The Seven Pillars of Life

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The seven circles are your mental, physical, emotional and spiritual state of being. The more that you can combine them, the easier it is to live a balanced life according to Native American teachings. These different circles overlap so it's not like you've got to find time for seven different circles. There's a lot of time where one activity done in a certain way may actually hit multiple of these circles for you. For instance, if we were to get out on the land seasonally and we worked to forage or hunt or fish something with family members, there's a lot going on right there because we are facilitating this connection to the land.

Chelsey Luger is a writer and wellness advocate originally from North Dakota, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She got her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College, concentrating on comparative histories of global Indigenous cultures, and later earned an M.S. in Digital Media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is the co-founder of Well For Culture. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Huffington Post, Yes! Magazine, and other outlets.

Thosh Collins is a photographer, board member for the Native Wellness Institute, and co-founder of Well For Culture. He is On Akimel O'odham, Seneca-Cayuga, and Osage, born and raised on the Salt River Reservation. He serves on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Land Board, and remains politically and culturally active within his community.

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Chelsea Luger & Thosh Collins and I Discuss How to Find Wellness in Indigenous Wisdom and ...

Their book, The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well
Beginning everything with gratitude is a key to our wellness journey
Accepting the challenges and finding balance
Chelsea's story of the dust storm and teaching resilience
Focusing on solution based thinking for indigenous cultures to heal and thrive
Expanding the common narrative of indigenous cultures to show resilience rather than brokenness
Understanding the harm of cultural appropriation
Keeping their cultural and spiritual practices private and sacred
The seven circles include our connections to food, sleep, movement, ceremony, sacred space, community, and land.
How the symbol of the medicine wheel represents interconnectedness of mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional
Finding ways to integrate the circles of wellness
Connecting to land is about remembering that we are not separate from nature
Noticing and acknowledging the natural elements of this earth
Adapting a subsistence world view
How connecting emotion to day to day rituals creates the element of ceremony