When you know how you function, you know how to heal.

It's time for a renewal of the healing arts.

Friendly heads up:

In the coming weeks I will be offering some live workshops and classes on “Laws of Human Nature” leading up to the opening of the School for Living Science. These will include classes about degeneration and regeneration, pain and its transformation, and an introduction to the Kinetix methodology.

CLICK HERE to get on the waitlist if you want a guaranteed invite to the classes, and/or if you would like to know when we open for enrollment.

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Dear friends,

Sometimes a compliment is offered that contains - along with the praise - a lamentation.

“I’m going to say something, and it’s not meant to be flattering.”

A painful sigh punctuates the pause.

“You are the best practitioner I know. By far.
But it shouldn’t be this way.”

🔸 🔹 🔸 🔹 🔸 🔹🔸

When it comes to the healing arts, we are utterly LOST.

A close friend of mine recently sought help from a practitioner in the healing arts that came highly recommended, hoping this time would be different. He was looking for someone with a well rounded understanding of the human being, including the mind body connection, patterns of dissociation and the nervous system, and knowledge of physical symptoms that might be associated with unhealed traumas.

He had stopped trying to get help a while back after many failed attempts over the years that left him feeling cynical about the skill level of most practitioners, and frustrated about the money lost.

I’m guessing you can relate.

Over the years, I have received thousands of emails from frustrated people who have been trying to get good help for their chronic pain, trauma and autoimmune conditions.

People who, like myself and many of my friends, have spent thousands of dollars on practitioners who were not able to identify root cause(s) or guide them adeptly through their health crisis into a state of permanent transformation.

Admittedly, this is a tall order.

But personally, I believe we should set really high standards for ourselves - as practitioners, as teachers, as students and as clients.

My friend completed two (not inexpensive) sessions with this practitioner before calling me to vent his frustrations. On a positive note, he said it was the best experience he’d ever had working with a professional. But practically speaking, he did not feel that he got the help he needed.

His justifiable complaints:

✦ He was not put through any kind of diagnostics process.
✦ The information he had provided in his intake form was never discussed.
✦ There was no logical progression from session one to session two.
✦ Instead of solutions tailored to a root cause analysis specific to him and his body, he was given generic protocols and practices, like breathing techniques.

This is, unfortunately, the norm - at the best of times.

Many of us have had very bad experiences with practitioners, which usually comes down to how they treat us. Consequently, many of us stick with sub-par clinicians for years, simply because we like them!

Tragically…

Most practitioners in the healing arts and wellness space - from psychotherapists and body workers to physical therapists and functional medicine doctors - do not have a well thought out diagnostics process that provides the data necessary to make root cause theories that can then be tested in a logical manner. And they don’t address the Whole person - body, soul and spirit.

Instead, they apply the same generic protocols to every client hoping to eliminate their symptoms.

Part of the problem is that most practitioners are generalists who have little specialized knowledge (about pain, for example, or the psyche/soul, or the nervous system), while the specialists know very little about the whole.

We have allowed ourselves to be sorted like new students in the Harry Potter saga arriving at Hogwartz, not realizing how detrimental it is to isolate ourselves and offer services to clients based on group identity (titles and certifications such as chiropractor or psychotherapist).

On the client side, our expectations for getting real help from practitioners in any field is so abysmally low that we feel ecstatic when someone can help us manage our symptoms and not make them worse!

We seem to have given up on the idea that the truth is knowable.

The only way out of this debacle is to start with an honest acknowledgement of exactly where we are and how we got here.

Then, we must stop participating in anything less than our desired reality.

And if it doesn’t exist, then we must build it.

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How did we get here?

When my friend told me:

”You’re the best practitioner I know. By far.”

…we lamented the current reality of the healing arts.

I did not feel happy hearing his compliment.
I felt deeply sad.

I want better for him.

I want better for you.

I want better for myself.

I long to experience what I offer my own clients, but I have yet to find such a practitioner.

I’m far from perfect and I often make mistakes. But I’m committed to the pursuit of truth, no matter where it leads.

When I opened my Kinetix practice in 2011, I knew I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to give people solid answers during the very first session, so I prioritized data gathering over pain relief. Incidentally, my clients got nearly “miraculous” results in addition to answers (usually during the very first session). Today, I would bet anything that this was, at least in part, due to the fact that I was approaching their pain differently than anyone they’d ever worked with. It wasn’t so much what I was doing, as how I was doing it.

I wanted to provide my clients with real diagnostics that were reliable and logical, which would help us measure progress from the very first session onward. Toward this mission I developed my mapping methodology.

Additionally, I wanted to be honest with my clients, which meant telling every single person who walked in my door:

“I have no idea why you’re in pain, but I’m confident we can figure this out together.”

I wanted to learn from the bodies of my clients, rather than from books or courses or human teachers. Because, while I knew almost nothing back then about why pain happens or how we function, there were a few things that I felt 1,000% certain about:

✦ Bodies are wise.
✦ Bodies are working on our behalf 24/7.
✦ Bodies will use every available resource to heal.
✦ Bodies are the key to self knowledge.
✦ Bodies hold the answers and the solutions to every single symptom.
✦ There are physical-spiritual laws underpinning reality - and we can know them.

From this perspective, I oriented to symptoms as helpful messengers from the divine intelligence permeating all of Life. Our mission was to intercept the messages and interpret them accurately, in order to meet the needs being expressed.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment together:

Pretend you have a houseplant (maybe, like me, you don’t have to pretend).

One day it becomes clear: your plant is NOT doing well. You don’t have to be a plant doctor to know this. 🌱

If you are a beginner plant parent, you probably google the plants’ symptoms. But let’s pretend that you are not allowed to use the internet, or ask a friend. All you are allowed to do is observe the plant. Imagine you are the plant. Talk to the plant. And conduct experiments.

So you really look at the plant.

You take in its appearance and the quality of its every cell.

What is it telling you?

▶ Does it need water?
▶ Or is it getting too much?
▶ Has the soil turned into dusty dirt that doesn’t retain water?
▶ Is it getting too much direct sunlight?
▶ Not enough?
▶ Is it root bound and needing more space?

When you give a plant water that needs water, you can literally watch its leaves spring happily back to life!

You are no different.

During my private practice years I watched thousands of human beings spring happily back to life when their needs were met! And it happened instantaneously.

Enrolling my clients in this philosophy of symptoms as important messengers has been surprisingly easy. It’s almost like they were waiting for a permission slip they didn’t know they needed.

Have you noticed how radical it is to befriend our bodies and treat them as if they are trustworthy allies?

That’s how tragically off course we are!

If you are a plant parent, you don’t blame your plants for their sudden decline. You investigate. You open your mind to what is needed. And you’re willing to learn from each separate plant - via trial and error - about that plant’s needs. You trust the plant to tell you when you get it right (or wrong). Which means that YOU ARE A SCIENTIST.

It’s actually not that hard.

Yet we don’t do this for ourselves, or each other!

In today’s world, this is a “wild west” approach to addressing pain and disease in the offices of “professionals.”

Unfortunately, practitioners in the holistic and “alternative” healing spaces fall into the same exact trap that modern medicine created, of scapegoating the body and succumbing to the temptation of offering clients symptom-suppressing protocols instead of root cause analysis and solutions that correlate with the wisdom of that ONE specific human being.

This article is MEANT to be critical - but not specifically of practitioners.

Because we are all complicit in the perpetuation of this sad situation.

(Which also means we can be part of the solution and build something better).

During the last 150 years, modern society has inculcated a pernicious normalization of pain avoidance and quick fixes.

Worse still was the introduction of a dangerous self fulfilling prophecy: we adopted a story that pain, illness and aging are abnormal; and that the human body - with its random and cruel transmission of selective genes and disturbingly unintelligible symptoms - is an enemy of human flourishing.

Due to the above, we have become a culture of people who feel helpless and powerless against the nature of reality. We feel trapped inside our own bodies.

Demonizing everything our bodies do that we don’t like, we’ve pathologized ourselves so thoroughly that there are now over 10,000 classified and clinically defined diseases (with hundreds more being added every year), along with 3,500 government approved tests that a doctor might use to label the human mind and/or body as defective, dysfunctional or incurably sick.

Falsely expecting that our bodies are likely to betray us at any given moment, delivering us into the hands of some unlucky fate or early demise, we have led ourselves straight into the unhappy confirmation of that fearful prophecy.

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To create real change, we must learn to think with reality.

There is no escaping what is real and true.

What is, is.

But that hasn’t stopped us from trying.

Much of what we do to the body today in the name of “healthcare” will one day be looked back upon as childlike at best, and barbaric at worst.

We do really silly and horrendous things out of ignorance, discomfort and arrogance.

But we only commit these sins because of a false assumption that our bodies are stupid and we can outsmart them.

▶ We try to cure plantar fascitiis and joint pain with poisonous steroid injections and thickly cushioned shoes.
▶ When we get sick, we take drugs of all kinds that interfere with the body’s attempts to heal.
▶ We inject healthy babies with formaldehyde, monkey kidney cells, and known neurotoxins like mercury and aluminum to “vaccinate” them against potential future disease.
▶ Doctors convince us to cut out body parts like tonsils and gallbladders because they blame the organ for our experience of dis-ease, not realizing - even though they are doctors! - that tonsils and gallbladders are responsible for removing toxins from the body, and if they are swollen and painful it might be wise to look for the poison instead of cutting out the body part trying to cure us.

We spray poison on our food, put poison on our bodies, clean our homes with poisons and spray it in the skies to block the sun…

And then we wonder why we’re sick!

A recent client of mine told me she’s been wearing a waist belt to stabilize her SI joint for the past 20 years, upon the recommendation of her chiropractor.

As I told my client:

“If we needed waist belts to create spinal stability, then we would have come out of the womb wearing them.”

Friends, we are not thinking with reality!

Fear of pain has blinded us to the truth: we have become our own worst enemy.

As people who are hurting - physically, emotionally, socially, economically, spiritually - we need to take responsibility for our pain; and our healing. We need to take real and full ownership of ourselves. We must get to know ourselves as physical and spiritual beings.

Self knowledge is the only lasting cure.

When we know how we function, we know how to heal.

Ignorant and afraid, we are easily manipulated by external powers who profit from our reflexive desire to escape discomfort.

When we bury our heads in the sand, refuse to get to know ourselves, and worship at the altar of Relief by Any Means, then we will always feel helpless and powerless when it comes to the very natural and normal processes of pain, illness and aging.

Pain and illness are not abnormal.

Pain and illness are as natural for human beings as the leaves falling off trees in fall.

Imagine that you’d never seen a tree lose its leaves before. You wouldn’t know what to expect in spring. You wouldn’t know that this process was necessary for the tree to renew its life forces and grow fresh new leaves in a few months. Maybe it’s even a flowering tree, like this gorgeous crab apple outside my house (it’s a wintry spring day here in Colorado!)

If you didn’t understand that trees, like all living phenomena on earth, go through cycles of degeneration and regeneration, then you might assume the tree was sick or dying when you witnessed its leaves turning color and falling off. Perhaps you would even feel justified in cutting it down mid winter, believing you were doing it a favor.

Unlike trees, we don’t yet possess the natural fortitude and wisdom needed to accept temporary but necessary defeats that help us grow and blossom.

Without winter, there is no spring.

Without degeneration there can be no regeneration.

Without pain there can be no wisdom (or freedom).

Without illness we would be frail creatures lacking physical and spiritual resilience.

Did you know that trees need strong winds to grow strong roots?

You do, too.

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Build new roots with me.

I’ve been working hard behind the scenes for the past few months to build out the School for Living Science.

My vision is big and bold, but I can’t do this alone.

I envision a world full of practitioners who have an ever growing knowledge of the whole human organism - specialized knowledge, and knowledge of how the parts interact with and impact the whole.

I’m not the teacher of this wisdom. The body is.

And I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I believe our bodies do.

Think of me as a guide, and a teacher of living science.

I envision nurse practitioners, psychotherapists, physios, body workers and healers of all kinds emerging from the School to either work in private practice, or - in collaboration with others - build the new healing centers, elder care facilities and clinics that so many of us wish existed today.

I envision individuals who are ready to take full ownership of their bodies and lives emerging from the curriculum feeling empowered to turn towards pain and illness as the portal through which wisdom, healing and regeneration are nurtured in their own bodies and lives.

If you long for it and it doesn’t exist, then you are being called to create it.

Do you long to have access to practitioners who can confidently and competently offer you diagnostics and root cause theories?

Are you a practitioner longing to offer your clients proven processes that provide the data needed to form intelligent theories that inform tactical solutions?

Let’s build new systems of education and vocation together. Let’s build a healing arts system that is based in sourcing authority from within rather than permission based systems that are driven by state and corporate power. We need systems that honor the human body, and the human being, as innately intelligent and capable. Systems rooted in collaboration and resource sharing.

Personally, I do not believe that ancient healing wisdom from cultures past is sufficient to meet the needs of our time. I believe we need NEW modes of thinking, NEW methodologies and NEW scientific processes that take into consideration the evolving needs of the human being.

Because we are NOT the same humans that we were 150 years ago; let alone 2,000.

Join with me and be the new healing impulse the world needs.

Much can be gained from simply stopping the suppression of symptoms. From there, we can get to work learning directly from the body.

CLICK HERE to get on the waitlist.

Instead of numbing pain and eradicating illness, let’s prioritize becoming wise as the body and the Creator who made us.

Let’s learn how to treat individual human beings rather than labels or symptoms.

With just this one switch, we will really begin to get somewhere.