The Paradigm Shift: A Return to Wholeness

Below, I dive into some of the nuance of the framework surrounding my approach to health, fitness, wellbeing, strength, etc. It gets a little technical at times, and this is because it has to! Human experience is a quantum phenomenon, after all, so it's difficult to summarize any of this in simple statements. Nonetheless, here is a basic overview of some of the key ideas I describe below:

• "mind" and "body" are essentially unified; there is no basic split between them. They are merely abstract terms that describe a multidimensional cognitive system/set of energetic processes that we call "the human" or "human life/human being"
• health and wellness is a condition of holistic alignment and integration of our many energy systems and processes; disease (literally dis-ease, lack of ease) is a condition of functional disruption of the patterns of energy flow that constitute us as living beings
• living systems are characteristically self-organizing: we possess an innate ability to align and regulate our energies into a coherent whole, and this is necessary to restore and fortify a condition of health
• Holos Therapeutics specializes in reconnecting you with, and resourcing, the innate, self-organizing, self-healing intelligence that is unique to living systems, thereby resolving symptoms by addressing root causes and not just temporary "fixes"

The approach I take to everything I offer is simple: health literally means wholeness. The word "health" derives from the Old English term hælþ, which means "wholeness; being whole, sound or well."

Health and wellness involve more than merely the absence of disease. Health refers to an inclusive and sustainable condition of strength, vitality, resilience, depth, and adaptability. To achieve this, we must actively cultivate these qualities through intelligent, dynamic, and intentional effort on multiple levels of our being. That's why, through the three paths of Holos Therapeutics, I engage the whole person and not just an artificially isolated aspect of your experience.

From Mind-Body Dualism to Multidimensional Cognitive Holism

In my doctoral dissertation, I wrote about a comprehensive paradigm shift in the life and mind sciences. At the core of this shift is an evolution beyond the obsolete "mind-body dualism," which assumes that human nature is split between two distinct levels of being: non-mental, physical body and non-physical, mental mind. In fact, this dualistic perspective stems from a basic logical error made by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides 2,500 years ago! It's well overdue time that we update our theories and science.

The best available scientific evidence -- not to mention millennia of direct, practical, embodied wisdom traditions -- affirms that there is no such basic duality of mind-body, mental-physical, consciousness-matter. Rather, everything in life are patterned flows of energy. This isn't new age woo-woo fringe stuff, this is our most advanced science. Consider this statement by Martin Picard, PhD, world-leading researcher on neurological mitochondria and professor at Columbia University:

"So, what are you? Are you a molecular machine? Or are you an energetic process? And I think the truest answer...the answer is that you're both. But if you ask, 'what is most fundamental?' What is most fundamental is not your physical existence, it is actually you as an energetic process, as a flow of energy."

In fact, researchers have been moving toward this perspective for decades. Twenty years ago, leading cognitive scientists Michel Bitbol and Pier Luigi Luisi stated in a peer-reviewed paper that "a full-blown metabolism is tantamount to cognition." ("Autopoiesis With or Without Cognition: Defining Life at Its Edge," Journal of the Royal Society Interface 1, no. 1 [2004], 99).

And even 20 years before that, Chilean biologists/neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela explained in their groundbreaking book Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, that "living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system" (1980, p. 13).

What does all this mean, practically?

This means that everything we experience, and every aspect of our being, is an energetic process within a multidimensional cognitive system. This includes what is simplistically called "physical" and "mental." Each of these terms refers, in actuality, to a set of complex energy systems that are in no way fundamentally separate from any of the rest. Cognition is not just "mental" or "psychological." Cognition is:

• movement
• sensation
• perception
• memory
• metabolism
• conceptual thinking
• imagination
• creativity
• feeling/emotion
• communication

Practically, this means that any aspect of health or wellness we engage is fundamentally and ultimately a matter of working with flowing patterns of energy, which we most directly experience through our tangible embodiment. Grief is a pattern of complex energies such as sadness, disbelief, denial, regret, fear, hope, love, pain, and other unnamable experiences. ADHD is a pattern of energies including scattered attention, anxiety, quick movements, high/active energy, doubt, hesitation, excitement, repeating thoughts, forgetfulness, etc. The motivation and desire (or lack thereof) to workout and develop fitness is a pattern of energies involving self-image, hopes, fears, frustrations, passions, conceptual thoughts, memories, sensations and anticipations. 

In these and all other cases, the most direct and accessible way to facilitate or alter any given energetic process or experience is to work with "the body" - our embodied mind. 

Health and Dis-ease: Disruption of Holistic, Functional Integration

When we are healthy, all these energetic processes align and synthesize in a holistic pattern: our whole self. A condition of disease obtains when this systemic integration is disrupted; we no longer function as a unified whole, and thus we are literally dis-eased: we experience a lack of ease in the form of unpleasant, painful, or functionally disruptive symptoms.

To restore health, therefore, requires re-establishing a holistic, functional integration of our many, diverse energy systems. Many other factors are important, of course: proper diet/nutrition, avoidance of toxic substances and environmental harms, etc. So, yes, sometimes medications or other medical treatments can help. But all such clinical treatments will be limited insofar as one or more of our energy systems are out of sync with the rest. The evidence for this is everywhere: Americans today take vastly more prescription drugs than any society in history, we spend over $4 trillion annually on healthcare, and yet we are one of the most chronically ill societies ever. What gives?

Well, drugs don't create holistic integration (they target very specific biological processes, manipulating these processes in simple, localized ways). Moreover, in the absence of such holistic integration, our innate self-healing abilities are suppressed. We possess the adaptive intelligence of literally billions of years of evolutionary development, but modern life has cut us off from most of that intelligence.

The Machine Mistake: What Modern Medicine Got Terribly Wrong

Despite amazing and extensive advances in medical technologies over the past century, many people in modern industrial societies are still profoundly and chronically ill. There are many factors in this, of course, but what explains this weird fact that whole new magnitudes of technology and technical knowledge (compared to previous eras of human existence) have not resulted in widespread health? Shouldn't we have been able to fix everyone up by now?

Well, this is precisely one of the problems: we are trying to fix people as if they are machines with broken or faulty parts, or computers with malfunctioning programming. These metaphors of human life function are fundamentally false, however. The body is not a machine, and the mind is not a computer. Living beings are something totally unique.

Take a car, for instance. A car is made of a bunch of physical parts that are designed to work together in one way, and one way only. Unless someone goes in and crosses the wires or tubes, applying the brake pedal will never turn on the windshield wipers, and the engine will never burn wiper fluid as fuel. When the steering wheel is turned to the left, the wheels turn to the left. Its function is linear, and deterministic.

Living systems are fundamentally different. As I've discussed above, a living system is a complex of patterns of energy flow. When these patterns are properly aligned and organized, we experience health and wellbeing. But how do our energies become so aligned and organized?

The mistake of modern medicine (and modern science generally) was to view life and reality as a vast machine, where the whole - and each part within the whole - is made up of smaller, component parts. It was thought that the functioning of the whole was simply a linear, aggregative matter of all the parts fitting together and working correctly, like a car or other mechanical system. So, if something wasn't working right, it could be fixed by finding the malfunctioning part and either repairing it or replacing it.

Turns out, this is emphatically not how living systems work. Among countless other details, there are two key phenomena to know here, which go hand-in-hand with each other. First, the functioning of living systems cannot be understood through a reductionistic approach, breaking down a higher-order operation into smaller parts or processes. As stated by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their paradigm-shifting book Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living,

"Under no circumstances is a biological phenomenon defined by the properties of its component elements."

Second, the organization of the incalculably complex energy patterns that make us who and what we are is not linear or deterministic, like a machine. Rather, living systems are spontaneously emergent: we are self-organizing. This means that, as Richard Campbell explains in his book The Metaphysics of Emergence,

"no internal or external agent is in control of the process [of spontaneous self-organization]."

You may have noticed that I wrote "incalculably complex." This is literally, scientifically true. Despite ridiculous advances in computing power, scanning technologies, and modeling systems over the past few decades, it is still impossible to comprehensively measure the holistic functioning of a living system, especially a quantum system as complex as a human being. Campbell further explains that:

Non-linear interactions produce higher-level entities out of lower-level components by generating a stable system through similar processes of dispersing energy interactions at the component-level across the whole system. As a result, it becomes computationally impossible to follow the detailed component-to-component energetic interactions.

Accessing the Intelligence from Within: The Core Modality of Holos Therapeutics

What all this means, practically, is that to generate genuine health, strength and wellbeing, we must be supported in reconnecting with and allowing this emergent, self-organizing ability to recreate holistic, multidimensional alignment and integration of our many, complex, dynamic energy systems. I think of this as the basis of, or definition of, living intelligence. Computers are not truly smart or intelligent, in this sense. They are impressive, but they are fundamentally deterministic, formulaic calculating machines.

Health, strength, and wellbeing are dependent on our being connected with this emergent ability to self-organize, which to a certain extent entails an ability to self-heal. At Holos Therapeutics, I specialize in facilitating your reconnection to this innate ability and intelligence to self-organize, self-heal, and make adaptive use of the challenges you face in life, rather than just "fixing" you as if you are a broken machine (you're not!).

We all possess immense reserves of energy that can be directed in various ways: strength and fitness; creativity; focus; productivity; care and compassion; artistic movement; analytic thought; etc. But when these energies are repressed and/or misaligned, they become maladaptive, and this is what causes the symptoms that people seek to address through therapy, medical treatment, drugs, and even surgery. Holos Therapeutics remedies these maladaptive patterns of energy flow by returning to the source of the disruption, and facilitating your embodied mind's innate ability to self-organize and self-heal into a unified, functional, integral whole system.