Inversions: The Body Holds the Key to Everything
Signal 063. Health opens the indicators by flipping the whole frame. The institutions act on you. Your health is you, reading back. A symptom is a clear report about something that needs to change.
The Body Holds The Key
You actually know, right?
You know exactly what to do and when.
You know how to do it and what is actually coming next, don’t you?
It’s there, but it is often obscured by a lot of noise.
I bet if you are like me, there is a lot of confusion surrounding all that knowing. Intuition requires training, and just like anything else, it is a muscle and a ‘thing’ you need to teach yourself how to use.
Okay, let’s try this together. Here is the full guide, or you can do the abbreviated version below. Keep reading to understand why.
Close your eyes.
Breathe in and out slowly.
Do it a few more times in order to release and calm your mind. The goal is to help you ground yourself and find your center, but do not quiet what you hear.
If noise comes in, let it come in. Don’t quiet this inner voice... LISTEN in, and keep it moving through. The goal is to catch what you hear and then release it. Don’t resist the hearing, which is the whole point of this exercise.
Listen in to your inner voice…
We have been forced to learn how to QUIET the mind in everything we do, including the western version of meditation practice. The practice today (and ideally moving forward) is to acutely listen to your inner voice and embrace it. I call it catch and release.
Move with it and be in flow… allowing the resisting to dissipate.
The goal of this exercise is to learn to listen to what our minds and bodies are trying to tell us. We know something we can’t put our finger on. We are just not stopping long enough to listen.
The body is the only honest witness in most rooms these days. Look around us. Epidemics of obesity and cancer, loneliness, and the highest suicide rates for kids under 21 of all time… at the same time, the planet is having its own meltdown with raging heat, fires, and resources unfolding at rapid rates. More on this soon.
Let’s face it, everything going on is interconnected. We are just missing the point that is right in front of us.
THE BODY registers what the mind explains away, based on conditioning and reprogramming we have been taught from childhood into adulthood. It signals misalignment long before we get on board. Every label we hand to a feeling, a behavior, or a diagnosis is an interpretation laid over a signal based on a system that wants to control, confuse, obscure, and remove the reality of what’s going on. The signal is true, but then society gets its teeth into it and tells us we are “crazy” and need more research, or that we need consensus before we can get it out into the world.
And then we do those things, and the information is still buried for half a century until enough people start working on it.
“The body cannot lie. It will always tell the truth.” —Gabor Maté
The Body is the Witness
I have wanted to share my point of view on health for 32 years, and after submitting an article to the New York Times this week on what pharma did to me (if they don’t take it I will publish on Friday), I finally feel ready to put out to the world that I have something to say, something I learned through my intuition because I just didn’t “feel right.” It’s time to amplify these messages. Please help me circulate and get them out.
Many of you in my community feel that you are also holding onto things that you don’t understand where they came from or how they landed, but I can tell you that it is a signal and a key piece of your road map. I am here to listen. I want to. But more importantly, I have many great resources to share.
I am taking a certificate course in Health and Wellness at Harvard Medical School to understand their unique perspective on the industry, and I am pleasantly surprised. The amount of research done in the last few years to connect these dots through science is significant. Intuition is now being used to guide dis-ease. Your nervous system matters… sleep is essential. Spirit matters, along with purpose and feeling ‘good about your life.’ It is finally being recognized by Medical Schools, and it is incredible. I want to cry writing it out loud because we have lost so much time and so many loved ones because of the Western system, and now, finally, we have a way to create the full loop. It’s beautiful. The body-mind link, the role of the nervous system, the cost of unprocessed emotion—all of it is moving from the margins into the curriculum.
None of it is new, of course. We just now have the science to prove it. My personal favorite human and mindset is Slow Medicine, created by Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in the twelfth century and wrote about plants, music, and the body as a single system. Classical Chinese Medicine has been organized around the energy centers and qi for 2500 years. In India, I spent a whole day with an Ayurvedic doctor whose approach was thoughtful and connected—alignment, herbs, energy, and conversation, all in service of finding the root cause. Indigenous medicine traditions across every continent have worked with cycles, patterns and nature since the beginning of time. In Guatemala, it was the teas and the lunar cycle that taught my family, and we have stuck with it.
What is new is the convergence of all of this. Science has caught up, and we can now measure vagal tone, cortisol patterns, inflammatory markers, the gut-brain axis, and epigenetic inheritance. AI can hold and cross-reference the literature at a scale no single practitioner could. And intuition, the most key instrument of all, is being restored as the starting point. It is no longer “you are your own advocate” alone, it is shifting to “you have the key to unlock anything you are dealing with.”
We are so lucky. This is a rare moment when the trifecta presents itself: science, lineage, and intuition, all rooted in AI.
How does it work?
I want to start by distilling how the mind-body connect and how emotions form. As a reminder, I am a Tantra practitioner, and there is only one word in Sanskrit for heart-mind: Citta (चित्त), and the same thing that happens with mind-body becomes one: Manaḥśarīra (मनःशरीर). There is no separation between individual and nature, and it is a non-duality practice. We don’t see the poles; we see the equilibrium of all things. Because we hold oneness with nature, we need to look at how systems manifest.
For most people, we experience emotions only after we have ignored the strain on our systems, and we never think this is the issue. For me, I can’t see the individual issue anymore. I see the whole system breakdown. The breakdown doesn’t start immediately of course; it starts after repeated stress and pain works through the system. And then it will manifest into an emotion. Feelings are very important. When you use the word “I feel…” you are already well on your way. Most of us intellectualize it away because we have been programmed to feel. When we say, “I think…” that means we are just not in our bodies.
After you are in it for a while, the body will send a signal. This could be the day off or years later. In this case, we are going to distill Anxiety and use Alcohol as our cover-up. So the first signal is anxiety rising as physiology… and you don’t necessarily know why it’s there yet. Again, you don’t actually know what you have covered up. The override of the signal is the reach for the drink, the nervous system depressant that mutes the warning. The cost will become what the body absorbs in exchange: liver under load, sleep architecture off the mark, hormonal cascade disrupted, and your body then rebounds at 3 am with a cortisol spike that wakes you up.
This is the body’s correction of the suppression, sharper than the original signal because it now carries both the unmetabolized anxiety and the chemical aftermath. The return places you back at the top of the loop, except the baseline has dropped: the anxiety you wake into is harder than the one you drank to quiet. I had a psychologist once recommend that I take another drink at 3am to put me back to sleep. This is the direct example of what the system sets us up to do: suppress it, blur the lines, make ourselves feel better in the moment.
Stage 5 is not the end; it is stage 1 again. So we stay in the continuous loop of the ouroborus chasing our tail until we consume it again. Let me be the first to share, you do not have to do that if you learn how to catch and release.
THE POINT: This visual shows it is not rocket science; you have seen this before, which is why I opted for a simple one to help you lean into something comfortable. The cover-up does not interrupt the original state—it amplifies it on the return trip, so we are actually just making the problem worse. And we know it. We know it in both our conscious and subconscious minds. We know it in our bodies. And we have all the research now to know it intellectually. But our incredible minds just keep sticking with the program of the train we’ve been on. The brain is captivated by what it learned for the last 4 decades of our lives, and it needs to rewire to reprogram.
That is why these patterns intensify rather than resolve, and why willpower at any single stage rarely changes the cycle. The intervention has to happen at the body signal, before the override fires… ideally, before the anxiety starts.
And that way, we break the chain of anxiety.
The second you do, however, you can see how quickly it figures itself out. In three steps, you are through the learning, and then you can dig into the work to unpack and rebuild your life from a state of integrity. Now, it’s painful in its own way… and it is definitely an experience that we don’t often get the privilege to learn from, but the second we finally make the shift, the other side is like a beacon of light pouring into our hearts.
The Proposed New Model, Distilled
I built three tables to show you how this breaks down, and it is illuminating in a way I didn’t imagine. Actually, I have been framing most of this in many different ways in my writing without putting together the comprehensive picture. It started with Anxiety for me and walking through the road map of my own spiritual journey and then it unfolded from there.
The first list names the feelings and labels we have been handed: Anxiety, fear, guilt, heartbreak, depression, etc. In each row, the second column is the public story. The third column is what the body is actually saying and what I have learned through my experience of witnessing and moving through each of these stages. Anxiety was my opener when I was willing to look at it, but then heartbreak opened me to the widest point I could be, and suddenly I was filled with information I didn’t know before. Additionally, this relates to etymology and how we connect to language that was mistranslated.
The second table showcases the diagnoses we pathologize in our sickcare system. Pancreatic cancer, lupus, IBS, Lyme, thyroid disease, Alzheimer’s, leukemia. What we call disease is the same conversation scaled up and buried deep into tissue, until we suffocate our ability to release. We are gripping onto these disorders from the inside out. They are dis-ease.
The last table shows how we address the discomfort caused by our diseases. The tools we reach for to drown out what the first two are saying. Alcohol, sugar, scrolling, shopping, work, busyness, romantic love as rescue, spirituality as bypass, etc. Some of the covers are obvious, but I think some of them we have just decided need to be there because it’s more comfortable by society standards. These ones exhaust me because they are so widely accepted, like taking Advil for a headache. And they wear you down within hours, making you suffer in silence without understanding what’s happening.
“Illnesses develop as a consequence of behavioral patterns and
attitudes that we do not realize are biologically toxic until they have
already become so.” —Caroline Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit
Labels
The media plays a HUGE role in shaping information because the goal is actually to create more capital flow. When we use ‘feelings’ and sell on ‘emotion,’ we can sell 10x more. Capitalism, by my definition (after working in finance for nearly 2 decades), is making people purchase something they don’t need.
I am going to begin with the feelings or emotions, outline the label's name and the public-facing story we are hearing, and then distill what the body is actually saying. It is much easier to know the specifics than the catch-all phrase of changing your nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic, which is all over the internet these days.
Safety and security deserve their own paper, so those will be coming up soon. But just to quickly dispel those two: the only safety you will ever have is in yourself, the only security is in your sovereignty. When you focus on external factors like relationships, job security, and 401(k)’s, you are not getting the benefit of the connection point that you need to release and expand outward. At some point, this will put you in a position to learn it. Saying it in absolute terms is a bit scary for me to say, but I want to make sure everyone benefits from the experiences I have been through. I believe that’s my purpose.
The Bridge, Tactics & Cover Up
It’s never an intentional cover-up, but we start using tactics that feel like a bridge until we have time and space to deal with an emotion, and then it becomes a dis-ease. We eventually land ourselves in a place where we no longer remember why we started using the tactic in the first place. It’s actually an interesting experience to pay attention.
What you will see below are common tactics we use every single day that ‘shroud’ and numb our emotions and eventually become a disease. This is how I think about it visually. I have been spinning on the Whole Human for about 10 years, so this is finally all coming together for me, how I want to think about the release. I see the three circles in the background receding, so that the Whole Healthy Human can Rise to center stage.
