Session 9: Your Human Habitat

Have you ever been to the zoo and seen an elephant sway side to side? Or perhaps you’ve watched a tiger pace back and forth along a well-worn track within its’ enclosure? In modern day zoos, humans do their best to make the animals there comfortable. Zoo animals typically live longer than their counterparts in the wild, so that is good evidence that the zoo habitat, with its consistent food supply, lack of predators, and free (for the animals) healthcare is a pretty great place to live. However, they have their limitations as well. Bigger animals especially, like elephants and tigers, suffer the limits of how large or complex their enclosures can be. In the wild, these animals typically walk several miles a day as they search for food and water. Their survival depends on their travelling across vast expanses of land during their lifetimes, and in the intelligence of evolution, their bodies are designed to be sustained by this movement. In the zoo, this is just not possible, but they still feel the need for movement in their bones. The elephants sway and the tigers pace as a way to alleviate this movement-hunger and regulate an understimulated nervous system.

Our modern circumstances are noticeably similar to zoo animals’. Many of us have a consistent food supply, a lack of predators, an amazing array of healthcare services, and a controlled environment in which to live. Compared with our wild human ancestors, who had to deal with periods of drought, seasonal availability of food, and very different healthcare possibilities, we might say we’ve got a good thing going. At the same time, our physiology evolved in such a way that experiencing fluxes of famine and abundance, the challenge of living outdoors in whatever weather there was, the hardship of needing to physically move our bodies in order to accomplish literally everything, paradoxically creates inputs to our systems that are vitally important to our wellbeing. Our zoo habitat may be safe, warm, and cozy, but it lacks some fundamental pieces of what made us who we are as a species in the first place. Like the elephants and tigers, we can feel that movement-hunger, even if we don’t always recognize it for what it is.

What Is Your Habitat?

Our habitat is the place we live. For a lot of us, this means your home, your workplace, and any other place you spend a significant amount of time. It’s the place you eat most of your meals, sleep at night, spend time with family, and pay your bills. It is the epicenter of the most mundane accomplishments as well as the most amazing dreams.

Where you live significantly impacts how you live. During the course of the Soma series, you have perhaps identified some new intentions on how you’d like to live. You might have grown your awareness of some ways your body has been expressing its own movement-hunger. Maybe you’ve also determined some facets of yourself you’d like to nourish, like your creativity, your calm, or your connection to community. How does your habitat support you in who you are becoming? 

What’s at the Center of Your Home?

Take a look around your home or office and ask yourself, which features are most prominent? How do the most prominent features of your home serve you? 

In Western homes, the most prominent feature tends to be places to sit. There are chairs of various sizes and shapes, sofas and loveseats, and more stools and seats by tables, counters, and desks. As discussed in Session 1, sitting on and around furniture limits the way we use our bodies, which can limit the way we are capable of moving over time. Let’s say, for instance, you decided you’d like to spend less time sitting on your couch and more time on the floor. However, your couch is positioned in a really convenient spot and is clearly the center of focus in your living room. Opting to sit on the floor can be hard when the space is designed with a different intention in mind.

In this case, you may choose to move your couch to a different part of your house that’s a little less appealing. Perhaps you can clear the floor space where you most likely want to be and make it more enticing. Add some floor cushions and a comfy rug for stretching and rolling around on. In the places you are likely to spend the most time, can you bring in the elements of your home that you most want to utilize? Maybe you want to do more art or grow your awareness of the natural world around you. You can keep some art supplies or binoculars for peaking at birds out the window in your home’s central hangout spot. How can you support your goals while meeting yourself where you’re at (literally)?

Make It Compelling

Sometimes putting the things that we want to prioritize right in front of our faces is still not enough. The fruit bowl may be positioned in the center of the counter, but we walk around it to the pantry for a different snack. Sometimes, we need to fashion ways of “forcing” ourselves to behave differently. What can you do to make meeting your goal non-optional?

For example, if you’d like to get more movement in your hips and shoulders, you can purposefully store frequently-used items on lower and higher shelves. This compels you to squat down or reach high every time you want your favorite coffee mug or mixing bowl. Much of the time, we automatically organize our habitats to position often-used items conveniently at waist-height. But if you strategically place things just out of easy reach, you’re going to have to move more to get them.

Similarly, you can choose to keep items in places that require you to move your body to a different part of the house every time you want to use them. Perhaps you have to climb those stairs each time you want to grab a pen or a phone charger. In my house, we use a computer monitor as our TV. If we want to watch something, we have to pick up the monitor from the cabinet where we store it and move it to the coffee table in the living room. Those extra steps before we can click the ‘on’ button keeps the TV from being the focus of our living space.

Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

What features of your home do you love most and why? Which parts of your body, mind, and/or spirit are nourished by each feature?

What features of your home affect you negatively? What can you change about these aspects?

What preconceptions do you have about how a home should look? What features does a living room need if it’s a living room? What are bedrooms supposed to look like? (Once, I had just moved into a new space that was larger than I was used to, and my new landlord declared I was going to need more furniture in order to fill the space. Why? Does empty space mean a home is less occupied?)

Workspace Habitat

These days, no matter who you are, you’ve got work to do at a desk, most likely on a computer. We’ve all got emails to write, bills to pay, shopping to do, and various administrative tasks in addition to whatever you may do for your job. The time we’re spending at our desks and on screens is shaping all of us. Let’s consider how to help make this work habitat more supportive for our longevity.

It’s not sitting that is so unhealthy for us, but rather sitting still that causes so many health problems. I recommend having at least three options for deskwork: floor sitting, table height, and standing. If you have an adjustable-height table, these three options may be found all in one place. If you’re working at home, you might alternate between the kitchen counter, dining room table, and living room floor. Within each of these options, there are various positions you can be in, and each puts different loads onto your joints and works different muscles as you hold yourself up.

Because screen work can draw our focus in so much that we stop being aware of our bodies, we want to make it easy to get a little movement here and there. Keep movement tools handy, such a balance board to stand and wobble on or a big exercise ball to sit and wiggle on. You can put reminders—on your screen, desk, or nearby doorframe—to remember to reach your arms high and wide every so often. There are so many ways we can move at any given point, but having a physical, visible reminder helps our brains remember to do them.

Have a window nearby so you can relax your eyes and connect, even a tiny bit, with the world around you. Our eyes tense up in order to focus on near-work like a computer screen or book. Sustaining this tension for long periods of time is hard on the eyes and brain. Imagine picking up a book and flexing your bicep to hold it in front of you. Keep the book in exactly the same place and don’t move your arm for an hour. The way your bicep would feel after all that is the way your eye muscles feel when you’ve been looking at a screen without any breaks. Now imagine you pick up the book and then put it down again, then you pick it up again and put it down again. Do that for an hour.  There’s a huge difference in how that would work your arm, and the same goes for your eyes when you take a moment to look out a window every so often. Eye breaks don’t need to be long, but they do need to be frequent enough to keep the muscles from getting stuck in a tensed position. The general recommendation is to look at least 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds at least every 20 minutes.

Being At Home Outdoors

A lot of our body/mind/spirit needs must be obtained by going outside our dwellings. Natural light and sun exposure, clean air, biophony (sounds of nature), irregular landscapes, phytochemicals and other plant and animal interactions, the space and intrinsic motivation to move one’s body—the benefits of being outdoors are too numerous to expand upon in this article. If you’ve been wondering how to improve your wellness or life in general, a good place to start is to spend more time outside, particularly in nature.

How can you set up your habitat to include more nature and outdoors time?

You can bring elements of nature into your home. Keep some potted plants. Open your windows. Use furniture and home products made from natural materials. Decorate your home with responsibly-gathered items from nature like pinecones, flowers, seashells, rocks, and feathers.

You can set up outdoor areas you are more likely to frequent, such as patios, decks, and garden spaces. If there’s something that keeps you from making the journey through your front door, identify what it is and what you can do about it. If it’s always raining, can you make an area that’s outside but covered? If it’s always buggy, can you put a screen around your porch? Or grow plants that naturally deter bugs? If it’s always too cold, can you get used to putting on warmer layers? Or set up a fire pit?

You can set up your life to compel you to go outside. Tend a garden—this is a project that can require minimal attention or all the attention you have, it’s really up to you. People who keep animals are more likely to go outside frequently. Dogs need to go for walks, but humans need walks just as much. Adopting a dog is a commitment to yourself to go outside and move your own body every single day. If you’re not able to take on the responsibility of a dog, you might consider getting chickens. Chickens need less daily care than a dog, but they create the necessity to head outdoors every so often to check on them and collect eggs.

Living in Community

A habitat involves more than just a physical location. It is made up of one’s living environment—one’s community. A zoo that houses an elephant along with a group of its fellows provides a much different habitat for that individual than a zoo that keeps a solitary elephant. Elephants are highly social, like humans.

Who are the people you see every day—those who live in your home and at your workplace? Who are your neighbors—the people, plants, and animals that reside alongside you? These individuals are part of your habitat. While living beings exist in many ways out of our control, you can choose how you relate to others. As you are discovering different ways of moving within the world and showing up for yourself, how does this change how you want to exist within your community?

Notice how the presence of other people in your life affects your actions, such as your willingness to try new things. You family and friends may be used to you behaving a certain way, or doing a certain routine. When you choose to do things differently, does this create friction in your household? Do they care or notice at all? Or, are they inspired to make changes themselves? You can’t choose how other people behave. You can only be true to yourself and hope that people can see that authenticity in you.

If you want to change your habitat, you may have to do it in collaboration with others. Consider the needs of your household. Do you want to get rid of your couch, but your partner wants to keep it? Do you want to plant a garden, but your housemates want the lawn space? Some things take patience and compromise. You may have been making self-discoveries, but your housemates have not been on this journey with you.

On the other hand, it can be easier and more rewarding to make changes as a team. Create opportunities for others to join you. For your partner who wants to keep the couch, you might invite them to sit on some floor cushions with you and play a boardgame. For your lawn-loving housemates, are there some plants you can all get excited about picking out and growing, as well as some movement-based games you can play together on the remaining lawn?

We are like zoo animals in the way that our modern habitats remove us from many of the wild forces that originally shaped our species. In many ways, we are also our own zookeepers. Although much about the particular enclosure you might find yourself in has been shaped by cultural history and your own life circumstances, you also have a lot of say (and therefore, responsibility). Culture may have determined that you have a refrigerator rather than the skills to acquire food seasonally from the wild, but still, you get to choose what you put in your fridge. Your current habitat may have removed the necessity of walking to obtain water or firewood, but you can choose to make walking a part of your life. If you find yourself swaying like an elephant, or pacing like a tiger, you can seek the support and resources to help you shift toward balance again and again. Our habitat is not something we build only once but an environment we cultivate continually.