I didn’t have the most stable upbringing as a child, but I did have the extraordinary fortune of growing up in Chicago in the 90’s, meaning I witnessed my hometown team, the greatest basketball team of all time, win championship after championship in one of the most captivating moments in sports history.

When the Bulls won their first title in 1991, I was just 5 years old, the same age that children start to create the capacity to understand “self” in the context of narrative. They learn to create story. And during the most challenging years of my childhood, the Chicago Bulls were the light at the center of my story.

I’ve always been short, though, so it wasn’t basketball I dreamt of. It was the intensity of emotion that was created within me as I watched the rhythmic dance that occurred on the court every night of the playoffs between Phil Jackson and the starting lineup. Some might dismiss this as purely athletic prowess, but for me it was something far more metaphysical — it felt magical and limitless. At the time I was entering school, when the limits of society were first being imposed and drilled into every part of my being, I suffered from a deep longing to break free, to fly like Mike.

Ever since then, I’ve set out to better understand the seemingly endless potential of the human body. Initially, it was personal: I wanted, like Jordan, to become an elite athlete (I was a swimmer growing up and through college), and I also wanted to overcome the chronic sickness I was born with. But as I reached and surpassed some of these goals, my obsession turned outward, as I realized my own power is stronger when shared in this dance with others.

Outside of sports, the physical body is overlooked. While Americans are told our issues are “all in our head” and encouraged to talk out our problems through therapy, we continue to become sicker each day, forcing more and more of us to become dependent on a system that has no answer for the chronic conditions we suffer from. Without the safety and health of the physical vessel in which our emotions and spirit live, we feel constantly disconnected, struggling to survive.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. By breaking out of the chronic state of survival and reclaiming our physical body, we slowly free ourselves from constant struggle and begin to tap into our fullest potential. In doing so, we find a space where limits dissolve and even gravity feels negotiable. Eventually, we begin to take flight

• Your best guide, teacher, and coach is you. No one else understands your body as well as you — not me, not your doctor, partner, or teacher, not even your mother. Most of what you need is already inside you. No one is going to save you but yourself.
  

• As integral as science is for our health, at the core of the human body is something deeper than biology or physics, something that can only be discovered through a broader understanding of all aspects of human life, including art, relationships, history, farming practices, mythology, philosophy, and the spirit.
  

• We are not powerless machines. The body, every single body, is a powerful work of art.
  

• The body is always recalibrating, searching for balance. As the environment changes, so too do our needs. There is no purity when it comes to health.
  

• There is no single diet or protocol, no drug or supplement, no quick solution to the physical and emotional struggles we face as humans.

• Being willing to slow down is crucial. Everything around us pushes us beyond what our bodies can handle. Slow is steady, and steady is fast.