This is the first in a series of posts documenting a project I’m calling Redemptive Practices for a Happy Body. It grew out of my work here at Happy Body Berlin, but it goes somewhere different — into the thinking underneath the practice. If you’re here for training advice, that’s still coming. But if you’ve ever wondered why I coach the way I do, this is where that answer lives.
Redemptive Practices: A Starting Point
The Premise I’m Working From
I started collecting certificates trying to solve a problem.
Jerzy Gregorek gave me the problem. His system — The Happy Body — offers something rare in fitness: a coherent standard. Not a feeling, not a vibe, not a before-and-after photo. A set of measurable criteria for what a well-functioning human body looks like. Strength, flexibility, leanness, speed — integrated, not traded off against each other. Jerzy’s own achievement was the standard. The target was a person, not a number.
I noticed early that this was, in one sense, arbitrary. Why Jerzy? Why these numbers? But I made a conscious decision to bracket that question — the same way you bracket the question of what came before the Big Bang. The origin point may be unexplained, but if everything downstream is coherent and generative, the starting point earns its place provisionally. Jerzy’s standard was arbitrary the way all genuine standards are arbitrary: someone had to go first and become the measure. I accepted that and kept working.
So I went looking for tools to help people meet that standard. And somewhere in that search — specifically in the Functional Range Systems Mastering the System seminar — I ran into a wall.
The Crack in the Foundation
FRS introduced me to the work of Jeremy England, a physicist whose book Every Life Is On Fire makes a striking claim: life isn’t a statistical accident fighting against entropy. It’s what matter does when driven by an energy source. Dissipating energy efficiently is thermodynamically favored. Life isn’t entropy’s opponent — it’s entropy’s most sophisticated collaborator.1
For someone formed in a purely biblically-based idealist worldview, this should have been threatening. It wasn’t. It was liberating — but slowly, and only through sustained meditation on what it actually meant.
England didn’t give me a reason to abandon faith. He gave me a mechanism I could teach. For the first time I had a pathway through materialism rather than around it. I didn’t have to reject the science. I found that the science, followed far enough, opens toward something the purely materialist interpretation cannot close off.
The groaning of creation in Romans 8 — which I had always read as poetry or prophecy — began to look like physics. Creation straining toward something. Not randomly. Not without structure. Driven, ordered, dissipating toward greater and greater complexity. The Logos not opposed to entropy but working through it. Thermodynamics as one of the languages God is speaking into the physical world.
That meditation — sustained over years, never quite resolved — is what became Redemptive Practices.
What the Collision Was Actually About
The tension wasn’t really about the body. It was about what the body is — what kind of thing it is, what it’s doing here, what it’s capable of becoming.
Mainstream fitness operates, usually without knowing it, on a purely mechanistic premise: the body is a system of levers, metabolic pathways, and hormonal feedback loops. Optimize the inputs, manage the outputs. This isn’t wrong exactly — it’s just catastrophically incomplete. It describes the instrument without asking what the instrument is for.
Dallas Willard put it precisely: the body is the primary instrument of the soul.2 Not a vehicle the soul rides in. Not a problem the soul manages. An instrument — meaning its formation is spiritual formation, and vice versa. You cannot separate the disciplines of the body from the transformation of the person. They are the same project.
When I started reading Romans 8 slowly — not devotionally but forensically — I found the same claim made at cosmic scale. Paul writes about the redemption of the body as the final destination of the whole Christian hope. Not escape from the body. Not the soul’s graduation beyond physical existence. The body itself, redeemed. Creation groaning toward something it was always meant to become.
England’s thermodynamics and Paul’s eschatology were describing the same directional pressure from different altitudes.
The Premise I’m Working From Now
Here is where my thinking currently stands.
Reality is not fundamentally material. It is fundamentally relational — and the ground of that relationality is what the Christian tradition calls the Trinity.
Jonathan Edwards described it this way: the Father is the prime unoriginated existence, the Son is God’s own self-knowledge, the Holy Spirit is the delight that flows between them — so fully and really that the delight itself stands forth as a distinct person.3 Reality, on this account, isn’t a static field. It’s a dynamic event of self-knowledge and love. Not a thing. A process. A communion.
The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, coming from analytic philosophy and a career in physics and AI, arrives at a structurally similar place from secular premises: consciousness is the ground of reality, not its product. What we call matter is what universal consciousness looks like from the inside when it localizes into a finite perspective. Individual minds are real and genuinely distinct — but not separate from the whole, any more than a whirlpool is separate from the river.4
And the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, in The Matter with Things, adds the piece that makes the whole synthesis honest: he explains why we don’t see this.5 The left hemisphere — the part that maps, categorizes, and manipulates — has effectively usurped Western consciousness and convinced us that its abstraction is the territory. We built a civilization on half our cognitive capacity and called it rationality. The result looks exactly like what you’d expect: mechanistic, fragmented, optimizable, and strangely joyless.
England fits here precisely. His dissipative adaptation is what the Logos looks like operating within the left hemisphere’s domain — in the language of physics, in the currency of thermodynamics. It’s not the whole picture. But it’s a real signal from inside the materialist framework that the framework isn’t self-contained.
What This Means for the Work
If the body is the primary instrument of the soul, and the soul is a localized expression of a conscious ground whose nature is Trinitarian communion, then the formation of the body is never merely physical. Every practice — strength, mobility, breath, food, sleep, stillness — is either moving toward or away from what we were designed to become.
Redemption, in Romans 8, is not rescue from the body. It is the body finally becoming what it always was in the mind of God — integrated, whole, participating consciously in the life from which it comes.
England showed me the mechanism. Edwards showed me the ground. Willard showed me the practice. McGilchrist showed me why we lost the thread.
That is the premise I’m working from.
The project I’m calling Redemptive Practices for a Happy Body is my attempt to build a framework — practical, embodied, intellectually honest — for what formation looks like when you take that premise seriously.
I don’t have it fully worked out. But I’m done waiting for a finished system before saying what I actually believe.
This is what I believe. Let’s see where it holds and where it breaks.
Notes
1 England’s core theory, known as dissipative adaptation, holds that matter exposed to an external energy source will tend to restructure itself to dissipate energy more efficiently over time — and that this thermodynamic pressure is a plausible physical basis for the emergence of life-like behavior. See: England, J. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. Journal of Chemical Physics, 139(12). ↩
2 Willard develops this most fully in The Spirit of the Disciplines (Harper & Row, 1988) and Renovation of the Heart (NavPress, 2002). His key phrase: “Grace is not opposed to effort, but to earning.” ↩
3 The quoted passage comes from Edwards’s Treatise on Grace and related Miscellanies. The fullest treatment of his Trinitarian theology is available in the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online (Yale University Press critical edition). For secondary reading, see Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Eerdmans, 2002). ↩
4 Kastrup’s most rigorous presentation is The Idea of the World (Iff Books, 2019). For an accessible entry point, see his essays at Scientific American. ↩
5 McGilchrist’s neurological foundation is laid in The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press, 2009); the full metaphysical case is made in The Matter with Things (Perspectiva Press, 2021). His Substack offers ongoing essays for readers wanting to engage incrementally. ↩