During countless hours as a child and teen spent sketching and painting farm animals, trees and landscapes from life en plein air, there was always something about the spirit or movement captured in an image which made it captivating rather than boring, which set the good sketches apart from the forgettable ones. Those years were spent learning to observe and replicate the forms, movements and essences of natural life in my 2D work and sculpture. Perhaps the substitution of that spirit for conceptualization and modernism when I entered a fine arts college influenced me to lose interest in it as an educational pursuit and leave the arts for pre-med. There I hoped my art would become working on patients with my hands. Osteopathy has fulfilled that inspiration beyond anything I imagined.

Laying stomach-down in the pine needles studying fox tracks with my classmates in those years, we learned at Tracker school not only the physical characteristics of a track but also felt a change in the ground which identified the next track, even with our eyes closed and hands several inches off the ground. We spent days and weeks and months in the forest practicing awareness, building our ability to feel, hear, see and communicate with the dynamic rhythms of the landscape, the animals, the various plants and trees, the movements of other humans. We learned to identify the disruptions caused by past and present destructive or negatively intentioned human interventions. We learned hands on healing, primitive crafting and survival skills all in a wilderness setting. I went there every chance I could to take classes and volunteer for five years, ending with an internship right before I started medical school. Those years at Tom Brown’s Tracker school grew into a priceless experiential skillset that formed a foundation for my osteopathic training and remains a rooted deep love of nature in my life. Always at Tracker School, a morning “sit spot” was a foundational daily practice. At sunrise, sit on the ground, preferably with your back against a tree, and face east. It’s a time of thanksgiving, setting intentions for the day, observing the natural rhythms on the landscape and merging with that harmony. At the time I felt the beauty and sacredness of that practice, but I had no idea what I would learn later in life about the biophysics of how critical this daily discipline is for human health!

One of Dr. A.T. Still’s most famous quotations is: “Nature is to be trusted to the end.” I’ll leave out the boring details of osteopathic medical school and residency, where this perspective was largely absent, to bring you the pieces that are important to today’s topic. Biodynamic osteopathy embodies the application of that quote in therapeutics. The osteopath learns through 10 plus years of study and practice post-residency training to follow the Health withing the patient’s dynamic relationship with nature toward a therapeutic transformation. This process is 100% rooted in physiology, anatomy, and embryology, only rather than the practitioner seeing him or herself as a mechanic changing structure, the practitioner treats in service to the patient by following a 3rd principle or Source, Health in relationship to the anatomy and physiology. Any structural adjustment comes from that whole. Studying Biodynamics, it dawned on me that a “patient” cannot be treated as an isolated individual or unit as we are taught to do in school, because every patient is in reality a dynamic relationship with his or her environment. This is manifested in simple examples like breath exchanging CO2 we make for O2 plants make, the free electrons we get from the earth when we walk barefoot in the grass, and the light wavelengths we get from the sun at different times of day that signal the metabolic, hormonal, and immune dynamics of our circadian rhythm. The light that our cells make when all these signals are harmonized.

Back to Sunrise now: sunrise light on the eyes and skin signals the morning cortisol spike, and it is critical for our health that we get that dose of blue light along with the red light from the sun in the morning, also that we don’t get blue light later in the day from indoor lighting, computer, phone, TV screens etc. During the day we need UVA and red light the sun provides for mitochondrial health and for the production of melatonin and of melanin, which is critical for energy efficiency in the nervous system. In other words, our environment is our pharmacy, and it can either poison and kill us or heal us.

The dynamic of ourselves with our environment also manifests in the various ionic exchange rhythms in the body such as blood flow, lymphatic flow, nervous system functions, mitochondrial energy production, etc which all create a magnetic field interface with our environment which can be either damaging or supportive to our healthy physiology. The influence can go in either direction – the wrong light and fields in the human’s environment can make them sick, likewise injuries, traumas, surgeries etc can manifest in the human’s internal light and magnetics being compromised – which cannot self-correct without the right environment. With training, an osteopath can feel these various rates of “breathing” movement both in the natural world around them and in a patient on the treatment table. Not only are they palpable, but they also become agents of therapeutic transformation. Each element in this complex whole has it’s own unique movements, colors, textures, etc.

I’m writing this post not to go into details about biophysics or biodynamic osteopathy – there are great educators out there illuminating these topics – but to lay a foundation for organizing an approach to treatment when a patient comes for help with a disease process. And so that the patient understands that approach and expects to embark on a journey of change and transformation in their lives as part of treating a disease. The foundation of the house must be correcting the places where the patient’s life has gone off the rails of the environment nature designed their biology to dovetail into, like a perfectly synced gear system. Without that foundation treatments can help but are band-aids and temporary fixes. In this sense I am a team-member with every one of my patients. Because their success depends both on my diagnostic and treatment skill and on their implementation of the changes to their lives which would facilitate maintaining Health. The goal of treatment is to have a healthy patient living a life harmonized with Nature to the extent that no doctor is needed barring a new injury. To do that the environment needs to be corrected while the patient undergoes osteopathic work, medicinal treatments, regenerative injections, etc.. I hope to inspire you to be excited about transforming your life! Small changes added over time while we implement supportive treatments can go a long way, so don’t worry about being overwhelmed.

Every Day is a new sunrise, a new opportunity for transformation of our lives, even if by only one degree, into a more aligned, intelligent, inspired, and happy existence.

“The most that any physician can do in treating disease is render operative the natural forces within the patient’s body.” -A.T. Still