The Post-Mindfulness Era: From Attention to Belonging

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We’ve learned to slow down, to breathe, to notice our thoughts. But awareness alone can become another private performance if it never leaves the mat or the meditation cushion.

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Lifestyle Ecology™—rooted in what I call Existential Ecology—begins where mindfulness leaves off.
It treats health not as a set of metrics to optimize, but as a living system: a web of habits, relationships, values, orientations, and environments. It’s not about perfect calm; it’s about participating more honestly in a world that is already breathing with us.

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Lifestyle Ecology™ is the applied framework; Existential Ecology is the lens that helps us interpret why our lives feel the way they do.
Existential Ecology asks deeper questions: not just How do I feel better? but What am I responsible to? and What is the shape of a meaningful life? Lifestyle Ecology™ is how those questions take form in daily practice—through walking, cooking, resting, relating, and telling the truth about the stories we live inside.

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If you’re here, you may not be looking for a program so much as a way of living that feels more coherent and alive. That’s the work I care about.

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Why I Do This Work
A note from Michael Franc, founder of Daily Three Miles and My Tiny Kitchen

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I’ve spent most of my life thinking about how we live—and how we might live better. My background is in philosophy and psychology, but my real education came through walking, through cooking, and through listening to people try to make sense of their lives. Over time, I came to see that most of us aren’t broken. We’re just disconnected—from our bodies, from nature, from each other, and from the quiet intelligence of our own experience.

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Daily Three Miles and My Tiny Kitchen are simply the ways I practice reconnection in public. Walking every day. Cooking real food. Asking honest questions about what we consume—physically, emotionally, spiritually. There is no single formula. But there is a path, and it doesn’t begin with shame or self-improvement. It begins with honesty.

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If you’re trying to live with more intention, to break a cycle, or simply to feel more at home in your own skin—me too. Let’s walk through that together.