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Summary
On episode 561 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins, co-founders of Well for Culture who grew up engaged with their Indigenous cultures in North Dakota and Arizona, to discuss their book The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well.
Chelsey and Thosh lay out a wellness model built from teachings passed down by elders across Native communities: food, movement, sleep, land, community, ceremony, and sacred space, all visually connected rather than treated as a checklist of separate pillars.
The conversation digs into why movement is not the same thing as fitness, the seven traditional actions for restoring a healthy relationship with food, and why sacred space now has to include how you manage your phone and your social media feed, not just how you keep your home.
Links
- https://wellforculture.com
- https://www.instagram.com/chelsea.moves
- https://www.instagram.com/thosh.collins
Key Takeaways
- The seven circles are interconnected, not a simple checklist. Food, movement, sleep, land, community, ceremony, and sacred space all affect each other; a bad food day tends to wreck your sleep, which then affects everything else, which is why Chelsey and Thosh built the model as a visually connected wheel instead of a list of pillars.
- Movement is not the same thing as fitness. Thosh deliberately uses the word “movement” because gym culture and the word “fitness” can be intimidating. Movement covers everything from swift walking and dancing to farming, canoeing, and combat sports, and the goal is finding a modality that keeps you coming back.
- Wellness runs on a cycle: learn, engage, optimize. You start by learning a new practice from knowledge keepers or research, move into a trial phase of engaging and testing what works, and eventually optimize once you have found what serves you, at which point the learning simply continues at a deeper level.
- Seven basic movement patterns give a simple template for any workout. Squat, hip hinge, lunge, push, pull, rotate, and gait (walking or running) cover the full range of functional movement and offer a clear structure for people who feel overwhelmed by conflicting workout advice on social media.
- There are seven traditional actions for restoring your relationship with food. Hunt, fish, forage, and grow represent how food was traditionally acquired; give thanks acknowledges the spiritual side of eating; and shopping smart at the grocery store and learning to cook are the modern additions for people without access to land.
- Sacred space now includes your digital life, not just your home. Just as a cluttered home or a garage gym needs to be swept and organized before it supports you, your relationship with social media needs boundaries: limiting time on it, curating what you follow, and periodically stepping away entirely.
- Wellness looks different at every stage of life, and that is normal. Chelsey and Thosh describe a man who is thriving in movement and sleep at 40 but neglecting his connection to land, and who by the time he is an elder has become an expert in growing food. The circles are meant to shift priorities over time, not stay fixed.
- Thosh Collins's and Chelsey Luger's strategies to get and stay well: Thosh says to start with a clear vision of who you want to be, find the specific life ways that move you toward that vision through the learn-engage-optimize cycle, and make sure whatever you adopt is sustainable for the long run, not a short-term fix. Chelsey says to build a wellness practice that is authentic to you rather than copying what is trendy, to build and be part of a genuine support system and community, and to keep expanding your thinking beyond mainstream wellness advice.
“It really is medicine. Movement is medicine.”
Chelsey Luger
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