How The BodyTalk System Is A Lot Like Chemical Engineering

I never thought that when I left my engineering job just 4 short years ago that I would end
up using my degree more in the field of alternative/holistic/energy medicine than I did as
an engineer. That idea still amazes me on a daily basis! I spent about 10 years in the specialty chemicals field working in control systems and advanced process control (APC)
before leaving it in June of 2004. In fact, my last job in that industry was working on optimization of several different chemical plants so that they would run more efficiently;
in effect, use less raw materials and less energy to create a higher purity product with less side-products. That ultimately makes the bosses happy, and fills their pocket books (not
mine).

All along my path with BodyTalk I did always see a general parallel between my engineering background and BT, but it wasn’t until I was reading Dr. Oschman’s
“Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis” that the light bulb went on over my head… One day about two years ago, I realized that almost all of the concepts, science, math and physics presented in his book were not new to me. I had already studied them in university, or had applied them in the real-world chemical plant setting. The only difference there is that instead of talking about a chemical plant with its pipes, pumps, reactors and instrumentation, Oschman was describing the bodymind complex and how it operates and heals itself.

In that a-ha moment, I realized that the body also has these same pipes, pumps, reactors and instrumentation; we just call them arteries and veins, heart and diaphragm, liver and
other organs, and the nervous system and five senses. The bodymind complex even has a “distributed control system”, or DCS in engineer-speak, that more or less controls the entire functioning of the system… sound familiar? That would most certainly be the brain! And in the nervous system, the individual nerve fibers act just like tuning loops that go out to some sort of sensor (temperature, pressure, level, etc.), read the data, and then send that information back to the control computer to be interpreted and used in
whatever way the control program for that system has been programmed (by the engineers) to do, or they send a signal to turn on or off some function. This is very much what happens in the amygdalae and limbic brain with the fight/flight response and
subconscious mind.

I could go on and I could probably even relate almost any part of a chemical plant to some similar function in the bodymind, but I think you get the point. One other major point that I want to bring up is that when I’m talking about a chemical plant or any specific process, the basic assumption made there is that the system is “closed”. Closed
systems do not interact with the environment and things like atmospheric temperature and pressure are adjusted for as necessary in calculations, but generally do not affect the
process to a substantial enough degree, so they are often ignored in order to make the math easy. The bodymind complex is not a “closed” system… we interact with the world and environment around us physically, mentally, emotionally and energetically. And on top of that we have consciousness and the conscious mind as another factor entirely. I will just point out here that the conventional medical model treats the bodymind as a closed system, which is just a small part of their problem.

So, as you can see from this engineering perspective the human body is a bit like a chemical plant, but is a conscious bio-chemical plant far more complex and amazing than what humans could ever design and build. I often say that I went from doing APC of chemical plants to APC of the human body and immune system, and that seems to make sense to many people I speak with. Of course this perspective and description I have
given really doesn’t do justice to the bodymind, so please remember that this is still a limited view, as it is also taking a Cartesian-Newtonian look at the bodymind complex and not viewing it as a whole like we do from the quantum physics realm. And that’s another topic for some other time!