This week, we’re talking about Pandemic Era Discoveries. Last winter, after two years spent in various forms of social isolation, Dallas and Pilar met up at an improvised San Diego studio to catch up live and in person. We compared notes about how we’d weathered the weirdness of COVID reality, where we’re at now, and some of the most rewarding stuff we encountered along the way.
From craniosacral therapy to cigars, from continuous glucose monitors to toe correctors, from garden plot puttering to nature-based spirit questing, we serve up some of our favorite COVID keepers, along with some of our just-emerging curiosities.
And, as always, we leave you with some experiments to get you thinking about what you’d like to take away from this next phase of post-COVID reality.
“Pandemic Era Discoveries” Episode Highlights
- Catching up on the podcast, and our lives
- The mental, emotional, and physical healing potential of craniosacral therapy
- Creating beauty through gardening … and all the other benefits
- Pilar’s foot-healing discoveries: minimalist footwear and toe spacers
- Dallas’s profound experiences on an 11-day Winter Desert Quest at the Animas Valley Institute
- Continuous glucose monitoring — not just for diabetics
- The low effort/high reward (in Dallas’s opinion) of a continuous fitness and health tracker
- Can cigars fit with a healthy lifestyle? (No, and/but …)
If you’ve ignored or abused your feet for the past several years and have never tried a toe-spacer device, consider experimenting with one (see the Resources section below for a link).
Even if you don’t think you’ve abused your feet, look at them closely and ask what they might need from you — more care, scrubbing, exfoliating, massaging, moisturizing, more comfortable shoes, more walking or resting?
An alternate experiment: Soak your feet in a bath of 50% warm water and 50% real, organic apple cider vinegar for 15-20 minutes. Give them a little scrub, and marvel at how revived they look.
The small experiment: If you don’t have a plant at home, get one. It can be small, it can live indoors or out. There’s a quality of tending and connection to a living thing that can be enriching.
The large experiment: Visit the Animas Valley Institute website (link below in Resources) and consider signing up for one of their events. If that’s too big, read one of Bill Plotkin’s books, maybe starting with Soulcraft.
Resources
- Check out the live interviews Pilar conducted during COVID at The Living Experiment’s YouTube channel or our Facebook page
- Toe spacers: Correct Toes, YogaToes
- Minimalist shoes that Pilar has tried: Xero Shoes, Groundies, Lems
- Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute, and his books
- Some continuous glucose monitoring programs: Nutrisense, January, Levels
- The WHOOP band and Oura ring health and fitness trackers (and our “Biometric Devices” podcast episode)
- To learn more about Pilar’s Healthy Deviant U experience and be among the first to know when registration for the next round opens, sign up here
Plus …
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