Blog Post created by Nick Dawe; Masters in Chiropractic, ALTR & Oov Practitioner, Biohacking Wizard and Legendary Human.
Why Understanding the Body’s Layers Matters
The body is made up of many levels and many systems. Most people, including practitioners, no longer have a firm grip on this salient fact and without such a grip, it becomes highly unlikely that they or you will be able to direct effort to the right layer or right region. If you have been dealing with the same thing for a while now this information is for you. If your practitioner has been treating the same thing for you for a while this information is for them. Of course, all the good practitioners do this naturally and easily and all the healthy people have some grip, consciously or unconsciously on some form of interpretation of this too.
Symptoms Rarely Originate Where They Appear
Almost never is your pain or symptom originating from that area in your body. Mostly, it’s not even coming from the same level in your body. Firstly, the concept of layers in the body is not a new one and almost every comprehensive system designed to help humans has accounted for this. The problem is that most of those systems are old and potentially less potent for modern situations or that there’s significant disagreement between the systems and their described levels that it becomes confusing and subject to derision.
Secondly, the systems that do still accept and accommodate these layers/systems can hold you hostage to their knowledge – drip feeding it to you for a fee each time you see them. To their defence, most people in the general population have lost so much natural knowledge of their own body and environment it is hard for practitioners to share the information (if they were trying to) without being accused of overwhelming the persons capacity for understanding. In the modern world people’s attention spans have been successfully attacked to the point that they’re basically obsolete – quick, let me check my phone for the 3rd time this minute…
The Layers of the Body
Here’s my attempt to provide a framework of layers with some brief supporting information so you may be armed with a degree of knowledge and empowerment for your health journey. These layers are merely the physical layers and not the equally important but outside the scope of this short blog layers extending into other realms (like the psycho-spiritual, mental, emotional, biophysics layers and many more).
These are lifted with permission from the BioTra philosophy – a modern approach to living healthily.
From the deepest to the most superficial:
- The fluid body
- The electric body
- The pressure body
- The limb architectural body
- The primordial patterns/rhythm body
The Fluid Body
The first two are primarily concerned with communication networks in the body and vital functions like, for fluids, how integral your blood and lymphatic system are, your perineural system (the health of the water surrounding nerves so they work correctly) and the big one from osteopathy is the movement of the Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) which keeps your brain and spinal cord healthy from your head to your pelvis. Aberrations is this system create an onflow of issues that can appear to exist miles away from their origin. Everyone knows the power of water to create great canyons but they forget that they have rivers all through their own body too.
The Electric Body
For the electrics, this system encapsulates your reflexes – the deeply subconscious movements you make all the time, every day, and the same reflexes developed your brain to work the way it works currently. Most of your movements are organised by subconscious networks of the brain and nervous system – if these aren’t healthy or tuned, they will impart a different quality of signals back and forth every movement and every part of your body resulting in the need to change the shape and quality of your movement until finally, something hurts or gets stiff for example.
Supporting the Fluid & Electric Body
So, these are rightly titled “deep” layers. You can impart positive change in both of these simply. From a fluid standpoint, drinking a water that will hydrate you in a very adversarial hydration landscape (namely living in a city in 2025), like Kangen water – see the water page on the pH clinic website to get your hydration started. Or, cooling your body and or head to increase the density of the fluids in these areas to increase their physics quality to move more purposefully through your body. Or, booking in with a physician that has training in cranial Osteopathic techniques like all of our manual therapists at pH.
For the electric body you are basically restricted to a home practice of using the Oov. Currently our manual therapists are the only properly trained therapists in Australia to show you how to do this (except for two colleagues in Byron bay) until the digital support platform being developed currently (stay tuned!) is released for your enjoyment.
The Pressure Body
The next system is about posture – the pressure body. Quite simply, you have no conscious control over any of your deep trunk stabilisers that are used in posture. If you think you do or your practitioner is telling you how to stand, I’m so sorry, but it’s on false pretences. Also, parents, stop telling your kids to sit/stand up straight and instead give them the appropriate means to do so unconsciously – they are, despite all appearances, not ignoring you. They just cannot access something that the conscious brain does not have access to. You stand up right (or not) because of the quality of your feedback systems (described briefly above) plus the usage of your pressure systems in your body. These can be trained in a number of ways but the quickest, once again, is using the Oov. The exact mechanism is outlined in the BioTra resources which will become fully available to the consumer (and not just the practitioners who have attended the education) early to mid 2025. pH clinic will be the urban hub for BioTra in Sydney. Without a stable and reliable trunk/spine, you really should not consider training to provide a material return on investment for your time and effort. Once your trunk is engaged subconsciously (nb. you cannot do this yourself on the floor, sitting or standing so read between the lines for any physical practice that purports to do so!).
The Limb Architectural Body
The next system is about movement – the limb architecture body. You have been designed to move wonderfully. The only reason you don’t is because there’s some malnourishment in one of the systems described earlier. If you don’t go and nourish that system then lo and behold, you’ll, at best, temporarily mask a problem if not create a new one in its place. Don’t despair, the earlier systems do not take long to address.
Once they’re integral, you can move your limbs in a full and stimulating way. Luckily, lots of systems do this pretty well so your options for where to go to get this are more plentiful. Once again, because the BioTra system was designed with these layers in mind, it’s our preference for where to send you. All manual therapists from pH have attended the BioTra education – some local gyms owners have also too – ask us who they are and we will direct you accordingly. In a nutshell, your wrists and your ankles are probably the most information rich (and therefore useful) component of the limbs and yet they receive very little specialised attention in a training environment. It’s all about your muscles of your pelvis – get those glutes going! Or the rotator cuff in the shoulder from a rehabilitative perspective. Do you have a strong and thorough ankle and wrist program, what about complex usage of your knee and elbow? And has anyone been told all 10 functions of the arm in their classes?
The Primordial Patterns/Rhythm Body
The last layer is the layer of primordial movements – the rhythm and sequencing body. If you are a great and dedicated Pilates subscriber and your body breaks down while running, it’s not because your muscles aren’t strong enough, they probably are super strong from that modality. It’s because the speed, timing and position of the muscles change radically from one situation to the next. If you don’t have an elegant, empowered solution to supporting your body in going from one thing to the other then it may or may not do that organically. We don’t leave it for chance in BioTra. Ask our manual therapists to show you the super fun and accessible for all ways you can begin to re-kindle these super foundational sequences in your movement patterns.
Empower Yourself with Knowledge
It needs to be said – there is not a single athletic or life based activity that does not draw heavily on these sequences. They may have been there once, but those shoes you’re wearing, the chair you’re sitting on and the floor you walk on have made sure that they’re very dim now in your life. Nature used to provide all these nourishing points of data to you, but now you have to be a bit more wily to know where to get them and how to use them.
Our manual therapists can help you learn this solution. It takes 30 minutes all up and is actually a really fun way of moving your body. Additionally it gives you first-hand knowledge of your body, the layers that make it up and therefore where to look to troubleshoot anything that you want to change.
At pH clinic, all the supporting modalities are available to consider all the other potential layers that exist outside the physical ones I have described here. There are wonderful practitioners for the mind, spirit and soul. Practitioners to support the inner workings of your body, gut, nutrition and meridians and all the biohacking essentials, to ensure that the environment you live in doesn’t continue to adversely impact your health without a strong rebuttal! This comes in the form of heat, cold and light (red light) to combat your blue light existence. Finally, without appropriate hydration all layers will have a hard time adapting and existing so get yourself a Kangen by simply clicking here and put that variable out of your mind.
