You describe this book as an invitation to slow down and rediscover our authentic essence. For someone trapped in the frantic pace of daily life, what is the first step to shifting our relationship with time?
Anthropology has taught me that every culture constructs its own idea of time. Our civilization measures time in terms of productivity, speed, and efficiency. But by observing traditional communities and studying long-lived people, I discovered that another experience of time exists: the experience of presence.
I believe that today our greatest poverty is not a lack of time, but the loss of our capacity to inhabit it.
Therefore, the first step does not consist in organizing our days better, but in rediscovering an inner rhythm. The body possesses an ancient wisdom that continues to speak to us through breath, sleep, emotions, beauty, and even stillness. However, to listen to it, we must have the courage to remove ourselves, at least for a few moments every day, from the world.
The spiritual experiences that have accompanied my life have taught me that stillness is not empty: it is a space of relationship. It is in stillness that I received some of the most important insights of my research and understood how true transformation does not occur through effort, but through the willingness to listen.
When we change our relationship with time, our relationship with life changes too. We no longer live in the urgency of getting somewhere, but in the joy of being fully present. I believe this is one of the deepest forms of healing and one of the foundations of longevity.
Over the course of four books, your focus has moved from managing physical alignment on the mat to nurturing emotional healing and soul surrender. How has your personal definition of wellness changed through this journey?
My books tell a single story seen from different perspectives. I have never been interested in wellness as a mere collection of techniques, but rather as a possibility to understand the human being in their totality.
With time, I realized that we cannot speak about health without speaking about meaning. Human beings do not get sick only in their bodies. They suffer when they lose the meaning of their existence, when they interrupt the dialogue with their interiority, or when they forget that they belong to something larger.
My anthropological lens helped me recognize that every culture builds rituals to safeguard this link with the transcendent. My research on longevity showed me that the people who live the longest often maintain a living relationship with mystery, gratitude, community, and beauty.
Because of this, today I define wellness as a state of communion. Communion between body and spirit, between the individual and nature, and between scientific knowledge and contemplative experience.
Health, for me, does not consist in controlling every aspect of life, but in learning to trust its deep intelligence. It is this trust that makes healing possible and continues to guide all of my work.