How Can We Become More Fully Human in an Age of Increasing Digital Abstraction?

Through a disciplined, embodied practice.

The people who have a long-term, embodied practice transform not only their health, but also the way they inhabit the world.

An Analog PresenceAn Analog Presence is about practice, and how we can all benefit from a real practice. It contains many insights into the depths of long-term, disciplined practice and why it is essential for and in our times. Although it’s written specifically about the practice of Mǐn Jíe qi gong and stone needle therapy, because that’s what I know best, its lessons and insights can easily be applied to any kind of practice.…A Humanizing ForceThere is a critical relationship between the times we’re living in and having a practice; something that we work on each and every day, day by day, year by year, decade by decade. This practice, whatever it may be, helps us to develop an analog presence that creates a critical balance to the digital presence that now influences nearly every aspect of our lives.

This analog presence is a humanizing force, something that restores and regenerates our life, relationships, community and environment.

Is it easy, fun, cheap and instant? No, it is not. It actually requires a certain level of heroism to achieve it, and it’s difficult, non-glamorous, often but not always expensive, and takes a long time to achieve.

The effort is worth it; through practice, we can build an analog presence in the everyday world and in our everyday lives, one that is based on integrity and genuine transformation, one that we can trust, one that is so primal that it goes beyond all of our highly engineered and victimized notions of culture, race, community, nation and planet. There’s a lot to discover in the journey of practice.

In doing so, we’re keeping something alive, starting with ourselves, and we’re watching the effects of that on the worlds around us and within us each and every day…