Hey guys it’s Dan. I wanted to take some time to share with you a little bit of my story and why I got into healthy, sustainable homes.
As a kid I loved epic adventure stories and save the world kind of stuff. I remember playing Pokémon and getting absorbed into the adventure, the experience points, the evolution that characters made. When I heard that random factoid about how humans only use something like 10% of their brain capacity I was like "woah! can we tap into any more of that? What can we do to evolve that capacity?” Those experiences really sparked a search for all the hidden potentials within us.
I grew up in a cluttered home that stressed my mom out. I saw how she feels overwhelmed by the clutter and how it may have created an underlying rift between my parents.
I have felt that same resentment in me with my college roommates. Even to this day I feel it sometimes with if things aren't put away after a few days.
My teens and twenties felt like the wasteland of searching for the seemingly elusive 'life’s purpose and meaning'. I want to fulfill my desire for adventure and heroic accomplishments. I want to help people with the public health crisis and climate change. I want to help people start or deepen a meditation practice that leads them to their true calling and optimal experience in life. I want to help them set up a healthy environment to raise a loving family and live together with purpose and presence I want them to be toxin and clutter free both inside their body and mind as well as in their home. I want to demonstrate how the earth is our shared home and that everything single person or household really does influence all else. I want to show the impact one home can have when living in service to others. I want to inspire people to live their life guided by their own inner wisdom.
In those times I'm feeling like there's so much I want to do, have or be I'm reminded of a loving kindness practice saying: "just as I wish to be healthy and happy, may you too be healthy. May you too, be happy."
My love for the epic adventure leads me to thinking big. Growing up I asked a lot of inward questions. Modern life is fast paced with lots of moving parts - How can I slow down and be present but still keep up society? How do I live a natural lifestyle but still find balance between the awesome innovations of the modern world. How can I reorient my lifestyle from materialistic and outwardly motivated to more heart based and inwardly driven.
How do I create a home environment that keeps me healthy in a fun and intuitive way. I want a home that prioritizes what makes me feel most alive and rooted in my inner nature. Can I do all of this in a simple way without becoming a hermit or outcast?
After perhaps a little too much big thinking and not enough action I feel like I numbed up my own heart in ways. How much do I have to meditate to open my heart. Where exactly am I going when I'm told to “go inward” to find my inner truth?
I became really fascinated with meditation, health and natural living in college. I learned the leading causes of death in the U.S. are largely from preventable diseases related to our sedentary lifestyles, processed diets and even perhaps from being chronically stressed by suppressed emotions.
After college I became a personal trainer to help people become healthier. I’m looking at these things thinking, we as a society know there is a solution to large amounts of suffering and premature death along with huge sums of wasted health-care spending and reduced productivity. “Why, is such a collectively innovative society destroying the environment as we create products and food that are making us sick?” When I saw how cultures living more natural lifestyles closer to nature experienced less disease this really struck a chord with me. The self-inflicted speed, stress, and toxins of the modern world are making us sick and unhappy. My clients would put in a few hours a week in at the gym. But then there’s 168 hours total in a week. What were they doing the rest of the time? What environments were they in? How come people living more naturally can look and be healthier without even going to the gym? These questions left me feeling like there had to be a more efficient way of healthy living.
I had the thought of designing healthy habitats for people in the modern world. What if I could design movement friendly, healthy environments right where people spend most of their time. They could get and stay healthy just by living more actively and naturally throughout their day.
This was the launching point for me into healthy environments. Once I met Lauren, and we dug deeper into it, we found so much more about hidden factors harming our health. We moved in to our current home about 2-3 years ago and have been working on it since. We found our local hazardous material center and detoxed our home from unnecessary chemicals. Still there’s the challenge of what the hazmat center does with the chemicals?
During renovations we found asbestos tiles but didn’t know it at the time. Sometimes it feels very overwhelming to consider all the details of how to do things healthy on a budget while trying to be sustainable too.
When we moved into our current home, Lauren designated a room for yoga and meditation. This has helped us stay active and centered. By being strategic with what we buy, we’ve reduced the waste in our home significantly - only about 1 bag of trash every 2-4 weeks. We’ve also decluttered nearly all of our unwanted stuff. We’ve got things placed around the house that remind us of the life we want to live and create together and Lauren’s got a great simple, natural, and bright vibe going throughout the whole house.
So now, together Lauren and I and all of us in the collective are on the journey to healthy homes and a healthy planet. We recognize that this is an evolving process of being and becoming. We are learning more everyday and teaching others as we go. We are moving toward our inner truth and a holistic way of seeing the world. We are choosing to live by our inner wisdom and let go of the things that don’t serve us. Join us on this journey, it’s one fueled by love and self-exploration.
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