What does health feel like to you?

Looking beyond metrics and numbers

Dearest Reader,

Several months ago, someone asked me: “What does health mean to you?”

I responded:

For me, health means feeling at ease and at home in my body. When I feel good in my body, that reverberates through my mind, spirit, and relationships.

I’ve been a licensed Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine since 2012, and I’ve practiced yoga and Buddhism for around twenty-five years. These traditions shape how I understand health and how I live day to day, from the way I eat and move to my relationship with spirituality, with others, and with myself.

The exchange took place in writing, in a more formal context. But the essence of my response—and what feels most important—is this:

What health “means” to me is what health feels like to me.

This feeling of health is something no one can measure or quantify, and no one else can actually know. It’s the way I feel—the way each of us feel—on the inside. It’s also how that feeling ripples outward, impacting every single person and thing we interface with, whether directly or indirectly, in ways known or unknown.

I see this different question—how does health feel to you—as deeply important. I’ve also seen, both in my own life and when working with patients, how touching into that feeling can support beautiful choices and changes.

How do you want to feel? What helps you feel that way? In your body, your mind, your spirit? When in doubt, do more of that. I promise it will bring you closer to how you most want to feel—maybe not all of the time, but a whole lot more often.

The heart of my own answer centers on ease in body, mind, spirit. That speaks to the physical ease I feel when I eat well and get good sleep and move my body each day. But also to the ease I feel at the end of the day, when I sit down to meditate and check in with how my actions and inactions have affected my body, my heart, other people.

It all goes together, and this is good news. Because it means cultivating ease—cultivating a hunger for ease and serenity and what leaves us feeling better, not worse—gathers its own momentum. And the more peace we feel, the more settledness and wholeness and love and enoughness, the more we crave it. Until, eventually, we crave it even more than what might offer temporary relief but takes us in the opposite direction.

This is how craving what’s good for you happens. This is how a feeling of health happens. This is how tending to our own body-mind-spirit leads to us living more beautifully.

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In case you missed it, Hungry For, a new collaborative series featuring people living beautiful lives in all kinds of ways, launched last week. In each edition, guests will answer the same set of four questions.

For all the reasons above—along with my own curiosity—the first question is: What does health feel like to you?

If you missed the inaugural edition, you can read Matthew Long’s thoughtful responses here. And look for the next edition this Wednesday—I think it will especially resonate with anyone interested in gardening, living simply, or even living abroad.

Then, on Friday, look for the next TCM Deep Dives series: holistic beauty through the lens of Chinese Medicine.

For now, I’d love to hear what health feels like to you. I’ll also leave you with what’s nourishing me and what I’m hungry for—and an invitation to share yours in the comments.

My solo trip to Cha-am, a sleepy beach town about two hours from Bangkok, and what health feels like to me.

WHAT’S NOURISHING ME

Longer yoga practices. Yoga asana (the physical postures many people equate with yoga) are woven throughout my day: a short but vigorous practice outdoors first thing each morning, a short yoga “snack” before lunch, a longer practice in late afternoon before dinner, and gentle stretching and long backbend holds before bed.

For the afternoon session, I usually practice with a recording from my teacher, Esak, as part of his Jedi Fight Club Immersion program. These recordings are typically around 90 minutes, but lately I’ve been pausing them here and there and stretching my afternoon practice to a full two hours. While this might seem like a lot, it’s really not if I think about how easy it is to spend 30 extra minutes scrolling Substack Notes or hopping from tab to tab on the internet. These longer practices leave me in a totally different, much better place mentally. They also offer a container for whatever I’m working on physically. This month: piking with straight legs into headstand, moving from headstand into tiger (forearm stand with a backbend), then into hollowback (tiger with bent knees, chest and head drawn through the arms), then exiting the same way—over and over, with multiple one-minute tiger and hollowback holds thrown in the mix. It’s mentally and physically challenging. I just love it so much.

WHAT I’M HUNGRY FOR

Green tea, pu’er tea, all the tea. When I committed to no coffee or caffeinated tea this year (as part of a program blending A Course in Miracles, Jñāna yoga, and ancient Egyptian mysticism that includes specific dietary and lifestyle parameters), I expected it to be much harder than it turned out to be. I was also amazed by how much less daily anxiety I experience without coffee.

But! We’ve been spending hours talking about tea in my Thai language lessons recently—the different types and processing methods, the history and health benefits. It’s left me very hungry for tea! I’m especially craving a lighter green tea, like sencha, and I fully expect to bring that back into my way of eating when the year is through—even if I continue with the program, and even if I stick with the other lifestyle parameters.

I’d love to hear yours.

Part of what excites me about writing these letters is hearing about your lives—what’s supporting you, what you’re wanting more of in the days and weeks ahead.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear:

• What’s nourishing your body, mind, spirit?

• What are you hungry for?

• What does health feel like to you?

Before you go, would you mind tapping the heart ❤️? It helps these letters reach more readers and genuinely brightens my day.

Thank you, with love,
Dana

If you’re new here, welcome! PERFECT HUNGER is about living a more beautiful, nourishing life. I’d love to have you here.

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