole life, active in her book group, a regular subscriber to Berkeley Repertory Theater, and a fixture at the local lecture series. She remained social, a popular member of her swim group and a regular at her temple. Even in her final year, she made new friends in her retirement community. Running her own catering business for over 50 years, she was entrepreneurial and hardworking. Her love of cooking carries down throughout the family.

Typical of her generation of women, she constantly fed everyone else as she often restricted herself. As the pictures rotated through the slideshow, she looked fabulous in lipstick on a European vacation or in a swimsuit on a Hawaiian beach. Her beauty was undeniable, but I wondered if she could ever see that in herself.

To honor our matrilineal legacies, let’s carry on their recipes but also question the internalized misogyny our mothers could never escape. We carry the responsibility and the opportunity to do the healing they never could.

Constant self-criticism keeps us from relishing our sweetness and beauty. Even if we're lucky enough to get 92 years, life is just too damn short.

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While DC had a meltdown over our 250th birthday, we got to focus on something better: my niece Cora’s 17th birthday.

I’ve traveled a lot, but floating in a mountain lake while day drinking and eating a pepperoni roll, is hard to beat. (This state food of West Virginia dates back to Italian immigrants who came to work the coal mines and needed something portable for lunch.)

Being back on the farm, in my mother’s garden, and porch-sitting with the extended commune tribe, always feels bittersweet. The hippy farm I grew up on feels more defiant than ever. I marvel at how fast the kids are growing, grateful the old folks are still mobile enough to keep the farm running. But nothing lasts forever.

Despite my hectic schedule, I’m called to write more about my roots as I dig deeper into wellness and sustainability. Luckily, those country roads are still there to take me home.

Penland exemplifies craft as an embodied practice, and the students and faculty were earning their muscle memory the only way you can: through repetition. Pushing their physical abilities and creative thresholds, I called them artist athletes. My job was to teach folks how to take care of their bodies so they can stay physically engaged in their art as long as possible.

In my morning and evening classes, we stretched, realigned, and cleared the physio-emotional residue from long studio hours. As folks studied the tension required for weaving or glassblowing, I taught them how to leverage their muscular tension to ensure stamina, dwell in supportive postures, and keep making art. Every day I traveled around the studios delivering “movement snacks”: a quick stretch break to relieve the shoulders, open the chest, roll out the wrists, lengthen the back, and give the eyes a rest. Being a creative and a craftsperson demands stamina and strength, but that must be matched with ease and flow.

I’m not a visual artist, but I felt like I was with my people. Folks at Penland are generally healthy and fit, but not too precious to get their hands dirty or enjoy the bacon at breakfast. The bodies at Penland are hard working and powerful creative conduits, not perfected specimens of wellness.

It was a gift to escape and tap into the analog, the communal, and the creative. To be fed, literally by the dining hall and emotionally by the nightly slide shows from instructors sharing their masterful work. While we are increasingly surrounded by the disposable, the digital, and the artificial, this place feels like a haven. I’m excited to return.

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Let’s unpack the persistent and pervasive image of “ancient man”: A guy who kinda looks like a Chad but with a full beard, a great tan, and a beefy (but mostly hairless) chest. With a spear in hand, he’s courageously stepping out into the savannah, trailed by a woman (also mostly hairless) with a baby strapped to her chest. He’s driven to survive and driven by self-interest. He’s got ripped biceps, no injuries, glowing skin, and is leading human evolution forward.

This is the image often attached to the “survival of the fittest” narratives. The central principle of our evolution is competition. It’s brutal. It’s winner take all. It’s a nuclear family. It’s a lot of meat eating. It’s so damn manly. But also too myopic?

When I hear adamant and reductive arguments about how it’s always been and how it always will be, I get a little squeamish. The insistence that competition is the sole propulsion of our evolution quickly slides into an individualist and absolutist call to return to the way things were. And that return has a destination: before we know it, we’re stripping women of voting and reproductive rights, advocating for fascism, and venturing toward eugenics. Complex and contentious evolutionary theory is being cherry-picked and weaponized by figures like the Bronze Age Pervert. The loudest amateur paleontologists are the same folks throwing out public health breakthroughs that allowed us to live past our 30s, while selling dubious longevity supplements. This is not just internet banter or wellness grifting; these are the darlings of far-right policymakers. Sorry, Chad, I’m not buying it.

Treating 6 million years of human evolution as settled dogma will always leave something out. What if the contentious, relentlessly inquisitive scientific process actually offers other lenses? What if we acknowledged that yes, competition is crucial to our advancement, but it is not the entirety of the story, and maybe we are a bit more interesting than that?

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Cooperation

Paul Stamets, pioneering mycologist, has led the study of fungal networks and reframed both interspecies and intraspecies evolution as collaboration as much as competition. He argues that advancement depends on resources being abundant and well distributed. In his words:

“I want to redefine Darwinian theory. It is not the survival of the fittest. It’s the extension of generosity of surplus to other members in the ecological community to build biodiversity. So it’s not the individual that survives, it’s the community that cooperates that survives.”

Care

Riane Eisler contested the inevitability of male-centered, hierarchical social organization in The Chalice and the Blade. She argued that partnership-oriented societies preceded dominator models. Never claiming utopia, she made a compelling case that we are capable of arranging ourselves toward more egalitarian, harmonious, and sustainable ways of living.

Her binary between matriarchal and patriarchal social orders has drawn criticism, but since her book was published in 1987, researchers across fields have built on the underlying intuition, arguing that caring for each other drove evolution as much as competition ever did. Madeleine Beekman’s 2025 book, The Origin of Language, contends that our verbal abilities evolved to handle the communal demands of child rearing. Basically, giving the babysitter instructions might have been as monumental as developing tools.

Creativity

Beyond cooperation and care, Edward O. Wilson placed human creativity, not competition, at the center of our evolution. In The Origins of Creativity, writing at the intersection of evolutionary biology and the arts, he argues that what separates humans from other species is not tool use or social bonding but the storytelling brain, the one that can project itself across time and possibility.

“To express this increasingly complex subject as succinctly as possible, the ancestors of our species developed the brain power to connect with other minds and to conceive unlimited time, distance, and potential outcomes. This infinite reach of imagination, put quite simply, is what made us great.”

While masculinism justifies trillionaires and dismisses climate science, we could really use some of that brain power right now. What if we could visualize beyond self-interest, scarcity, and brutality? This seems like exactly the right moment to interrogate how we got here and conceive some potential outcomes for how to get out of our current shit show.

A Circle of Grandmothers

Here’s another picture of our early days: at the center of the village, a group of grandmothers squatting around the fire, keeping an eye on the kiddos, processing the harvest, and tending the flames. Their stories and wisdom offer practical guidance: what plants feed us, which ones heal us, what poisons us, how to endure shifts in weather, and how to handle conflict. On the periphery, adults are gathering food and wood, nursing babies, carrying water, and tending to shelter.

I made this image up, of course. My paleontology credentials are roughly equivalent to those of anyone selling you “primal” beefy jerky or the knuckleheads rewriting reproductive health care policy. But while researching this piece, I found out I was onto something: an evolutionary theory called the Grandmother Hypothesis. (Here’s a quick description from the renowned Robert Sapolsky.) The theory holds that menopausal women were crucial to human evolution because they allowed younger women to reproduce sooner and improved the survival odds of their offspring.

Maybe Chad and his buddies returned with some small game, or went after high-stakes big game and never came back at all. But at the nucleus of the community, and perhaps more central to our advancement, were the caregivers and carriers of institutional knowledge: the grandmothers.

Questioning Modernity

Like many holistic health folks weaving stories about our origins, I get the need to question modernity. I’m skeptical about AI and worry when the algorithm seems to know me a little too well. Why are we inundated with so many processed foods, passwords, and microplastics?

It does feel like we took a wrong turn. We have the most advanced communication systems, medical treatments, and food production in human history, and yet we are more divided and more in need of healing than ever. The environment we have engineered for ourselves is now threatening our survival. For me, that means interrogating the patriarchal narrative that brought us to this late-stage capitalist. Anthropocene.

I’m not dismissing competition, excellence, innovation, or the pursuit of mastery as crucial to our evolution. But I’m also not willing to reduce millennia of complex human experience to a reductive story, especially when that narrative aligns with fascist regimes, justifies unnecessary wars, and focuses on building data centers and detainment facilities instead of grappling with a rapidly changing climate. Doubling down on dominance and scarcity as a survival strategy just doesn’t feel like evolution.

Wilson’s infinite imagination, Stamets’ generosity of surplus, Eisler’s partnership model, the Grandmother Hypothesis: these are not fringe ideas. Taken together, they suggest that the alternative to patriarchy is not simply swapping who holds power, but organizing society around the actual work of keeping humans alive: raising children, tending communities, and prioritizing collective need over individual self-interest. Centering male dominance could be exactly what is handicapping our ability to understand how we originated, how we currently govern ourselves, and most importantly, how we might evolve.

Less Chad, more Golden Girls.

After returning from Italy, this note is from home: Asheville, North Carolina. This summer my husband and I celebrate six years in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Building our businesses, building a home, and building community: it's been a lot of work. But this place evokes so much creativity and resilience so it is our place. Establishing and cultivating a sense of belonging is the antidote to algorithmic loneliness, anxiety, and outrage.

The hubs and I at a Steep Canyon Rangers concert: the local band that made it big. There's nothing more Asheville than drinking craft beer at a bluegrass show, only to come home and find a bear had wandered through the backyard.

We hiked around Mount Pisgah to return where we found reishis a few years ago. Near a creek, on a dying hemlock, we found a gorgeous flush of what Traditional Chinese Medicine calls the "mushroom of immortality." We'd already harvested and made a tincture a few years back, so this time we just admired, photographed, and left the crop for the next hikers to find.

In late May and early June the Catawba rhododendrons are in full bloom, so we headed up to Craggy Gardens on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Hiking through a rhododendron thicket always feels like a magical wonderland.

My hubs and I met and fell in love in 2014 over plates of heirloom tomatoes and burrata.

Strawberry-rhubard pie, corn on the cob, or ice cream on a hot day, I hope you enjoy the sweetness you deserve without guilt or counting grams of protein.

Let summer feed you.

While my Substack is mostly dedicated to railing against wellness culture, I spend most of my time trying to create wellness offerings beyond all the noise, all the vanity, and all the fear mongering. It’s not easy to make a living, keep people healthy and stick to my values, but this retreat is what I consider the pinnacle of that work.

We stay removed from the tourist crowds and the churn of the cities, instead heading out to explore agricultural traditions. We explore local towns and trails by foot, stopping to support the local trattoria. We get our hands dirty making pasta and learn how to keep these traditions alive. We taste the terroir, understanding how history, geology, and climate change are (re)shaping the glass in your hand.

As we root down into another culture, we bump up against all the American wellness baggage we didn’t realize we were carrying: the pressure to become a better product or a more optimized means of production. Turns out Italy is the ideal place to put all that down. For one week, wellness looks like:

• Less perfect posing. More moving well.

• Less trying to look the part. More belonging at the table.

• Less counting grams of protein. More moments savoring each bite.

• Less following wellness protocols. More time outside to play.

• Less trying to see and do everything. More savoring one spectacular terroir.

• Less optimizing and hacking. More free afternoons for napping.

• Less self-care. More being taken care of.

• Less research, noise, and decisions. More levity.

  

I know it’s a real privilege to travel this way and I don’t take that lightly. But I want to leverage what privilege I’ve got to imagine and craft something beyond our current, crumbling paradigm. To stretch the bounds of what wellbeing and living well actually could be, even if just for a week in Italy.

Getting into shape means reclaiming a body that is wired, tired, and numbed out. And yet wellness keeps lacquering on additional expectations, chasing the next diet, performing the latest protocol, piling more onto bodies that are already overwhelmed.

I’ve learned to read the patterns: how we work, whether we still play, and all the emotional baggage we schlep around. How to take a body that is out of whack, reset its posture, reframe its relationship to effort, and actually get stronger. Strength training is as much undoing as it is doing. It’s simple but not easy, because we are humans.

The Loads We All Carry

Every body carries loads. Every body solves physical problems every day, and every body has deeply ingrained patterns for getting the job done. The dentist hovering over mouths, the warehouse worker pulling ten-hour shifts on concrete, the desk jockey grinding through Microsoft Teams meetings for hours: the shoulders tense up, the eyes narrow, the breathing gets shallow, the hips stay locked in flexion. After a few decades in the same postures and perspectives, specific parts of the body get stuck, too tight, overstretched, and numbed out.

Feeling drained at the end of the day, at the gas pump, at the grocery store checkout, makes sense when daily life is inherently extractive. But we don’t all carry the same loads. The nurse working overtime to feed her family is not the same an executive with a staff of people managing his life. We don’t all carry the same metabolic and mental burdens.

Unpaid (Emotional) Labor

The invisible loads are often the heaviest. We are constantly pummeled with news that is baffling and heartbreaking, while the kids need to get to practice and the car needs an oil change and there’s email and meetings and dishes to be done. As an average American who is working, paying attention, and actually gives a damn, the expense of daily life plus the unrelenting existential toll accumulates and begins to thwarts our movement.

We down the coffee, build up the defenses, and eventually hit our threshold. We contort around our deepest insecurities, calcify around unresolved traumas, and keep going anyway, walking around with open wounds, which honestly all of us are. Too wrung out to stay open, we clam up around whatever feels protective, showing up and acting like we have our shit together.

Armored Up

Armor isn’t only a survival strategy, it’s also an identity. The strongman mentality takes it to the extreme, downing peptide stacks and banging out chest presses. Just punish yourself with exercise, adhere to strict dietary regimes, track every biomarker, follow the YouTubers who seem to have it all figured out. The promise is that you can escape your insecurities and lack of security by achieving the image.

Whether it’s masculine coded as muscular, feminine coded as skinny, or the current hybrid: extremely thin and also visibly muscular (as typified by Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Demi Moore). Male, female, or anywhere in between, the message is clear: your body needs a lot of work. Beyond eating healthy and exercising regularly, you can be endlessly injected, implanted, and botoxed until you look cartoonish. Dressed up as extreme self-care, the pursuit of “wellness” has morphed into systematic armoring. In times of uncertainty your body can become a specimen of predictability and imperturbability.

But you can never be perfect enough. Most of our insecurities are a marketing scam and our lack of security is a policy decision. As ecosystems and institutions collapse around us, take an anti-inflammatory supplement. Feeling powerless? Up the protein. Feeling confused and overwhelmed? Follow the nearest self-appointed wellness guru, who will tell you exactly how to eat, move, and sleep while constantly selling you something else to obsess over. You won’t even notice the jet stream collapsing. You too can be perfect and immune.

Conclusion

What if deconditioning was just finding our power under all the BS? Regularly reminding ourselves our power actually lives, regardless of whether you have visible biceps.

Despite living in an inherently extractive economy and contending with crumbling institutions, we can practice what is simple and regenerative. We can be disciplined without being blindly obedient. We can tend to ourselves without being self-absorbed. We can move our bodies without punishing them. We can stay anchored and energized when everything feels like too much. We can build community in at every squat rack and at each yoga mat along the way.

My next post gets more practical: how to train tension skillfully, why movement patterns matter more than muscles, and what it actually looks like to get stronger without armoring up further.

I began studying and practicing strength training in 2001 when I ventured past the elliptical machines and into the weight room at my local 24 Hour Fitness in San Francisco. I entered into gym bro culture: grunting through bench presses, downing protein concoctions, and preening in the mirror with each biceps curl.

Here’s what I’ve observed over the last 25 years: You can look very strong and still not move well. You can be completely ripped and still too weak to deal with hard conversations and adult responsibilities. Despite age or body type, almost every body can get stronger with the right support. So how you define strength determines how you strength train.

Like so many of the strongmen, you can appear super buff but still be ruled by insecurity, terrified of vulnerability, and desperately crave belonging in a hierarchy. I’ve seen extremely muscular guys fail grueling kettlebell certifications and a bodybuilder quit the yoga teacher training because it was too emotionally confronting. Strength training can be all about beefing up- adding muscle as an armor against big feelings and vulnerability. Or we can train to stay open, aligned, and still able to get shit done (even when it feels like everything is falling apart.)

During my thousands of hours of training folks, I’ve studied how they get stuck, how they get out of pain, and how they get stronger. Getting strong always demands liberating ourselves from years of conditioning, from too much sitting, from old injuries, from trauma, from ingrained insecurities. It’s as much about undoing the patterns and postures that have limited us as it is about lacquering on more reps, more muscle, and more defenses.

Now as I approach 50, the pressure to shrink and conform is louder than ever. Pressing a 55 lb kettlebell overhead with one arm or deadlifting over 200 lbs feels extraordinary. The stronger you are, the more immune to bullshit, especially your own.

The Flat Muscle Man

Before the Wellness Strongman found his first podcasting mic, he was doing “guns and buns” workouts and trying to look like the poster on the wall. The muscle anatomy poster hanging somewhere behind the dumbbell rack in virtually every gym. He has a front: biceps, pectorals, quadriceps. A back: glutes, lats, hamstrings. No skin, minimal connective tissue, no organs, no nerves, no feelings. Usually expressionless, no depth. (Kinda like a date I went on 15 years ago.)

His job is to demonstrate muscularity, and for decades that defined what it meant to be strong. The sport behind him is bodybuilding, built around hypertrophy: isolate discrete muscle groups, make the most visible ones as large and symmetrical as possible. It demands, hours of training, rigid dieting, and strategic dehydration and it’s also entirely subjective. Contestants aren’t judged on strength, speed, or endurance.

It’s about appearance, not function. That distinction is what this whole series has been circling.

Fitting the Mold vs Moving Well

While most folks aren’t dedicating themselves to bodybuilding, a lean body with pronounced muscles is now trending as the perfect body du jour. Of course women, have been bombarded for years by the fitness, diet, and ever increasing wellness industry with constantly shifting and shrinking aspirational standards. But now, thanks to social media trends of looksmaxxing, and the manosphere, guys get to have widespread body dysmorphia too!

Over two and a half decades in wellness. I’ve watched an endless rotation of diets to “trick” our hungers and exercise packaged as atonement. Trying to “achieve” the current idealized body type is more likely to lead to torn hamstrings and disordered eating than lasting health. I’m constantly reminding my students the difference between trying to fit the mold and sustaining yourself.

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Hollow Power

Throughout my entire career in wellness, I’ve watched the same idea resurface in different packaging: the body can and should be dominated. Your body should conform and you should obey. The bro podcasters amplify this idea of wellness as shredding your pecs, torching your abs, and obsessing over every ounce of macronutrients. Self-care gets reduced to following exact instructions: what to eat, which supplements to down, which peptides to inject. But remember, these rules are written by young, able-bodied, already-basically-healthy guys, often trying to sell you supplements or off-market peptides. The standards are not set to include folks but to create impossible aspirations, like staying forever young or maintaining an unnecessarily oversized muscle mass. Health and functional strength are beside the point.

Looking and presenting like an exaggerated version of “a real man” is a hedge against insecurity, a shield against vulnerability. And when that performance goes mass-market, as Wilhelm Reich articulated, it becomes the breeding ground for something darker. As if doing a hot take on the manosphere, Reich nails it:

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others’ strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends then, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily.

Deeply conformist, invested in hierarchical pecking orders, desperate for belonging and approval. The manosphere playbook is to project as much of the image of strength as possible: flashy cars, big bank accounts, and bulging quads. You can be jacked AF and still be desperate to follow the leader, falling for every get-rich-quick scheme and the next diet trend, treating Huberman or Asprey like they’re preaching gospel. It’s like those lifted F-150s I see on my country road around my home in North Carolina: huge wheels, shiny paint, looks like they’ve never spent a day on a job site or gotten any real work done.

The Real Work

Beyond being able to carry loads or maintain our stamina, the hardest work we face is often more emotionally challenging than physically demanding. Getting through a busy work day, showing up to support a family, taking care of ourselves, and enduring so much upheaval requires fortitude not just a bombastic veneer.

Real strength means you wrestle with your insecurities instead of projecting them onto the nearest trans person, immigrant, or woman. Instead of being spooked by shadowy desires, you own them. Instead of fortifying against vulnerability you are able to stay open. It’s about living in a body that can show up, not just show off.

Every day in the gym I practice and teach folks how to ground, organize their skeleton, and breathe skillfully and leverage heavy weights. Instead of trying to look like a Marvel character, it’s about how we can carry, squat, push, and pull. These physical practices keep us aligned, especially now, when the patriarchal puppet show is falling apart. A strong body with a clear mind is its own form of resistance.

The Wellness Strongman: What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook: Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

The Wellness Pipeline to the Manosphere: Reflections on Netflix’s Inside the Manosphere

This Post ~ The Wellness Strongman: 5 Myths to Stop Buying

Next Post ~ Strength Training: Showing up, Serving, and Building Agency

The Wellness Strongman wakes up at 5am to an impeccable morning routine. He rakes in passive income. He is rich, he is buff, and he has his shit together. In all his self-determined glory, he wants to prove that you, and you alone, have control of your health, your body, and your life.

He’s also a boring blowhard. He peddles ice baths and supplement stacks with the promise that if you just keep counting those grams of protein, you too will be safe, spared, and sheltered from the uncertainty we all face. He talks too much, thinks he’s figured it all out, and is blinded by his own bravado. He is the perfect mascot for a culture built on the myth of American meritocracy, the belief that we all have an equal shot if we just work hard and optimize relentlessly.

But there is no such thing as a self-made man. There is no high-performer who hasn’t had an extraordinary amount of support, much of it invisible, much of it unpaid. There is no billionaire who hasn’t extracted wealth from the labor of others. Wellness and wealth are always a group project but they don’t benefit everyone equally. The wellness industry would prefer you not think too hard about any of that, because the moment you do, the whole personal optimization project starts to look a lot lonelier and a lot less heroic than advertised.

What follows is a series about the illusions underneath the strongman bravado. Attitudes and assumptions that we may have internalized without realizing it.

The Illusion of Choice Reality: Shopping Will Not Save Us

We’re told, repeatedly and insistently, that being healthier is mostly a matter of being a better consumer. Cut the ultra-processed foods, drive an EV, buy the performance shampoo (yes, that is actually a thing). Wellness arrives with a barcode and proudly proclaims what it lacks: gluten, parabens, corn syrup, and a carbon footprint. You too can earn redemption, salvation, and double credit card points.

If you zoom out just a little, you notice the absurdity. Endless options in the all-natural toothpaste aisle while the EPA guts clean air protections. Dozens of diaper brands while affordable childcare is nearly impossible to find. Wellness products everywhere while our health insurance rates skyrocket. The message is consistent: focus on your buying power and ignore your political power.

While we debate the calories in leading protein bars, we are making enormous choices together that we barely discuss. We are funding another oil war. We are maintaining a tax code that redistributes wealth upward. Collectively and repeatedly, we have chosen not to have universal healthcare, gun reform, or invest more into renewable energy. Those are important health decisions but they don’t come with a loyalty rewards program.

So keep going to the farmer’s market and boycott Target. But it is far too easy to feel virtuous at the checkout when the wellness industry thrives on keeping your attention small and personal. Real power is messier, more collective, and a lot harder to monetize.

The Illusion of Prepackaged Perfection
Reality: One-Size-Fits-All is a Marketing Ploy

As fascism tightens its grip, the ideal body is shrinking. The narrowing definitions of “good” bodies tell us exactly who is in power, who is out, and what is required to belong again. MAGA women look like Barbies who’ve been in the sun too long. Manosphere bros juice up to look like superheroes. Meanwhile, trans bodies are policed, immigrant bodies are detained, and middle class anxiety is quietly managed by trying to “be good” and healthy.

We are being blasted, continuously, with an ableist, misogynistic, and deeply Eurocentric ideal of what a body should look like and how it should perform. It feels too obvious to say that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to health and there is no one healthy body type. Yet body normativity and its attendant rules are being enforced with more vigor than ever. There are high carbohydrate diets built around rice that sustain billions of people. High fat diets that have kept Alaskans alive for generations. Nonnas in Italy who are squat and strong and climb steep steps into their 80s. Masai warriors. Sumo wrestlers. The diversity of skillful, joyful embodiment across human cultures is vast, and that diversity is precisely the threat. Control requires conformity.

Fitting the narrow mold and being genuinely healthy are two very different endeavors but the wellness industry has worked hard to conflate them. If you don’t fit the mold, especially genetically, if you trust yourself to make reasonable choices, that is framed as a problem to be solved. This is alarming enough on its own, and becomes something closer to terrifying as MAGA policy inches toward eugenics.

The Illusion that Vulnerability is Escapable
Reality: Center Cradle to Grave Care

Every guy who claims to be bulletproof once had his diapers changed. Now someone does his laundry, fixes his car, and handles his accounting. There are invisible hands propping up his “independence.” Other people’s labor is woven into what he calls self-made, and underneath it all, he’s got the the dumb luck of being born an American instead of, say, a Gazan.

As humans, we are born completely helpless and at every stage of our lives we need touch, support, and love. We will get injured, endure sickness, have our hearts broken, and face grief. Our independence and heroic physical abilities, are an occasional blip rather than a permanent state. As my grandmother used to say, “We are all temporary able-bodied.” So vulnerability is not a moral failing. It is the human condition, and coming to terms with our own fragility is actually the key to our collective survival.

But the wellness industry, coupled with hustle culture, has sold us the opposite story. That we need to figure it out alone, stay constantly relevant, keep improving, keep producing, or risk being left behind. It’s a story built on a very real fear, which is exactly what makes it so effective and so corrosive.

Instead of endlessly chasing the next level of personal optimization, what if we tended to the most vulnerable among us, trusting that this is what actually makes all of us safer, healthier, and more secure?

The Illusion of Immortality
Reality: Letting That Shit Go*

Even with pristine biomarkers and a supplement stack that rivals a pharmacy, but spoiler: you will still die. If your body is your greatest achievement, how do you contend with it slowing down and, if you’re lucky, inevitable frailty? Despite your best efforts, you will lose control, and the optimization project has no finish line except the one we don’t talk about.

The uncomfortable truth is that someone can command a high-performing body and be utterly miserable, sit at the helm of a massive empire and never feel like they have enough, or be their most aligned and at peace on their deathbed. Peak biomarkers do not guarantee a good life, and they certainly don’t guarantee a good death.

Because every one of us will eventually say goodbye to everyone we’ve ever loved, every possession we’ve cherished, and every penny we’ve saved. The real measure isn’t how much we can amass but how gracefully we can release our grip on our bodies, our identities, our need to be winning at wellness. By all means, live robustly, climb the mountains, fall in love, take the dream trips. But along the way, remember to sink into savasana and practice letting it all go. Because, beyond your blood pressure and Vitamin D levels, that’s what it means to be fully human.

The Illusion of Achieving Results
Reality: Navigating Uncertainty

Remember March 2020, when we were all freaking out and wiping our groceries down with bleach? None of us knew WTF was going on and we felt completely powerless. That’s exactly when the wellness industry went into overdrive, peddling the same seductive promise it always does: that for the low price of $19.95 you can lose 25 lbs, bulletproof your immune system, and find the fountain of youth. It was BS then and it’s BS now, but it worked, because it always works when people are scared.

The “getting results” siren song has been fitness marketing’s greatest hit for decades, because it works on a very human impulse. When we feel out of control, a fast, painless, measurable outcome feels like solid ground. The problem is that real transformation is rarely cheap, fast, and pre-packaged.

As a personal trainer, I know what it means to keep showing up and cheering my clients through the hard work. I’ve seen genuine transformation in folks in their 60s with multiple diagnoses getting stronger than they’ve been in years, people unraveling decades of chronic stress, athletes recovering from serious injuries to lift massive weights overhead. The results didn’t arrive on schedule, where were often unexpected, delightful, and rarely matched notions of the “perfect body.”

Change requires showing up regardless - that’s the muscle worth building. The quotidian care when it’s tedious, the agency when the world feels heartbreaking, the refusal to let nihilism prevent you from getting out of bed. You won’t always get the result you planned for, but you can absolutely get stronger as you navigate the unknown.

Conclusion

The self-made man is a trap, and a seductive one. Easy enough to lampoon, harder to dislodge from the places he lives in us: the guilt about skipping the workout, the shame around the medical diagnosis, the gnawing sense that if you just optimized a little harder you’d finally feel secure. Having worked in wellness for almost 25 years, I am still actively unlearning so much of this.

And while we optimize, we are lonelier than ever. Disconnected from our lineages, our communities, our ecosystems, we are prescribed ever more self-absorption as the antidote to a loneliness epidemic we are not supposed to name. More personal achievement. More protein. Another protocol, another set of marching orders issued to an army of one.

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The constant performance is isolating in a way that’s hard to articulate because the whole point is to look like it isn’t. The bravado is a house of cards that requires continuous reinforcement. The prison of machismo, it turns out, is just as confining for the man inside it as for everyone he’s crowded out.

There is another way to carry this. Not a strong woman playing by the same exhausting rules, but something more genuinely matriarchal: tending rather than dominating, sharing the load rather than hoarding the credit, understanding power as relational rather than extractive.

We don’t have to keep performing our way through this alone. That’s not wellness. That’s just a different kind of suffering with better supplements.

The Wellness Strongman:
What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook
Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

This post: The Wellness Pipeline to the Manosphere:
Reflections on Netflix’s Inside the Manosphere

Redefining Wellness
Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Each Other, Sustaining the Planet

Strength Training for the Resistance
Showing up, serving, and building real agency

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In the middle of my “Wellness Strongmen” series, Netflix popped up with Inside the Manosphere as a textbook example of the promises of strength, discipline, and dominance that I’ve been articulating. It shows how fitness and wellness are both a throughline and a pipeline for these young, very ripped, and ostentatious influencers. Let’s take a look at this shift and grift from body optimization into political grievance.

Every bit of their self-branding and laser-focused content speaks to young male disenfranchisement. They speak to:

• A yearning for muscular, virile embodiment. For a generation raised on screens, there’s a deep longing for robust physicality and fitness.

• Financial freedom, opportunity, and status. Money is power, and you don’t want to answer to anyone else to get it.

• Belonging and leadership. Even if it’s just a subscription to a private Discord or Telegram channel, there’s a desperation to be on a team and have someone rooting for you.

• The need to express libido and actually feel their feelings. Don’t know how to express your desires? Project it onto women. Act all dominant.

Above all this documentary speaks to young men’s desire to improve their situations and carve out a path to mastery. Sounds completely fair to me. But why are we leaving it up to the manosphere to so tightly define the version of masculine success to emulate?

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As our economy mortgages the futures of young people, saddling them with student loans, impossible housing costs, a mental health crisis, and AI already coming for entry-level jobs. With plenty of adolescent irreverence the manosphere responds with an escape from the “Matrix” of wage earning. Its offer ups anti-establishment ideology without ever acknowledging capitalism or the kinds of policies that create the current economic circumstances. The manosphere boosts an every-man-for-himself ethos, full of bravado. These influencers promise dominance, outsmarting the system, and the ultimate: control. Control your body, control your woman (or women), and control your life, even in an economy with fewer and fewer real opportunities.

It’s valuable to peek into the rabbit holes of the internet to understand how ideas permeate the broader culture, shaping how we talk about wellness and our politics. Many pundits and pollsters contend that manosphere support swung the 2024 election, as MAGA learned to harness this testosterone turmoil. Even if Joe Rogan is now questioning the Iran war and ICE raids, figures like Erika Kirk are saying the quiet part out loud: “Don’t let anyone disenfranchise you because you’re a young man… especially a young white male man.” A sentence like that would be laughable if it were not politically manipulating so much young male angst.

Meanwhile the administration forgives student loans while recruiting ICE agents to dress up in camo and play appalling real-life video games. That is the investment we are making. Those same resources could fund something closer to a modern Civilian Conservation Corps or AmeriCorps. We don’t need ICE in Vermont or Minnesota. We need massive public investment in infrastructure and to prevent and respond to natural disasters. What is we offered young people work with dignity, skill building, and a real career path? We could be funding opportunities to develop very needed skills, to feel capable, and to serve communities beyond all the bro-y parasocial fantasies.

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Now we hope they don’t get too radicalized as they remained parked in front of screens, buying crypto and creatine while spiraling through Reddit threads of incel victimhood. Let’s give these guys some boots, some tools, a living wage, and a chance to be a damn hero.

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The Wellness Strongman
What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook
Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

Redefining Wellness
Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Each Other, Sustaining the Planet

Strength Training for the Resistance
Showing up, serving, and building real agency

In this post, we move from naming the character to studying his playbook. The Strongman is not just a personality with a microphone or a premium protocol. It’s a specific playbook that tells us how to behave and who belongs. A set of repeated instructions for how to live in a body right now, how fascism becomes internalized, and how easily we start believing the myths of meritocracy and health.

Over time, those rules stop sounding external. They start to feel like common sense. They shape how we exercise, how we eat, how we judge ourselves, and what kind of authority feels trustworthy. If we want to dismantle this version of wellness, we have to understand the moment we’re living in, how it gets under the skin, and what it will take to move beyond it.

The Era of the Unwell, Insecure, and Unsure

Strongmen rise during economic and cultural instability. This is one of those moments.

The old American promise, work hard and follow the rules to earn ease and security, is shattering. Instead, income gaps are widening exponentially, housing is only available to those with generational wealth, AI is devouring stable middle-class professions, and the lack of universal health care keeps reminding us that if we get sick, we could go broke.

Saturated by technology that promised connection and convenience, we’ve ended up isolated, inflamed, sedentary, and dissociated from our bodies. We are constantly grazing at an information buffet while starving for wisdom.

As manufacturing jobs disappear, women pull ahead in academia, and gender norms shift, this is an especially disorienting moment for young men. The game feels rigged, and our nervous systems know it. Add ecological collapse, nonstop political turmoil, and a pandemic, and of course we feel fried.

When the Bros Crashed the Party

Desperate to feel better in the upheaval, wellness was rebranded and became ubiquitous. Back in 2006, when I was in graduate school for Holistic Health Education, wellness was still coded as girly, too amorphous and introspective to be taken seriously. Health was framed as personal exploration and overlapped with a lot of “woo-woo.” (That’s a whole other alt-right pipeline I need to unpack if we’re going to understand Casey Means.)

But about a decade ago, as the question of how to take care of ourselves grew more urgent, the bros stormed in with protocols, metrics, and a whole lot of certainty. We seem to be surrounded by wellness and yet increasingly unwell. That’s because what we’re swimming in isn’t care. It’s an instruction manual for internalizing patriarchal power.

Let’s name the instructions of the Strongman wellness playbook.

• Follow the Leader
• Police the Body
• Scarcity and Status
• Arm Yourself with Bro Science
• Escape Vulnerability
• Elitism is a Feature, Not a Bug

Follow the Leader

Drowning in information, dissociated from the body, and economically struggling to stay afloat, the natural response becomes: Just tell me what to do.

Basic health advice, eat your veggies, get enough sleep, exercise regularly, is a way to daily microdose personal agency and self-care. It gently puts power back into your hands through simplicity and consistency. But the basics, and trusting your audience, are not enough to build a following.

Strongman wellness digs into mythologies of hypermasculine hierarchical power. The questions being answered aren’t just How do I feel better? They’re closer to How do I gain dominance? How do I feel powerful again?

The advice both addresses and reinforces a desperate grasp for certainty, confusion about embodiment, and a longing for agency in an economy that drains us. They tell you precisely how to get your life together, what to optimize, what to obsess over, and incidentally, what to ignore.

Eat all the meat, crush your workouts, inject yourself with peptides: The Wellness Strongman promises that if you are obedient, you will rise through the ranks, because the path to power demands adherence, not self-trust.

All those pesky social determinants of health? Ignore them. You can hack your way to the front of the line.

Police the Body

Our wellness could be liberatory. It could free us from Reichian limitations, help heal generational trauma, and prepare us to better serve our communities.

But in the manosphere, wellness is about rigid self-control and dominance. The old diet culture playbook that kept women hungry and compliant has been rebranded as longevity hacks, intermittent fasting, and high-intensity intervals.

To maintain health, the body must be digitally monitored and vigilantly policed. Every bite is a chance to track your macros, and every movement needs to be a quantifiable rep. At the root is a deep distrust of the body: controlling hunger, suppressing desire, and training us into obedience.

There’s a big difference between keeping yourself together and tipping into rigidity. I see this especially on my Italy retreats, when Americans arrive with deeply ingrained ideas about what they should be eating and how much they need to burn off any pleasure.

Scarcity and Status

As the billionaire class manufactures scarcity, manosphere wellness becomes less about feeling good and more about gaining a competitive edge. Health isn’t about feeling better. It’s about becoming more efficient, more focused, more productive.

The goal is to achieve a body. One that signals discipline, optimization, and success. Wellness becomes something you perform, something you display.

The mantra of Strongman wellness is PERFORMANCE. Always on. Always optimizing. Always needing to prove it. (When I was single, I went on many dates with this type of guy. It was exhausting.)

If we break down, wellness is supposed to fix us instead of asking why we keep burning ourselves out.

Don’t ask why groceries are getting more expensive.
Just work harder so you can afford them.

Arm Yourself with Bro Science

Getting men on the wellness bandwagon en masse required a very specific communication strategy, one that deploys anything science-y as authority.

The assumption is that you’re a sitting duck if you aren’t armed with the right information. That you, the dear listener or follower, don’t know jack squat and need an authority to tell you how to live in your body.

Enter bro science.

If knowledge is power, information is your arsenal, data is your bullets, and certainty is your shield. Science stops being a way to investigate our biases and becomes a way to invoke authority.

Huberman devises research studies to show that deep breathing is important. Shocker. He espouses the importance of getting sunshine, especially in the morning.These are obvious ways to stay healthy, and I don’t disagree with him. It’s his delivery that has always felt patronizing. Instead of reinforcing what we already intuitively know about caring for ourselves, he frames these ideas as breakthrough discoveries.

Asprey is even worse. He deploys the sensationalized, reductive, and myopic “science” of biohacking while trafficking in untested, unregulated longevity products.

Meanwhile, they ignore the scientific consensus that actually shapes our health: climate change and the overwhelming evidence that income drives health outcomes, because neither one is easy to parlay into an Athletic Greens discount code.

And that omission isn’t accidental. If the real drivers of health are structural and ecological, there isn’t much to sell. So the story shifts.

Escape Vulnerability

As we teeter toward ecological, economic, and existential uncertainty, the biohacker bros arrive triumphantly with longevity hacks. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy. Longevity sells because its a hedge against our personal obsolescence.

Driving around Silicon Valley, the unhoused people living in shanty towns along the freeway are a daily reminder that we abandon our most vulnerable. We are a society that treats other human beings are treated as disposable.

All the longevity hoopla is promise that if you constantly stay on top of your game, you won’t be trashed and abandoned. The podcasters, especially in the menopause space, constantly remind us to stay strong so we can avoid dependence as we age. God forbid we ever become frail, need care, or rely on someone else.

I want to be climbing steps for as many decades as possible. But can we stop preying on the fear of needing each other? The deeper anxiety isn’t aging. It’s living in a society that leaves people behind.

How about we stop treating each other as expendable and center cradle-to-grave care? (More on that in my next post.)

Elitism Is a Feature, Not a Bug

As the administration targets immigrants, denies health care, and limits reproductive care, we feel viscerally who belongs and who doesn’t. Meanwhile, wellness influencers operate as the softer arm of the propaganda machine, constantly reinforcing what the “ideal” healthy body should look like.

The hierarchy is clear: bros at the top, the rest of us pushed to the margins, and white women desperate for proximity to power. The aspirational “ideal” body is increasingly centered around wealthy, able-bodied, middle-aged, cis, hetero white dudes.Not surprising.

These bodies are not just the most privileged. They’re also something like a blank slate for exercise and health recommendations. When a young, able-bodied guy gets off the couch, starts exercising, and eats better, yes, he will often “get results.” So he starts to believe his body works like everyone else’s and begins spouting cookie-cutter advice.

If it worked for him, it should work for everyone. If it doesn’t work, it’s probably your fault.

Meanwhile, bodies with uteruses, bodies with more adipose, older bodies, trans bodies, differently-abled bodies, and bodies with chronic illness are de-centered, shamed, policed, or ignored. That’s most of us.

Instead of expanding the definition of a healthy body, health gets framed as an achievement. The aspirational ideal is designed to be unattainable and unsustainable, while keeping everyone believing they aren’t doing enough. A healthy diet and regular exercise aren’t enough. You need protein in your water and expensive wearables. When accessibility is dismissed, elitism becomes the business model, a hamster wheel that exhausts us while generating the revenue stream.

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All Regimes Collapse

It’s exploitative. It’s exhausting. And it was never meant to include all of us. That could describe the Strongman version of wellness, our current administration, or late-stage capitalism.

Eventually, this patriarchal pyramid scheme will fall. Authoritarian systems, like overly restrictive diets, collapse under their own rigidity because they were never designed for thriving, only control.

Regardless we will maintain our focus on repairing generational wounds, (re)building our communities, and supporting human flourishing. Our work now is to critique and dismantle the excesses of current power structures while simultaneously creating more robust alternatives.

If we do not fundamentally redefine what we mean by wellness, we will not survive what is unfolding. In my next post, I’ll share some ideas for reframing wellness. Let’s start building.

As much as I would like to laugh off the antics, I believe this clown show is masking something far more sinister. It looked absurd, but it reveals how wellness and power now perform together. This four-part series explores the rise of the Wellness Strongman, a hybrid of authoritarian and showman that perfectly embodies how power operates in the Information Age.

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What’s a Wellness Strongman?

During the last decade, as MAGA consolidated power, a cadre of male wellness influencers claimed the podcast airwaves and online town squares to define what “wellness” means. Focused on biohacking, longevity science, and functional medicine, figures like Andrew Huberman, Mark Hyman, David Asprey, and Peter Attia have built empires of influence through book deals, endless supplements, and elitist, often unnecessary diagnostics. They differ in the degree of pseudoscience they peddle, the scale of their personal scandals, and how closely they align with the current administration, but they share a similar orientation toward the body, toward wellness, and toward power. This series examines how wellness became a proxy for power, how that power gets deployed, and how we might reclaim our strength on a deeply personal level.

When I researched “strongman,” I found two primary definitions of this archetype: the authoritarian political figure and the old-time carnival act who lifts massive weights. I began to see these male health influencers as a hybrid, part showman, part promoter of a distinctly authoritarian agenda.

These Information Age power players know exactly how to edutain. They have built empires of persuasion, mastered the art of capturing attention, and often contort information into propaganda under the guise of health advice. The Strongman is a charismatic figure with all the answers, clearly defined enemies, and precise instructions for obedience. They are a key branch of a larger broligarchy machine and, when it comes to your health, there is always more mansplaining to do.

Like many autocratic leaders, they present themselves as outsiders, populists, even saviors. Mark Hyman frequently rails against Big Pharma, Big Ag, and the medical establishment while promoting healthy living. He talks about reforming the food system while cozying up to an administration that helped make American food both less nutritious and more costly. Yet he co-founded a company with RFK Jr and built a business valued at two billion dollars selling boutique diagnostics and supplements, a model that would be threatened by something like universal health care.

He names the problem, then sells the solution. When we’re asking, “What’s wrong with me and how do I feel better?” the answers are ready, packaged, and expensive.

Much of this Wellness Strongman content masquerades as accessible health advice, but you cannot build multimillion dollar companies by telling people to take a walk, go to bed earlier, and eat more vegetables. To hold attention and sustain revenue, the message has to grow more extreme, burrow into deeper fears, and inflame sharper anxieties. Dave Asprey’s biohacking enterprise, for example, rests on the premise that the boring basics like healthy food and exercise are not enough. You need the special coffee, the branded creatine, the elaborate routines and devices, the constant supplementation. There is always another spectacle, a new diet, an optimized workout, or a flight to the jungle for the latest psychedelic revelation they have “discovered.”

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Abuse of Power is No Surprise

Peter Attia and Deepak Chopra showing up in the Epstein files. Dave Asprey receiving a warning from the Federal Trade Commission over claims about “hacking” coronavirus treatments. Andrew Huberman’s sex scandal and subsequent complete denial of accountability. Once again, powerful men stepping over the line. Everyone act surprised!

The think pieces debate whether we should still worship these wellness heroes or separate the message from the messenger. But in the trenches of wellness, I’m less interested in their personal dramas, than in their framework which has always felt so damn patronizing. Every day I help people make sense of living in their bodies, simplify their wellness, and remove the barriers that make wellbeing feel complicated or out of reach.

So many well-meaning folks have absorbed hours of content and are still left chasing the next protocol. The confusion, the information deluge, the sense of not-enoughness, and the growing dominance of the body inside the manosphere all point to the same thing.

Ultimately, it’s obvious to me that the Strongman is more interested in his own authority, his bank account, and the accumulation of power than in what he claims: spreading the gospel of wellness. In my next post, I’ll unpack how these messages have become encoded in our society, our psyche, and our bodies (yes, that’s why protein is now in everything). We need to understand the playbook to move beyond it. Rigid control, whether it shows up as fascism or strict diets, doesn’t hold for long. Systems built on domination crack and Strongmen eventually fall.

When they do, we need a version of wellness that is more sustainable, collective, and grounded. That’s what I outline in the third post in this series. Finally, I bring it back to the body and my own approach to strength training as a way to reclaim agency, keep showing up, and learn how to function without gung-ho gurus.

1. The Wellness Strongman
   What authority looks like in modern wellness

2. The Business of Wellness Authority
   What they’re selling and why we buy it

3. Beyond the Spectacle
   Redefining wellness after the guru era

4. Strength Training for the Resistance: Showing up, serving, and building real agency

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Lately, my feed has been split between two versions of masculinity: armed, masked men tearing through Minneapolis and, in sharp contrast, gorgeous, gay hockey players falling in love on Heated Rivalry. Beyond the graphic, steamy love scenes (FYI, don’t watch it on the plane), I’d argue the show is revealing more than truly excellent butts. It’s tapping into a zeitgeist about how we’re coping with fascism. I posit that this popularity has a lot to do with our wellness and with that low-grade jaw clench many of us have been carrying for the past few years. Hear me out.

Although I’d much prefer the comfort of romantic escapism, we have to look back to 1933, when Hitler rose to power. (I know, I’d rather not go there either.) That year, Wilhelm Reich, a protégé of Freud and a radical psychoanalyst, published The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Writing during the rise of the Nazi Party, Reich argued that authoritarian regimes consolidate power not only through politics, but through sexually repressive ideology and internalized bodily control. For the state to tighten its grip on a mass scale, he believed that control lives in the bodies of the populace.

Reich observed his patients bracing against vulnerability, quelling anxiety, and rigidly conforming through what he called character armor. He linked this to patterns of chronic physical tension, particularly in the jaw, chest, and pelvis, which he referred to as muscular or body armor. (This concept of muscular armor has deeply informed how I teach yoga and strength training, though I realize that’s for a future post.) In other words, what we might now call toxic masculinity wasn’t just a set of beliefs for Reich. It was a personality structure, a way of inhabiting the body, a posture toward life itself.

This character type is a perfect ICE agent: already emotionally armored, and now physically outfitted with external armor paid for by our tax dollars. These fragile, insecure men are being paid to play a real-world video game, hunting down immigrants and proving their worth through domination and force. And after “completing their mission”, all the president’s men applaud them as heroes. As bell hooks wrote:

“Cultures of domination attack self-esteem, replacing it with a notion that we derive our sense of being from dominion over another. Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their sense of self and identity, their reason for being, resides in their capacity to dominate others.”

To dominate, anything deemed “other” must be controlled. Anything defiant is violently attacked. Anything transgressive is ridiculed, shamed, closeted, policed, detained, beaten, and too often, killed. When the only power we know is dominance, there is never enough, and this malignant masculinity becomes its own cultural contagion.

It’s infected us all. We’re pouring massive resources into surveillance, policing, and detainment, incarcerating immigrants as well as citizens in the process. At the same time, we’re targeting a handful of trans athletes, stripping away reproductive rights, and draining public healthcare funding. Whether it’s the constant flattery of our orange emperor, the corrupt financing behind it all, or the steady dehumanization of our neighbors, the facade requires endless reinforcement and perpetual violence. It is so damn exhausting because what’s happening politically isn’t just abstract or ideological. As Reich understood, it’s a collective, visceral experience that takes up residence in our bodies. For years, we’ve all been bracing against vulnerability, quelling anxiety, and trying to keep our shit together.

That tension, the one lodged in your jaw, has become a profit and propaganda pipeline. The MAHA side of wellness culture, along with a cadre of bro-sphere podcasters, has doubled down on internalized bodily control while routinely disregarding the social determinants of health. “SkinnyTok” isn’t just about thinness. It’s about controlling our appetites, our bodies, and pleasure itself. The trending body type values ultra-thin musculature as visible proof of discipline. Conforming to diet culture becomes shorthand for being “good,” even morally superior, while a newly inverted food pyramid lectures us about “personal responsibility” at the same time this administration makes healthy, affordable food harder to access.

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We’re told we’ll be safe and successful if we focus on following the rules. Regulate your nervous system, schlep around in a weighted vest, and adhere to the latest Huberman protocol.

Stay regulated. Don’t freak the fuck out.

But maybe freaking the fuck out is exactly what we need right now. Maybe we’re exhausted by the faux strongman bullshit and desperate for something else, something like Heated Rivalry. Maybe we’re ready to escape our own internalized compliance. We’ve policed pleasure so thoroughly that we didn’t realize how hungry we are. Locked into the confines of trying to be good, we crave belonging to something more transcendent—which explains the show’s record-breaking popularity.

Across its six episodes, the characters strip out of the straightjacket of character armor, allowing for a torrent of emotional vulnerability and plenty of physical nudity. If nothing else, the show deserves accolades for its masterful lighting design, where shadowy desire is no longer policed and gives way to sunlit tenderness. The series illustrates Reich’s “character armor” and how it works to suppress the chaos of the erotic. He also recognized this as fascism’s deepest threat. External violent control and internalized suppression can never fully contain the unknown, the shadow, or desire itself. This is why the Grindr server keeps crashing at the RNC.

I’ll admit I would much rather watch beautiful cinematography of queer ecstasy than American citizens gunned down by perverted power. But I’d argue these are two sides of the same story of oppression. They point to the scale of change we’re experiencing, and to a deep hunger for something more humane. When we’re released from the shackles of shame, when we no longer hide in fear, we find the bravery to step out of the shadows, let our desires see daylight, and take to the streets. Our wellness practices can be about unshackling ourselves from the armor and liberating us from brittle patriarchal norms. We can exercise the core strength to stand up for what we believe in. Unlock our jaws to speak up for what we believe. Once we give ourselves permission, we can feel it in our bones: the drumbeats of collective liberation, radiating outward from Minneapolis.

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In closing, I’m including this quote by poet, writer, and activist Audre Lorde. My rule of thumb: when it feels like the arc of justice is bending way too slowly, invoke the Black feminists:

“The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.”

― Audre Lorde

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The message is clear: we can all make better choices to improve our health. Eat the right foods, crush your high-intensity intervals, hit your step count, listen to the right podcasts, down the supplements, get adequate sleep, and you’ll be perfectly fine. Just do all the right things, work hard, be disciplined. Sound familiar? These ideas reflect American meritocracy and rugged individualism, repackaged as self-care.

The belief that you, and you alone, are responsible for your health outcomes has a name: healthism. Coined by sociologist Robert Crawford in 1980, healthism describes the preoccupation with personal health as a moral obligation and personal achievement. It treats health as something we earn through good behavior, while quietly ignoring genetics, income, environment, discrimination, public policy, and sheer bad luck.

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Healthism is so normalized that we barely notice how it shapes our response to current events. Watching ICE terrorize neighborhoods? Regulate your nervous system. Afraid of getting sick without adequate healthcare? Eat more antioxidants. Losing financial ground in a volatile economy? Go bulk up at the gym. When the world feels out of control, we’re sold the idea that tighter control over our bodies will save us.

This framework asks too much of individuals and far too little of systems. In practice, that shows up in a few predictable ways.

It’s too much to carry alone

Anyone else overwhelmed by the expectation to stay healthy, well-regulated, thin, and perpetually young? Doing all the right things can feel like a full-time job, one that easily costs hundreds of dollars a month. Health becomes a status marker, another place where we can never quite keep up, where not doing enough is treated as a personal flaw rather than a predictable outcome.

It rewards the performative and the narcissistic

Healthism slides easily into spectacle, especially on social media. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll find all-meat diets, crash cleanses dressed up as detoxing, and plenty of coffee enemas. The loudest, most extreme, and most self-absorbed voices end up defining what it means to “take control of your health.” And it’s not just the algorithm rewarding this behavior. Rather than holding press conferences or offering coherent public health guidance, we’ve ended up with our HHS secretary performing pull-ups in airports alongside wellness influencers for a photo op.

It conceals privilege as virtue

Having the time and energy to hit Pilates, shop for fresh ingredients, and chop vegetables for a wholesome dinner is very different from working late and relying on the drive-through to feed hungry kids. When self-care is framed as willpower, that difference disappears. Those with the resources to take care of themselves are praised as more disciplined, more intelligent, and more morally upstanding, while those with less bandwidth are cast as lazy, irresponsible, or uninformed.

It blames the victim

Healthism arrives as empowerment and quickly turns judgmental. We subsidize corn, flood the market with cheap ultra-processed foods, and then blame people for eating them and getting sick. Instead of changing policy to make fresh food accessible, responsibility is pushed downward. Struggling to stay well in an increasingly unaffordable society is treated as a personal failure rather than structural pressure. Healthism isn’t neutral advice. It’s gaslighting.

Most importantly, it’s absolute BS

Our health is shaped far more by where we’re born and the zip codes we live in than by what we put in our grocery carts. This is the core insight of determinism, a lens that reveals what healthism conceals. In Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky argues that our lives are formed far more by biological and environmental forces than by individual choice. Genes, fetal environments, childhood stress, income, education, trauma, and social position all mold impulse control, health, and behavior long before “choice” ever enters the picture. As Sapolsky puts it, “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

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No control? Ouch. At first, determinism feels like a real bummer. As someone who feels genuinely proud of my breakfast smoothies, exercise routines, and early bedtimes, it can sound like Sapolsky is dismissing my commitment to wellness. But read more closely and that’s not what he’s saying. He isn’t arguing that some people lack willpower or that others are blessed with a magical reserve of discipline. He’s pointing to the environments that shape impulse control and executive function. I’m not healthy simply because I work hard at it. I’m healthy because I have the capacity to take care of myself. And that capacity is shaped by support, stability, and resources long before it shows up as “good choices.”

Our social, socioeconomic, genetic, and environmental conditions shape health far more than individual behavior ever could. Healthism is not merely an illusion of meritocracy; it is marketing, increasingly translated into policy. The MAHA emphasis on personal responsibility and empowerment eclipses a more basic truth: human beings require sustained, collective nurturing over a lifetime. While the wealthy purchase expansive support systems, poorer folks are inundated with cheap coping mechanisms and told to call it resilience. The result is a culture that insists we can optimize our way out of structural neglect, even as the conditions for health continue to erode.

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As I was writing this, I came across the concept of Inheritocracy, developed by Eliza Filby, which makes a data-driven case against meritocracy by showing how inherited support, not effort alone, determines opportunity in housing, education, childcare, and affordability. She doesn’t explicitly address health, but the connection is obvious. Who gets praised for discipline, who is punished early for “poor impulse control,” and who was ever actually given the conditions to sustain themselves in the first place? Inherited genes, environments, and financial scaffolding shape who has the capacity to care for themselves at all.

This is where the wellness slogans finally collapse. Who actually gets control over their body and their time, and therefore their health? Who can make long-term investments instead of constant short-term tradeoffs? We do not all have the same 24 hours in a day when some people are insulated from economic pressure and others are working multiple jobs while caregiving and recovering from chronic stress. Framing health as personal control in a landscape this unequal is not empowerment. It’s propaganda.

Don’t buy it.

You don’t sustain yourself through restriction, self-loathing, or chugging magic pills. Intensity might sell, but it rarely lasts. What actually carries us through busy seasons, demanding work, and real life don’t photograph well or promise transformation in 14 days.

I call them the Deep Basics.

They’re the unsexy, mostly free practices you can actually commit to consistently. They help you stay regulated, resourced, and showing up without burning yourself out.

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The Deep Basics of Wellness

Hydrate

Yes, it’s obvious, and yes, you still need the reminder. Drink the water or tea. Don’t let your brain, your joints, or your immune system shrivel up like a raisin.

Move to Get Unstuck

Stress lodges itself in the body. Walk, stretch, squirm in your chair, shake it out. Movement shifts mood in the moment, not just for long-term fitness goals. Let your emotions become raw material and put them in motion. Emote, emotion, and motion all come from the same root word: movere, Latin for “to move.”

Don’t Get Hangry

Solid meals and handy snacks prevent unnecessary downward spirals. Forget the diets and food rules. You don’t need to constantly reinvent how you eat, you just need to feed yourself in a way that sustains you. A well-fed body keeps your mood, mind, and energy steady.

Green Time > Screen Time

We push our minds to the point of indigestion with endless information and fear-driven feeds. The antidote to doomscrolling is simple: green time. Step outside, notice the season, breathe fresh air, and let your senses recalibrate. Even cooking dinner, tending a plant, or taking a shower can be a return to something real.

Rest

Sleep is not optional. Recharge fully and often. Learn how to turn the knob between effort and recovery, and remember that rest takes many forms. The ability to turn the day, the work, the week off and not let the to-do creep into your chill time.

Be Kind to Yourself

We are constantly told we need fixing, optimizing, or reshaping. Practicing contentment is an act of rebellion. Ease up on the inner critic, notice what you’ve endured, and give yourself credit for making it this far.

Stay Connected

Isolation breeds outrage, and outrage makes us more vulnerable to nonsense. Stay connected to friends and family instead. Share the meme, organize the potluck, tell the truth when someone asks how you are. A strong community is more powerful than any self-care hack.

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If you’ve got money to spend on wellness, skip the magic pills and spend it on support. Find a class, a teacher, a therapist, a gym, a walking buddy, or a community that helps you keep showing up. Structure and connection will take you further than any supplement ever will. Wellness sticks when you’re not doing it alone.

Every day I bounce between the sharp, urgent grind of hustling and the tender, buoyant moments of healing work. Writing this recap made me realize that I’m damn proud of how I’ve made a living. As the most extreme personalities in the wellness industry seized power and violently dismantled our social safety net, I worked in grassroots wellness. Running a multifaceted wellness business meant holding it together while so much seemed to fall apart.

Here’s my report on where I showed up:

Online:

Movement Medicine

My Movement Medicine virtual classroom has a lively, regular group. Many show up to the live Zoom classes three times each week, while others fit in the recordings around work schedules, family obligations, and real life. This year we dove deeper into anatomy, practiced functional training before “No Kings” rallies, and checked in on caring for children, grandchildren, aging parents, and ourselves. Many Movement Medicine students work in public health or policy, so I’m glad to keep them active, often in their pajamas, before heading into valiant, demanding workdays. These classes connect me to people across the country and anchor my own movement practice.

Workplace Wellness

I piloted an online workplace wellness program for the Organic Trade Association, a lobbying, policy, and education nonprofit representing the organic sector and advocating for our food system. With the upheaval in DC, I addressed a lot of creaky shoulders, the isolation of remote work, and the ongoing challenge of staying healthy under intense workloads.

Italy Retreats

Despite a very bumpy year for marketing, I gathered groups in May and September. Together with my Italian business partners, we created retreats with morning yoga, hikes through vineyards, and farm-to-table meals paired with stunning wines. These trips consistently reframe my jaded American hustle mentality and give me the chance to work alongside Alice, a friend of over 30 years and a masterful chef. For those who can make it, the experience is once-in-a-lifetime.

Asheville:

I work for three women-owned wellness businesses in Asheville, which allows me to focus on the direct service I love without the constant headache of the overhead.

Functional Flow

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:30, a rowdy-but-exhausted group rolls into West Asheville Yoga fresh off WFH desks, nonprofit jobs, and the retail & service industry gigs that keep Asheville running. We banter, squat, sweat, stretch, and eventually melt into a savasana puddle. I would not have made it through the Hurricane Helene recovery or the February DOGE massacres without this crew.

Fitness Training

I returned to personal fitness training at All Bodies Movement and Wellness, an emphatically inclusive gym committed to offering space to exercise for people marginalized by or averse to mainstream gym culture. Many of my older clients face osteoporosis or multiple sclerosis, live with several fused discs, or are recovering from surgeries. Younger clients are navigating gender transitions, autism, depression, or ADHD. Almost all of them are new to lifting weights and need support to start a regular exercise routine. I also lead strength classes for people across a range of body types who want a solid workout without diet/ fitness shaming. I’ve coached several folks to personal records, including deadlifting over 250 lbs or pressing 50 lbs overhead. Every day I’m reminded that we are strong enough to face our physical and emotional obstacles.

Tarot

Through the Asheville Wellness Tours and other collaborations, I offer tarot readings at dinner events and for small groups of visitors. Reading cards is like personal training for your intuition and telling these hero’s journey stories I often need to hear myself. I aim to make the mystical practical, and the work often creates a release of tears, belly laughs, and sudden aha moments.

Reflections on getting through the year:

Sustaining Myself

After Helene last fall, winter in Asheville was pretty damn depressing. As the growing season returned, I noticed crews dredging the river of debris and nature slowly mending her open wound. I returned to hiking trails scarred by downed trees but reopened by chainsaws. The community celebrated businesses reopening as Asheville’s creative and ecological vitality returned.

Although often overwhelmed, I stayed connected to friends and family. I showed up for baby showers, a too-early funeral, a wedding, and family gatherings. I hosted a few damn good parties. I stayed open to grief, joy, and the realities of aging, because that’s the real work of belonging. IRL, I was less the wellness persona who has it all figured out and more the friend just keeping it together. And while I may not have it all dialed, at least I’m not an insufferable, narcissistic influencer no one wants to invite over for dinner.

Despite a bout of sciatica, because sometimes life is literally a pain in the ass, I completed my annual birthday fitness challenge. I nailed the 100-rep, 5-minute kettlebell snatch test, pulled a heavy AF deadlift, and reminded myself that I can still do both a full backbend and a full split. Aunt Sadie’s still got it, for now.

Sustaining the Writing

Luckily, I’ve baked most of my physical practice into the workday and reserve my precious mornings for writing. My body is holding up pretty damn well, which allows my mind can keep exercising its strength.

Usually mired in the transactional, writing is my reach toward the transcendental. I posted on Substack 43 times this year. When did I manage that?

I especially appreciate my ten unsolicited, paid subscribers (thanks, everyone!) I’ve needed this space to step back from monetizing my offerings and interrogate the context of the wellness hustle. That often requires fending off emails and early-morning calls to Italy to protect an hour of focused time, fueled by my husband’s impeccable cappuccinos.

This year, writing often felt like a punishing boxing match with our current political realities. This Substack is my attempt to gain traction and clarity while being pummeled by endless what-the-actual-fuck moments. I’ve kept the paywall down because I feel a profound responsibility to define wellness beyond the extreme, the weaponized, and the nefarious political operators who have claimed so much of its language.

Sustaining Each Other

So as I close out my 23rd year of working in wellness, I don’t have a serum to reverse aging, “7 health secrets the medical industry isn’t telling you”, or an MLM to pitch.

What I can report is that I’m proud of who I serve and who I work alongside. Those of us still eking out small, service-based wellness businesses are the ones actually making America healthy. Our job is to feel the ache, know what to do with it, or at least how to hold it.

It’s a privilege to be in the trenches with my retreat partners and the women keeping the doors open here in Asheville. Relentless self-promotion makes us cringe when we would much rather offer direct service. We balance affordable, accessible pricing with paying our people and ourselves a decent wage. Every day we wrestle with expensive, exasperating software that promised to make business management easier. We barely keep up with emails, admin, and endless to-do lists. We all need to update our websites. We all think the algorithm is a real asshole. We are all trying to relax. We are all tired of being so damn resilient.

But we keep showing up.

We have not achieved bodies of plasticized perfection. We have not meditated ourselves beyond ever needing medical care. We are not paragons of purity. Actually, we cuss like sailors and know that sustainable health includes the occasional cheeseburger. We keep it real because that is all we can afford to do.

Within the shrinking confines of capitalism, the grief of ecological destruction, the full assault on public health, fabricated economic scarcity, state-sponsored terror against immigrants, attacks on trans kids, and the nauseating migraine of our current administration, my job was to show up energized, on time, upright, focused, and recently showered. As a somatic trail guide I feel the overwhelm, coax out the frantic gripping, and realign spirits so we can keep up the resistance training. In a year that often felt hopeless, the workout was rejecting isolated outrage. We got through it by carrying the ache together.

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