It is easy to feel disconnected from nature and our evolutionary history due to the societies we have erected around us, but the truth is that we are very intimately connected to nature and natural law.
To gain a better understanding of this, I would like to show you a comparison between the heart of a human and the trunk of a tree. This comparison is an adaptation of an excerpt from the Autobiography of A.T. Still written in 1897. In this text, A.T. Still, the man who discovered Osteopathy, clearly lays out the similarities between man and tree. It’s a comparison that can be very eye-opening in the quest for understanding how the human body works and therefore how it can heal.
First, let’s consider the tree. If you were to cut a tree in half and take a look at the trunk, you would see a dark spot in the middle surrounded by concentric rings, the number of rings indicating the age of the tree. If we were to follow this dark spot in the center to see where it leads, we would find that it leads to the earth below, where the roots diverge. That being said, we can see that this common center is like the heart of the tree, with the trunks and branches extending above and the roots below.
We can now apply this logic to the heart of an animal, such as the human animal. The human heart would be synonymous to the center of the tree trunk, acting as the source from which life extends above and below. We call it the source because it is from here that fresh blood gets sent to all tissues of the body, permitting life. With proper blood supply, we have health. Without it, we have disease.
It is with this comparison that we can see how connected to nature we as humans truly are. This is why more and more people are turning to natural forms of health care, such as osteopathy. By utilizing the power of nature, health can be restored in a safe and effective way.