Our guiding principles include the power and necessity of connectivity.
(Re)connect with the past, with the earth, with each other. Technology has given us a great gift of virtual connectivity but we must not let the virtual supplant the real. Among our guiding principles is the desire to connect with intent and purpose. We hope to improve lives as they are lived in the physical spaces we share.
We connect here such that we may deepen our connections out there.
All humans have value: differences in strengths, weaknesses, needs, and gifts do not moderate our value.
We all have essential needs that unite us yet we also have purpose and potential well beyond our immediate grasp and thus should not be reduced to categorical standards.
In our desire to bring valuable insight to our readership, our focus is on what unites us in the human experience, the goodness and generative qualities that bind us together in nature and in spirit.
We acknowledge our kindred natures but celebrate what is unique. We promote equality without sameness such that our individuality is honored but also reverent to that which is greater.
Our guiding principles foster the power and necessity of community.
We desire to grow organically by providing value to those who choose to share their time with us.
We are a living body of knowledge and experience. Within our community you can take what you need and give what you like. But we hold onto the reality that without you Healthy Hildegard is just words.
We have expertise to share but are not experts on living life.
We do not have all of the answers, so instead we will help you know your questions and then live those questions with grace and strength.
Our guiding principles promote learning as we grow.
We will strive to provide you with the insight, knowledge, and tools for you to engage upon the path of your choosing, but we leave perfection to the divine.
Healthy Hildegard will grow as we do; through learning, sharing, and practicing we will climb and bend toward the light that fills our hearts.
Our guiding principles Gratitude is our reward.
We know there are many resources out there and that your time is sacred. We hope you choose to make us a part of your regular reading. Above all else we are grateful for being a part of something greater than ourselves. Thank you for being here.
We believe parsimony is important for long-term transformative change.
There is no panacea, no pill or practice that will yield the bounty of a healthy life. Wholesale reinvention, trademarked lifestyle plans, and programmatic prescriptions for life are not what guide us and are thus not what we desire to provide to you.
There are countless ideologies, diets, books, and schemes that promise remarkable change. We believe there are valuable aspects to many of these things but their extrinsic focus, complexity, obscurity, and rigidity too often result in abandonment and disappointment.
With that in mind, when selecting from the multitude of options within the multidisciplinary tenets of our foundation, we tend to embrace and advocate for the most simple, elegant solutions from the past and present.
This doesn’t always mean the easiest or that we trivialize or seek shortcuts, but that the best solutions are often the most simple – sometimes for no other reason than the increased probability of them being adopted into daily life.
Some of the most profound benefits of a healthy life are realized in the pursuit of such.
We believe that what works is what works best for YOU.
Healthy is not a static state to be achieved or some population metric; it is a pursuit, the cumulative acts of being what you desire to become. Health is a fleeting thing. Our bodies are dynamic, changing, aging, and sometimes we just break down.
We choose to embrace this dynamic view of wellness, to honor the interconnection of spirit mind body, to adhere to a holistic approach whenever possible, and to respect the unique situations of our readership when contemplating our goals and expectations of health and wellness.
We want you to be healthy, fulfilled, and empowered but we know that it is up to you to determine what those things really mean and what works best for you. We hope you will find Healthy Hildegard to be valuable in this regard.
Our guiding principles include the teachings of our namesake without proselytizing.
We are passionate about who Hildegard of Bingen was. We hope you find learn to appreciate her as we do, but our community here is greater than one woman – even if she was remarkable in so many different ways.
We hold her contributions to living well through spirituality, nature, herbal medicine, art, music, and discipline in high regard. After all, we did borrow her name.
Yet we do not prescribe her teachings as the only way – even the best way to live. She is, however, a worthy figure to guide us, to ground us, and to inspire us along our shared paths of living well.
We believe there is great value in the ways of the past but do not believe this requires abandoning or ignoring the role of modern science, medicine, and technology in improving our lives.
We believe there is much about the past that is instructive in modern healthy living. There is also much that is best left in the past.
We also believe that modern advancements in medicine, health, and lifestyle present some incredible resources for improving our lives, but also bring with them trade-offs, consequences, and detriments that need to be continually evaluated for their real benefits.
Lives have improved greatly in many ways over the eons, yet we believe that too much was abandoned along the way. Our relationship with nature, between spirit mind body, and with each other, has suffered, as have the ways of sharing health and happiness, and growing and healing as a community.
We want to be a part of changing this for our communities and ourselves.
Traditional medicine and modern medicine are not opposites.
Modernity or technologies are not the enemy. We can still live modern lives of relative ease while incorporating simple, natural practices derived from ancient techniques and natural substances without demonizing modern medicine or romanticizing past practices.
We can extract from the past and leverage the advances of the present to discover ways of living, products, and visibility into our health and wellness that could not exist at any other time in history. This is exciting!
Our guiding principles include faith.
We believe in what we are doing. We invite you to believe as well. More importantly, we hope you will first have faith in yourself.
We are curious explorers.
Healthy Hildegard was born from our individual and collective desire to find different, better ways to live. We have many questions about how to do this.
We revel in the questions because asking each other -‐ and ourselves, is how we explore, how we learn and grow. Our curiosity will lead us down many different paths, some better than others. But we hold this curiosity dear because it keeps us young and because we enjoy the discoveries that an open heart and open mind invite into our lives.
So when did natural become ‘alternative’? Lets explore together.