Lifestyle according to Huang Di Nei Jing

Dao is untranslatable but it is best rendered as the ‘way’ or ‘way of life’. To live in harmony with the Dao was regarded as essential if the human being was to realise her full potential during her time on Earth.

Qi Bo continued:

“There was temperance in eating and drinking. Their hours of rising and retiring were regular and not disorderly and wild. By these means the ancients kept their bodies united with their souls, so as to fulfil their allotted span completely, measuring unto a hundred years before they passed away. Nowadays people are not like this; they use wine as beverage and they adopt recklessness as usual behaviour. They enter the chamber of love in an intoxicated condition; their passions exhaust their vital forces … they do not know how to find contentment within themselves; they are not skilled in the control of their spirits … For these reasons they reach only one half of the hundred years and then they degenerate.”

What is lifestyle?

There are many talks about lifestyle today, it is becoming a fashion word. It may have different meanings for different people. But what is lifestyle anyway?

A definition from Wikipedia states that:

“The term lifestyle was originally coined by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929. The current broader sense of the word dates from 1961.

In sociology, a lifestyle is the way a person lives. A lifestyle is a characteristic bundle of behaviors that makes sense to both others and oneself in a given time and place, including social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. The behaviors and practices within lifestyles are a mixture of habits, conventional ways of doing things, and reasoned actions. A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual’s attitudes, values or worldview. Therefore, a lifestyle is a means of forging a sense of self and to create cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity. Not all aspects of a lifestyle are entirely voluntaristic. Surrounding social and technical systems can constrain the lifestyle choices available to the individual and the symbols she/he is able to project to others and the self.

The lines between personal identity and the everyday doings that signal a particular lifestyle become blurred in modern society. For example, “green lifestyle” means holding beliefs and engaging in activities that consume fewer resources and produce less harmful waste (i.e. a smaller carbon footprint), and deriving a sense of self from holding these beliefs and engaging in these activities. Some commentators argue that, in Modernity, the cornerstone of lifestyle construction is consumption behavior, which offers the possibility to create and further individualize the self with different products or services that signal different ways of life.”

So lifestyle is not only a bundle of behaviours, but also a reflection of our belief systems, i.e., our concept about who we are, what is our relationship with our society and with our environment (nature), etc. It’s our belief systems which shape our behaviour. Lifestyle influences every aspect of our life, includeing our health, our well-being, our social relationship etc.

About this blog

This blog is about lifestyle and well-being. It’s about how lifestyle influences our well-being and how we can achive physical, emotional and spiritual well-being by keeping an eye on our lifestyle. In short, it’s about the art of living and living as an art.