Gather Courage, Friend — Radiant Health Is Your Reward

If you're on a journey to reclaim your vitality and resilience, you're gonna need some moxie. Here's how to ... get some.

Call on your courage, and it will come to you.

On Day 2 of our Healthy Deviant Adventure, we gather our courage. Not willpower. Not detox supplies. Not biometric data. But courage.

Why courage, you ask? Because the process of getting healthy in an unhealthy society involves bravely deviating from all sorts of accepted social norms.

It involves veering outside the dominant-culture defaults. It involves seeing, choosing, and behaving differently that most of the people around you.

And when you do that, as noted in my “Get Ready for Weirdness” post, things tend to get weird pretty quickly.

Get Ready for Weirdness

As you cease fitting in with the less-healthy hoards, and start going your own health-reclaiming way, it’s easy to lose faith that what you are doing is good and right — even if it might sometimes be seen as odd by others.

So yes, you will need courage. And you will need to replenish that courage on the regular.

As you may have already noticed, navigating our Unhealthy Default Reality as a health-seeking person can be both an invigorating AND a draining, discouraging experience.

Yesterday, I heard from one of my Healthy Deviant U members — a public school teacher — about just such an experience.

She had felt a bit mortified, she said, when a fellow teacher walked in on her as she was taking her afternoon Ultradian Rhythm Break — lying down on a yoga mat in a darkened back room.

Super healthy thing to do. Something I had encouraged her to do. Something science supports. And something her colleague clearly saw as a very strange thing to do.

“Are you okay?” is not a phrase most of us want to hear during the course of our workday.

But lying down on a yoga mat in a dark room during work hours — as smart, sane, and vitality replenishing as that might be — will probably put you at risk of getting that question (among others).

Doing healthy but irregular stuff like that can start up rumor mills that take even more courage and energy to ignore.

In the Unhealthy Default Reality, taking care of yourself in even the most basic ways can get you ridiculed, reprimanded, unfriended, or worse.

So a big part of Healthy Deviance is learning how to overcome our fear of being seen as weird, of not fitting in, of inviting other people’s judgment and disapproval or threats of reprisal and just … doing it anyway.

If you are interested in just doing your own healthy thing anyway (hurrah!), here’s a little encouragement: the complete video for Day 2 of my very first (live, 2020 pandemic-era) Healthy Deviant Adventure program.