Devon Hornby LMT

What if healing began not with asking what is wrong, but with asking what is already alive?

In our last installment of Biodynamic Living, we explored rhythm—the movement between activity and rest, effort and recovery, engagement and withdrawal.

Rhythm gives us another way of understanding health.

A living system is not healthy because it is free of every fluctuation, tension, or imperfection. It is healthy because it has the capacity to respond, adapt, recover, and reorganize.

This points toward a different way of approaching healing.

Instead of beginning with deficiency, we can begin with health.

Instead of asking only:

What is wrong?

we can also ask:

What is working? What is alive? What is available? What can we strengthen?

This may seem like a subtle distinction.

It isn’t.

It changes the entire orientation of healing.

The Culture of Cleansing

We live in a culture fascinated with purification.

Detoxes.

Cleanses.

Fasts.

Elimination diets.

Juice cleanses.

Gut resets.

Heavy-metal protocols.

“Clean eating.”

Thirty-day challenges designed to eliminate something from our lives.

There can be legitimate therapeutic uses for some forms of fasting, elimination, or dietary restriction. Sometimes the body does need a period of reduction. Sometimes something genuinely needs to be removed.

But there is something worth examining in our almost compulsive attraction to these practices.

Why is purification so appealing to us?

Part of the answer may be cultural.

Western religious traditions have often associated purity with goodness and contamination with wrongdoing. The body, appetite, sexuality, pleasure, and material existence have frequently been placed on the side of temptation or impurity, while restraint, abstinence, discipline, and purification have been associated with virtue.

Our contemporary wellness culture can reproduce this pattern in secular clothing.

We may no longer speak about sin.

Instead, we speak about toxins.

We may no longer confess our impurities.

Instead, we eliminate sugar, gluten, dairy, alcohol, carbohydrates, lectins, seed oils, or some newly identified threat.

And sometimes the underlying emotional message remains remarkably similar:

There is something wrong with me, and I need to get rid of it before I can be well.

This can become an exhausting way to inhabit a body.

We can become preoccupied with what we should not eat, what we should eliminate, what we should cleanse, what we should fix, and what we should protect ourselves from.

Health becomes a process of subtraction.

But living systems don’t survive through subtraction alone.

They also survive through nourishment, relationship, adaptation, and growth.

Medicine and the Problem of the Problem

There is a parallel here with modern medicine.

Modern medicine has accomplished extraordinary things by becoming exceptionally good at identifying and treating disease.

In an emergency, this orientation can be lifesaving.

A broken bone needs to be stabilized.

An infection may require treatment.

A tumor may need to be removed.

A dangerous physiological process sometimes needs to be stopped.

There is enormous value in knowing how to identify pathology and intervene effectively.

But there is a limitation when the disease model becomes our primary way of understanding the human being.

We can become so focused on identifying the problem that we forget to ask about the organism in which the problem is occurring.

A diagnosis tells us something important.

But it doesn’t tell us everything.

Two people can have the same diagnosis and very different capacities for adaptation, resilience, relationship, recovery, and healing.

The question becomes:

What is the health of this person doing, even in the presence of dysfunction?

That is a very different question.

Health Is More Than the Absence of Disease

If we define health simply as the absence of pathology, then health becomes a kind of empty category.

You are healthy if nothing is wrong.

But what if health is something more substantial?

What if health is an organizing intelligence?

The capacity to regulate.

To adapt.

To recover.

To orient.

To connect.

To respond appropriately to changing circumstances.

To mobilize when mobilization is needed and settle when settling is possible.

To repair.

To grow.

To rest.

To relate.

This is much closer to how living systems actually behave.

A healthy organism isn’t motionless.

It is responsive.

It isn’t perfectly balanced.

It is constantly finding balance.

And it doesn’t necessarily eliminate every challenge.

It develops the capacity to meet challenge.

Tonification: Building What Is Already There

This is where an older idea from Asian medicine becomes particularly interesting: tonification.

Tonification is not simply treating a symptom.

It is strengthening and nourishing the body’s existing resources.

Instead of asking only:

How do we get rid of this?

we can ask:

What does this organism need in order to become more capable?

More nourishment.

More rest.

More warmth.

More circulation.

More stability.

More vitality.

More capacity.

More connection.

The goal isn’t to create health from nothing.

It is to support the health that is already present.

This is an important distinction in body-centered healing.

Sometimes the organism needs something removed.

But often it needs something supported.

Sometimes we need to interrupt a pattern.

But sometimes we need to strengthen the capacity underneath the pattern.

Sometimes the most profound intervention is not another intervention.

It is stabilization.

Stabilization Before Transformation

In many forms of healing, there is a temptation to go directly toward transformation.

We want to release the trauma.

Open the restriction.

Break through the pattern.

Clear the blockage.

Get to the root.

But living systems often need something simpler first.

They need enough safety to settle.

Enough nourishment to sustain themselves.

Enough stability to reorganize.

Enough resource to meet what is difficult.

This is one reason that stabilization can be profoundly therapeutic.

A person who has spent years mobilizing against life may not need another experience of intensity.

They may need to discover that nothing needs to happen right now.

A depleted organism may not need to be pushed into another cleansing process.

It may need food, sleep, warmth, connection, and time.

A body that has been fighting may need to discover that it can stop fighting.

Health doesn’t always arrive through greater effort.

Sometimes it arrives when the organism finally has enough resources to let go of the effort it has been using to survive.

The Biodynamic Orientation

This is one of the places where Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy offers such a beautiful perspective.

In BCST, we aren’t primarily trying to impose a correction upon the body.

We orient toward health.

As my teacher Anna Chitty describes it, there is a distinction between the blueprint and the imprint.

The imprint is what has happened.

Injury.

Adaptation.

Compensation.

Trauma.

Illness.

Habit.

The ways life has shaped the organism.

But underneath and alongside all of that is the blueprint—the deeper organizing potential of the living system.

The practitioner doesn’t have to manufacture health.

The work is to create the conditions in which the organism can reconnect with its own inherent organization.

This is a radically different relationship to healing.

Rather than becoming fascinated with the problem, we learn to remain oriented toward the health that exists even within the problem.

The restriction is real.

The pain is real.

The trauma is real.

But it is not the whole person.

There is something more.

And our work is to help the person discover their relationship with that “more.”

The Wisdom of Slow Food

This principle extends far beyond clinical work.

Consider cooking.

Industrial food culture tends toward speed.

Fast food.

Instant meals.

Highly processed ingredients engineered for convenience.

Food becomes fuel delivered as quickly as possible.

Slow cooking offers something different.

A pot simmers.

Flavors develop gradually.

Fibers soften.

Ingredients interact.

Something changes through time and relationship.

The cook isn’t forcing the transformation.

They are creating the conditions for it.

This is not unlike healing.

We provide nourishment.

We create appropriate conditions.

We apply warmth.

We allow time.

And something happens that we cannot entirely manufacture.

Farming Knows This

The same principle becomes even clearer in farming.

A farmer does not manufacture the growth of a plant.

They cannot command a seed to become a tree.

They can prepare the soil.

Provide water.

Provide nutrients.

Protect the plant.

Manage competing influences.

Attend to the seasons.

And then they wait.

The intelligence of the seed is not created by the farmer.

It is supported by the farmer.

This is a beautiful model for healing.

And perhaps also for parenting.

For teaching.

For leadership.

For relationships.

For our relationship with ourselves.

We often assume that helping means making something happen.

But sometimes helping means creating the conditions in which something can happen by itself.

From Fixing to Cultivating

This is the larger movement I am interested in when I speak about Biodynamic Living.

We can spend our lives trying to fix ourselves.

Fix our bodies.

Fix our relationships.

Fix our habits.

Fix our minds.

Fix our lives.

There is certainly a place for change.

But what happens when our primary orientation shifts from fixing to cultivating?

We begin asking different questions.

What is already working?

Where is there vitality?

What gives me energy?

What helps me recover?

What makes me feel more connected?

What strengthens my capacity?

What environments support my health?

What relationships nourish me?

What practices help me become more present?

What can I do less of?

And perhaps most importantly:

What can I give more attention to?

Attention itself is nourishing.

What we attend to tends to become more organized in our experience.

If we continually attend to deficiency, we can become experts in finding what is wrong.

If we learn to attend to health, we become more sensitive to subtle signs of vitality.

This does not mean ignoring suffering.

It means refusing to let suffering become the only thing we can see.

Health Within the Problem

Perhaps this is the deepest principle.

Health does not necessarily exist on the other side of our difficulties.

It already exists within them.

The body that has developed a compensation is still trying to organize itself.

The person experiencing anxiety is still attempting to protect something.

The chronic pain response may contain an extraordinary history of adaptation.

The tired person may not be failing.

They may be signaling that a resource has been depleted.

This doesn’t mean that every symptom is secretly beneficial or that every illness should simply be accepted.

It means that we can become curious about the intelligence that exists alongside dysfunction.

What is this organism trying to do?

What is it protecting?

What capacity is asking to be strengthened?

Where is the health?

Those questions can lead us somewhere very different from endless correction.

A Practice of Orientation

For the next week, try an experiment.

When you notice something you want to change about yourself, pause before immediately asking:

How do I get rid of this?

Instead ask:

Where is the health here?

If you are tired:

What would nourish me?

If you are anxious:

What would help me feel more resourced?

If you are physically weak:

What would strengthen me?

If you feel disconnected:

What would support genuine connection?

If you are overwhelmed:

What could be simplified?

This isn’t positive thinking.

It isn’t pretending that problems don’t exist.

It is a shift in orientation.

We acknowledge what is difficult without making difficulty the center of our relationship with life.

The Living System

Perhaps this is what biodynamic living ultimately asks of us.

Not to become perfect.

Not to become purified.

Not to eliminate every problem.

Not even to become permanently healthy.

But to develop a relationship with the living intelligence that is continually working toward greater organization.

Sometimes that means intervention.

Sometimes it means elimination.

Sometimes it means effort.

And sometimes it means doing absolutely nothing.

Sometimes we need to clear.

Sometimes we need to cleanse.

But sometimes we need to feed the fire.

Strengthen the roots.

Prepare the soil.

Let the soup simmer.

Allow the body to rest.

Give the nervous system time.

Stay close to what is alive.

Because healing isn’t only the art of removing what doesn’t belong.

It is also the art of cultivating what does.

And perhaps the question beneath all healing is not simply:

“How do I get rid of what is wrong?”

but:

“How can I create the conditions for health to express itself more fully?”