Writer and hospice counselor Stephen Levine describes in Planet Steward the anxious energy of urban life as a force conspiring to keep us out of tune with other more healthful resonances to our detriment. "Large cities produce an unnatural modulation inharmonic with the human body, tuned through evolution to the planet, which makes it difficult to stay centered. If the rhythm of the individual becomes that of the dynamo of the city, he will literally go out of his mind. . . . So it becomes necessary to rebalance."
— Richard Mahler, Stephen Levine, Stillness by Richard Mahler