To know where you are in evolutionary time, view the universe from a biocentric perspective. Placing your awareness at the core of your body, you can examine it from within and go on to consciously immerse your body in the larger aggregated bodies that give you life: the bodies of your species, your habitats, your bioregions, and the whole of life. By taking this agentic view of life, you position yourself to resume your neglected inborn abilities to connect with the living world, and use your understanding to enhance your connections by engaging new constructs of the body that enable you to restore your abilities to relate to the subjective, intangible, and unknown as well as enhance your learning and problem-solving. These new constructs are the sevenfold body and its nested bodies.

The sevenfold paradigm of the body can facilitate embodiment of natural history phenomena that you observe with full attention, and can give or receive and integrate care and cure. As many patients have access to practitioners of all manner of ancient traditions, and as the sevenfold body paradigm can be expanded by physicians to detail phenomena by organ system, you can use it to “meet patients where they are” and so facilitate not only your own health but your abilities as a clinician and communicator.

The sevenfold paradigm is drawn from the Buddhist model of the body that was developed around the time of Hippocrates through careful observation from within of both flesh and being. The seven aspects, which are exquisitely developed in many Asian traditions from the time when medicine and spiritual practice were conflated, include awareness, understanding, perceptions, and sensations; also included is energy, referring to the energy body similarly explored from within during Indian classical civilization. Knowledge of these first five intangible aspects of the body is kept today by tantrikas and by Daoist masters, and by some rabbis who keep the ancient practices used by Maimonides to enhance character. Flesh is incorporated as the modern construct developed with the leadership of the Munro family of the Edinburgh University Medical School that produced interventionist medicine during the Scottish Enlightenment, when doctors still kept their knowledge base and accrued new wisdom. The seventh aspect of the body, interbeing, was named by Thich Nhat Hanh and refers to the tangible and intangible connections between you and other beings in the body of life as well as material connections with resources such as clean air and water that—with the body of life—give you and your species and habitats generative life and health. For more on embodiment with personal transformation (see the Transformation Series on this blog).

The nested bodies construct emphasizes that you, as a holobiont containing multitudes of microbiome organisms (described in Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes), are in turn contained by the aggregated bodies that surround you, and that enhance your health—except as limited by the human consumption and poisoning of life on earth. This model makes it easy to see that you and your patients have always been integral to your habitats, and prepare you to step up to the responsibilities that come with your evolved right to live a healthy life.

With these constructs, it is easier to see that you face an epoch-ending diagnosis that must be treated as belonging to the body of life. Upon considering maps of extinctions and poison residues throughout the world, you may readily grasp that toxic waste—which includes any artificial product that you did not evolve to metabolize, or that is now present in abnormally high levels—has been applied to soils for industrial agriculture and via industrial effluents as if the intention was to wage a war on life. Such toxicity is now, like plastics, ubiquitous throughout life on earth, and is still being ignored by the doctors who could—if not constrained as employees or driven by economics—serve as an early warning system, raise the alarm, and so make recovery much easier and quicker as well as complete.

If you don’t recognize gastro-or neuro-toxicity caused by ambient cocktails of poisons, you can’t really blame the chemical industry for not doing so, can you? You—and I, before I knew better—left the responsibility of caring for the body of life to others.

To move forward as doctors, we need to become well versed in this epoch-ending diagnosis of chronic ambient poisoning, and to own and elaborate it like Hippocrates and his fellow natural historians. The human-other boundary was a here construct, and now, as with AIDS, one who knows chronic ambient poisoning is one who has the potential to become a doctor of life and to practice medicine for a living future.