I am particularly interested in complex cases involving autoimmune conditions, blood disorders, and situations in which someone has been searching for answers for a long time without finding a satisfactory path forward.

My work is not based on quick fixes, standardized protocols handed out to everyone, or promises of cures. I spend considerable time trying to understand the individual, the history of the illness, the laboratory findings, the diet, the environment, and the circumstances that may have contributed to the problem.

Consultations are conducted privately by Zoom, allowing me to work with people regardless of where they live.

Because I work closely with the people I accept, I keep the practice small.

If you believe your case may be appropriate for this kind of work, you are welcome to contact me privately and tell me briefly what you are dealing with.

Dr. G

Holistic Physician, Teacher, and Storyteller

This morning, in one of Coral Springs’ beautiful little parks, the path meandered ahead of me and disappeared around a corner. There was no boardwalk and no grand destination. It was simply a quiet road continuing beyond what I could see. I stopped for a moment because a thought came to me that seemed worth putting in my pocket: the road does not end merely because it leaves our sight.

Much of life is like that. We are so accustomed to wanting to know where things are going. We want the destination, the outcome, the prognosis, the answer. We want some assurance that if we keep walking, something recognizable will be waiting around the bend. But very little of life actually offers us that assurance. Sometimes the road simply turns, and we continue.

The elevator in my building was finally working again, which meant I no longer had to carry my bicycle up and down the stairs. So I took the bike out, filled the tires, rode into town, picked up some bananas, wandered through the parks, and eventually found a place to sit and read. There was nothing extraordinary about any of it, and yet the entire morning felt extraordinary. I had movement. I had usefulness. I had a bicycle underneath me, a book to read, food to carry home, trees around me, and nowhere in particular that I needed to be. Many people might call that merely adequate. I experience it as abundance.

I have spent enough of my life participating in civilization to know both what it gives us and what it takes from us. I can complain about what we have built and still remain grateful for some of the things it has given me. I do not have to reject every convenience in order to recognize what excess, noise, consumption, speed, and constant striving have done to human beings. Perhaps the task is not to flee the world, but to become more selective about what we take from it. Take what serves life and leave what deforms it. A working elevator, a bicycle, a small park, a banana, a book, a piano, and a quiet home are enough to construct a remarkably rich day.

I have begun to recognize that the same kind of selectivity is necessary in my work with people. There was a time when I thought that someone asking for help meant that they were prepared to receive it. Those are not the same thing. A person may desperately want a different outcome while remaining unwilling to do anything differently. They may ask another human being to guide them while continuing to defend every explanation, every habit, every conclusion and every decision that brought them to where they are.

That is not necessarily dishonesty. Sometimes it is simply unreadiness. I have come to believe that willingness precedes almost everything else. Before change can occur, there has to be some willingness to look carefully, to observe honestly, to question one’s own story and perhaps, for a while, to stop insisting upon being the one who already knows the way.

There is a kind of surrender involved in that. I do not mean blind obedience. I have never believed that anyone should surrender judgment, intelligence or responsibility for his own life to another human being. But when we deliberately choose someone to teach us, guide us or help us find our way through territory they understand better than we do, there must be enough trust to stop fighting for the steering wheel. For a time, we have to be willing to follow the path long enough to discover whether it has merit. Otherwise every step becomes an argument.

I have seen what happens when this willingness is absent, and as I grow older I find myself less interested in forcing anything. That includes people. I would rather wait patiently for the right human being than fill my days with people who consume my peace, resist the work, and then wonder why nothing changes. That is not cruelty. It is a boundary, and boundaries, when properly understood, protect everyone involved.

Perhaps this too is something I have learned from simply being alive long enough. Not everything needs to be pushed. Not everything needs to happen today. Not every road needs to reveal its destination before I begin walking it. I have become increasingly fond of making one small adjustment and then listening, watching, and waiting long enough to know what actually happened.

We live in a culture that frequently mistakes motion for progress. If one thing might help, we add five. If something does not change immediately, we change direction again. We pile one thing upon another until eventually we have no idea what caused what. Perhaps we do the same thing with life itself. We keep stuffing things into our pockets simply because there is still room. But we do not need full pockets. We need only carry what is needed in the moment.

I am becoming more interested in less: one thing, one observation, enough time. That principle reaches far beyond medicine or healing. It applies to almost everything: relationships, work, food, money, music, a bicycle ride, a road disappearing around a bend. There is great freedom in no longer requiring every action to produce an immediate result. Sometimes it is enough to make the next intelligent movement and then see what life does with it.

Tonight I will probably play the piano and then go to bed. I do not need another adventure today. The day has already been full of movement, reflection, boundaries and simplicity. Nothing spectacular was required, and yet I came home carrying quite a bit: a road turning out of sight, a bicycle finally freed from the stairs, the recognition that a simple life can be an extraordinarily rich one, the reminder that trust requires some willingness to surrender control, the understanding that not everyone who asks for help is ready to receive it, and the quiet decision not to give myself away to people who are unwilling to meet me halfway.

These are small things, but then, most of the things worth carrying are.

I put them in my pocket and brought them home. Before I go to bed, I will empty them again. There is a lightness in empty pockets that sleep seems to require.

And tomorrow morning I will awaken with nothing in them, empty pockets waiting to be filled.

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EVERYTHING I WRITE IS FREE

Paid subscribers may send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being and will be welcomed into recurring groups zooms.

Work With Dr. G

I continue to maintain a small private practice for people dealing with difficult, chronic, and sometimes confusing health problems.

I am particularly interested in complex cases involving autoimmune conditions, blood disorders, and situations in which someone has been searching for answers for a long time without finding a satisfactory path forward.

My work is not based on quick fixes, protocols handed out to everyone, or promises of cures. I spend considerable time trying to understand the individual, the history of the illness, the laboratory findings, the diet, the environment, and the circumstances that may have contributed to the problem.

Consultations are conducted privately by Zoom.

Because I work closely with the people I accept, I keep the practice small.

If you believe your case may be appropriate for this kind of work, you are welcome to contact me and tell me briefly what you are dealing with.

You may find this dark, that was intentional. Turn up your brightness if you desire, but it’s my words that matter. Please consider them.

Private Clinical Consultations

I am available for private Zoom consultations for people dealing with difficult, persistent, or poorly resolved health problems. My clinical work has focused especially on complex autoimmune conditions, chronic inflammatory illness, blood disorders, digestive dysfunction, and cases in which conventional approaches have not produced satisfactory answers.

I do not offer quick fixes or generic protocols. My work is individualized and begins with a careful review of the person’s history, laboratory findings, diet, lifestyle, and the circumstances that may have contributed to the illness.

If you would like to discuss whether working together would be appropriate, you are welcome to contact me for a clinical consultation.

Everything I write here remains free to read. Paid subscribers may also send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being.

Subscribe now

First, get to know yourself.

We seem to have forgotten that step.

The ancient admonition Know thyself may be more important than we have allowed it to become.

You cannot intelligently plan a life unless you have begun to understand who you are. Yet by the time many children reach high school, they are already being pushed to decide what they want to become. From there they dive directly into universities, professional programs, and six or more years of education preparing themselves to do something they may eventually discover they do not even like.

All too often, the end result is a person educated to perform a particular kind of work but neither naturally skilled for it nor deeply aligned with it. The work becomes a way to earn a living rather than something capable of becoming a blessing both to themselves and to others. I know the world, this civilization, has increasingly been structured to breed people to work, to become cogs in the wheel of this monstrous machine.

There is an old idea that still stands strong: we cannot help others while we remain confused and disturbed ourselves.

Yet everywhere I look, I see coaches, guides, mentors, influencers, and assorted experts who are hardly adults themselves selling their opinions to people who are genuinely suffering. Someone sets up an account on a social media platform, places the word coach after their name, and suddenly begins offering guidance to people whose lives may be far more complicated than anything they have personally experienced.

How can someone who has not yet found their own way presume to lead someone else toward theirs?

This becomes especially troubling when the person seeking help is vulnerable. A human being in the midst of illness, loss, fear, confusion, or some other serious trial does not merely need encouragement. They need wisdom, perspective, judgment, and sometimes the ability of another human being to recognize consequences that they themselves cannot yet see. Poor guidance offered with confidence can do real harm, even when the person giving it sincerely believes they are helping.

Once when young people were given more opportunity to experience life before being expected to define it.

They were not necessarily expected to make a lifelong vocational decision while still in high school. Many entered universities to study the humanities, history, philosophy, literature, science, art, language, and the broad record of human experience. An undergraduate education did not always require an immediate professional purpose. Its purpose could simply be to educate the human being.

Perhaps during those years a young person might begin discovering what truly aligned with who they were. From there they could decide how their abilities, interests, temperament, and experience might eventually be used in a way that benefited both themselves and others.

I don’t say this to be cruel, but I certainly don’t want longevity advice from a 23-year-old. I’m sorry, but at 23 you know almost nothing about longevity. You have barely begun the experiment.

There was also a time when elders within a community were valued precisely because they had lived.

Young people went to them with questions because these were people who had loved, failed, succeeded, lost things, built things, buried people, made mistakes, changed their minds, survived disappointments, and watched enough years pass to understand that life rarely behaves according to the plans we make for it.

Experience did not automatically make someone wise, but wisdom without experience was understood to be unusual.

Today, instead, someone who is confused often turns to another equally confused person on social media. Both may be chasing the same things: money, fame, attention, acceptance, validation, or confirmation. And what value is there in being confirmed by someone who is just as uncertain as you are? They may simply recognize their own confusion in yours and support you in maintaining it.

Perhaps we have become so eager to arrive somewhere that we have forgotten that certain steps cannot safely be skipped.

Before deciding what you should become, discover something about who you are.

Before trying to lead other people, learn something about where you yourself are standing.

And before offering answers to another human being’s life, make certain that what you are calling wisdom is not merely an opinion you have not lived long enough to test.

Let me say it once again.

We cannot help others while we remain confused and disturbed ourselves.

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Private Clinical Consultations

I am available for private Zoom consultations for people dealing with difficult, persistent, or poorly resolved health problems. My clinical work has focused especially on complex autoimmune conditions, chronic inflammatory illness, blood disorders, digestive dysfunction, and cases in which conventional approaches have not produced satisfactory answers.

I do not offer quick fixes or generic protocols. My work is individualized and begins with a careful review of the person’s history, laboratory findings, diet, lifestyle, and the circumstances that may have contributed to the illness.

If you would like to discuss whether working together would be appropriate, you are welcome to contact me for a clinical consultation.

Everything I write here remains free to read. Paid subscribers may also send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being.

I have been going back and reading some of the things I wrote when I first arrived here. I recognize the man who wrote them. I recognize the ideas and the convictions, and in many cases I still believe exactly what he believed. But I don’t always recognize the way he felt compelled to say it.

He explained everything. And when he was finished explaining it, he sometimes explained it again from another direction, just to make certain nobody could possibly misunderstand him.

I think I know why. I was still writing like a healer.

For years I had worked with people who were sick, frightened, confused, and sometimes running out of time. In that world, repetition was not necessarily a flaw. Sometimes it was necessary. If I thought something mattered, I wanted to be certain the person sitting across from me understood it. I wasn’t trying to be elegant. I was trying to get through.

And yes, somewhere inside all of that was a savior complex.

I had been saved from death, or at least from the death I had been told was coming, and for a long time I carried a strange guilt about having survived when so many others had not. I had been given another chance, and somewhere along the way I decided that meant I had a responsibility to drag as many people as possible across the line with me.

That urgency followed me into my writing. If I had learned something that I believed could help someone, I wanted to make certain they understood every piece of it. I wanted to explain why it mattered, where it came from, what it connected to, what might happen if it were ignored, and probably two or three other things that had occurred to me while I was writing. The ideas were often sound. The delivery could become a lecture.

I can see that now.

What I could not see then was that everyone isn’t dying. Everyone doesn’t need to be awakened, instructed, corrected, and sent home with a book of directions. Sometimes people simply need the point, and what they do with it belongs to them.

That may be one of the more important things I have learned, not only as a writer, but as a man. There is a difference between offering something and trying to make certain another person receives it exactly the way I intended. For much of my life, I felt responsible for the outcome. If I saw something that I believed another person was missing, I wanted to show it to them. If they didn’t see it, I tried another angle, and if they still didn’t see it, I explained it again.

That made sense in a treatment room. It does not always make sense on a page.

Writing is different because the reader has to be allowed to arrive. I don’t have to carry someone all the way to the conclusion. I can make an observation, tell the truth as I see it, and place something on the table with enough space around it for another person to walk around, look at it from another direction, disagree with it, question it, or perhaps recognize something of themselves in it. I don’t have to tell them what they are supposed to find.

For a long time, I thought good teaching meant leaving no questions unanswered. I am beginning to think good writing sometimes does exactly the opposite. It leaves the right question behind.

That requires a very different kind of trust. I have to trust the reader enough not to do all of the work for them, but I also have to trust myself enough not to keep proving the point after I have already made it. Perhaps that is the larger evolution. I am not necessarily changing what I believe. I am changing the way I offer it.

Less instruction. More invitation.

What interests me is that this is not very different from the way I learned to heal. Nothing I did during those years arrived as a finished system. I observed, tried something, watched, adjusted, removed what no longer seemed useful, changed direction when the evidence asked me to, and kept going. The protocol evolved because I evolved.

My writing seems to be doing the same thing.

I can look back now and find sentences I would never write today, not because the thought was wrong, but because I no longer feel the need to surround every thought with scaffolding. Some things can stand by themselves. Maybe that is what confidence eventually becomes. Not certainty or rigidity, and certainly not the need to have the last word, but the willingness to say what you see clearly enough and then stop.

I smile when I read that earlier Gabriel now. Not because he was wrong, but because he hadn’t yet learned that the truth doesn’t always need that much help.

So why did I write this? Is it a true confession? Am I simply thinking out loud, or am I still trying to cause change? Certainly the change I am describing has helped me grow, but is it something you require? Perhaps you have already arrived somewhere else and everything I have written here is unnecessary.

I don’t think it is. I don’t believe these words are falling on deaf ears. I believe there are people who may find something here worth reading, worth applying, perhaps even worth loving.

Whether you do or not is no longer my goal. It is also beyond my control.

I do what I do to seed the ground.

Whoever needs what grows there is free to eat.

Private Clinical Consultations

I am available for private Zoom consultations for people dealing with difficult, persistent, or poorly resolved health problems. My clinical work has focused especially on complex autoimmune conditions, chronic inflammatory illness, blood disorders, digestive dysfunction, and cases in which conventional approaches have not produced satisfactory answers.

I do not offer quick fixes or generic protocols. My work is individualized and begins with a careful review of the person’s history, laboratory findings, diet, lifestyle, and the circumstances that may have contributed to the illness.

If you would like to discuss whether working together would be appropriate, you are welcome to contact me for a clinical consultation.

Everything I write here remains free to read. Paid subscribers may also send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being.

Subscribe now

Stepping Out

It is one thing to recognize that yesterday’s truth no longer fits. It is another thing entirely to step out of it.

Recognition can happen in an instant. We suddenly see that something we have believed, practiced, defended, eaten, taught, followed, or perhaps even built our identity around is no longer producing what it once did. But recognition alone changes very little.

Seeing is not leaving.

We can recognize something for years and continue doing it. We can know that a relationship has ended long before either person walks away. We can know that a way of eating is no longer serving the body while continuing to prepare the same meals. We can recognize that a belief no longer makes sense and still repeat it because it has become part of the language through which we understand ourselves.

That space interests me, the space between recognizing what is no longer true and becoming willing to live according to what we now see.

My experience, and increasingly my practice, have taught me to remain awake to what is actually happening. Not what I expected to happen, not what a book told me should happen, and not what worked twenty years ago. What is happening now? From there comes another question: what is beneficial now? And then the more difficult one: am I willing to do what that recognition requires?

This is where awareness becomes movement. We step out of what no longer serves and begin walking into another way of living.

There is a strange territory between the two. We are no longer able to completely believe what we once believed, but we have not yet become comfortable living without it. The old identity is loosening while the new way of living has not yet become familiar. Perhaps that discomfort is why so many of us remain where we are. The familiar can feel safer than the true.

But leaving something behind does not require condemning it. Something may have served us very well for a season of our lives and still no longer belong in the life we are living now. I can be grateful for what carried me here without granting it permanent authority over where I go next.

Leaving is not rejection.

Something can carry us across a particular stretch of river without needing to be carried on our backs for the rest of the journey.

The difficulty begins when usefulness becomes allegiance. We stop asking whether something continues to work and begin defending it because it has become part of who we believe ourselves to be. A religion, a diet, a philosophy, a diagnosis, a profession, a political position, even a particular image of ourselves can gradually stop being something we examine and become something we protect.

At that point we are no longer observing life. We are protecting an identity, while life continues changing around us.

The question that interests me now is not whether today’s action agrees with yesterday’s belief system. The question is whether it benefits life. Does the way I live make me clearer, less harmful and more useful? Does it allow me to care more intelligently for myself and, through that care, become more capable of caring for the people, animals and world around me?

This is what I mean when I speak of benefiting all beings. There is an old Buddhist aspiration: May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.

The second half matters as much as the first. Happiness is not merely something to wish upon ourselves or others. Causes produce consequences. The way we eat, think, work, speak, consume, believe and relate to one another creates conditions, and those conditions become the lives we inhabit.

So when I speak of walking into a new reality, I am not pointing toward some private reality manufactured from preference or desire. I am pointing toward becoming awake enough to participate in reality as it actually is, and willing enough to change our behavior when what we see requires it.

Sometimes the first act of that participation is leaving something behind, because building a new life on old ideas creates a weak foundation.

Walking Into

Once we have stepped out, something else is required of us.

We have to walk.

Leaving the old does not automatically create the new. It merely makes room for it. And perhaps this is where many attempts at change fail. We become very good at identifying what we no longer want. We stop doing something, abandon an idea, leave a relationship, change a diet, discard a belief, or finally admit that a former way of living has reached its end.

But an empty space is not yet a new life.

What comes next has to be lived into. A different reality is not created by declaring it, imagining it or giving it a name. It takes shape through what we repeatedly do after we have seen clearly.

We begin with what is in front of us. We observe, we act, we watch what happens, and we remain willing to change again. Walking into is not the adoption of another permanent answer. If it were, we would simply be exchanging one allegiance for another.

It is learning to live awake, to see what is here, respond to what is true now, and remain willing to change when experience asks something different of us.

There may never be a moment when everything is settled, when certainty arrives and the path ahead becomes perfectly clear. Perhaps that is not required. Perhaps we only need enough clarity to see the next step, and then take it.

You’ve already stepped out.

Now get up and start walking.

Everything I write is yours to read, free of charge. Paid subscribers may send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being. Those seeking a more extensive private clinical consultation may select the Clinical Membership.

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There was a time when I would have looked at a set of gymnastic rings and thought only about what I could do with them. Pull, hang, lift, challenge myself. Not long ago, I returned to them with much the same attitude. I was not trying to prove anything to anyone else. I simply assumed that because this kind of exercise had once been useful to me, it should still be useful now.

My body disagreed. Instead of making me stronger, the rings irritated and injured me. The easy conclusion would have been either to abandon them entirely or to insist that I simply needed to push through until my body adapted. Neither response fit what I was observing. I stopped using them for a couple of weeks and allowed the injury to heal. Then I returned to the rings with a different mindset. I still do dips on them every day, but I move more slowly and I do not descend as deeply as I once did. The rings were not telling me to stop forever. They were telling me to pay attention. The lesson was not to give up something I wanted to continue doing, but to adapt it to the body I have today.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me. None of this happens unless we are watching closely enough to notice what is changing. And noticing is still not enough. We also have to be willing to accept what we see, especially when what we see contradicts what we would prefer to believe.

We often say we are paying attention when what we are actually doing is waiting for reality to confirm a conclusion we have already made. We notice what supports it and explain away what does not. Something worked for us once, so we assume it should continue to work. A food made us feel better. An exercise made us stronger. A particular routine helped us sleep. A way of thinking carried us through a difficult period. It worked, and because it worked, it became true.

The problem is that yesterday’s truth is not necessarily today’s truth.

The rings were not bad. They had not betrayed me. My body had changed, circumstances had changed, and the relationship between the two was no longer what it had once been. The only real mistake would have been refusing to acknowledge what was happening because I preferred the old answer.

At 77, growing older makes that kind of honesty increasingly important because change becomes impossible to ignore. Recovery changes. Strength changes. Sleep changes. Digestion changes. What we tolerate changes. But the lesson is not really about aging. Aging simply makes the lesson harder to escape. If I intend to continue living actively and fully, I have to keep looking at what is actually in front of me rather than insisting that today behave like yesterday.

Experience is valuable, but it can also become a trap. We know what worked before. We know what made us stronger, what helped us recover, what gave us energy, what allowed us to move successfully through the world. The danger comes when yesterday’s experience becomes today’s unquestioned rule.

Paying attention means allowing present evidence to challenge past conclusions. Is this still working? Is it working in the same way? Does it still serve me? If not, does it need to be abandoned, or merely changed?

Those questions require more than observation. They require willingness. Without willingness, we can watch the evidence accumulate and still defend the old truth simply because it is familiar. We can continue looking without actually listening.

That is where adaptation begins. Not in surrender, and not in deciding that because something has changed we must walk away from everything we once enjoyed. Sometimes paying attention tells us to stop. Sometimes it tells us to rest. And sometimes, as with the rings, it simply tells us to change the way we are doing something so that we can continue doing what matters to us.

That may sound simple, but much of our difficulty comes from resisting that very process. We remain faithful to methods long after they have stopped being faithful to us. We defend diets, routines, relationships, beliefs and habits because they once gave us something valuable. We confuse consistency with wisdom and stubbornness with discipline.

There are times when persistence is exactly what is needed. There are also times when persistence becomes nothing more than continuing to argue with reality. The challenge is not merely to keep going. It is to keep observing while we go, and to remain willing to change course when what we observe asks us to.

I have no interest in becoming less engaged with life as I grow older. Quite the opposite. I want to continue swimming, cycling, walking, practicing, learning, experimenting and discovering what remains possible. But doing that with my eyes open means I cannot demand that today behave like yesterday.

Something that once served me deserves gratitude. It does not necessarily deserve lifelong allegiance. I can honor the body I once had without asking the body I have today to pretend that nothing has changed.

I deeply bow to both.

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Everything I write is yours to read, free of charge. Paid subscribers may send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being. Those seeking a more extensive private clinical consultation may select the Clinical Membership.

There was a time when I could have told you quite a bit about health while remaining remarkably unaware of what was happening inside my own body.

That contradiction still interests me.

I had become profoundly ill. My spleen had enlarged dramatically, I was waking soaked in night sweats, and there were mornings when I found blood on my pillow. None of this was subtle, and yet I had somehow learned not to see it. Or perhaps more accurately, I had learned not to listen. I was living inside a body that was moving farther and farther from balance while my awareness of it had become increasingly dull.

I was dying, and I did not understand the extent of what was happening within me.

That experience changed the way I think about health.

I no longer believe there is one correct diet, one correct routine, or one set of instructions that every human being should follow. Human beings are too different for that, and even one human being is not the same from one season of life to another.

Our constitutions differ. Some of us tend toward heat, others toward cold. Some become dry, others congested. Some need nourishment while others need less of everything for a while. And all of this is influenced by where we live, how we move, how we sleep, what we are carrying emotionally, and where we are in life.

And all of it changes.

A food that serves you beautifully today may not serve you six months from now. Something you avoided for years may suddenly be exactly what your body needs. A practice that restored you during illness may become unnecessary once balance has returned.

This is why I have very little interest in dietary religion.

I am far more interested in whether a person can recognize what is happening within themselves.

Before deciding what to eat, what to eliminate, how much to exercise, whether to rest, or whether some larger intervention is necessary, there is a more fundamental question:

What is actually happening here?

That sounds simple, but it is not.

Most of us are extraordinarily practiced at living outside ourselves. We follow schedules, habits, recommendations, cravings, ideologies and routines. We eat because it is lunchtime. We exercise because the program says Tuesday is exercise day. We continue doing yesterday’s solution even after yesterday’s problem has disappeared.

Eventually we may become so accustomed to discomfort that we stop recognizing it as discomfort.

So the first practice is simply to see.

Notice how you feel after eating.

Notice what happens when you sleep poorly.

Notice what your body does in heat and cold.

Notice what tension appears during conflict.

Notice what improves when you move and what improves when you stop moving.

Notice without immediately constructing a theory about it.

Just see.

Then comes the second part.

Do.

Exhaustion may require rest. A body that has become too sedentary may need movement. Overeating may call for less food, while depletion may call for nourishment.

And if a practice that once helped you now leaves you depleted, stop worshipping the practice and pay attention to the evidence.

Seeing without acting accomplishes very little, but acting without seeing can be equally dangerous.

The two belong together.

See and do.

That may be one of the simplest descriptions I know of what it means to care for ourselves intelligently.

Balance is not a destination we reach and then permanently occupy. Living systems move. Conditions change. We wander a little in one direction, recognize it, and make a small correction, then another, and eventually another.

Much of health may consist of making these small corrections early enough that they never need to become dramatic ones.

Sometimes seeing clearly is enough to know what to do next.

Sometimes it isn’t.

We can recognize that something is wrong without knowing what the correction should be. That is where knowledge, experience, and sometimes another set of eyes become useful.

That is part of why I am here.

Not to tell everyone to do the same thing, but to help people see more clearly what may be happening in their own particular case, and what might reasonably come next.

See.

And do.

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All too often, when we don’t know the answer to something, we go into it believing that somehow we must get it right the first time.

That makes very little sense.

When the answer is genuinely unknown, we, and certainly I, have to be willing to fail. Maybe more than once.

That is how research works. You try something, observe what happens, make an adjustment and try again. Every attempt gives you information you didn’t have before. Gradually, you begin moving toward the result you were looking for.

This is also very much the way I have to practice medicine.

I do not treat a diagnosis. I treat a patient.

A conventional physician often works within a much more rigid structure. Standards of care establish what is generally expected for a particular diagnosis or presentation, and there are good reasons those standards exist. But they also limit how far the physician can move outside an established course of treatment.

The medicine I practice gives me considerably more room to respond to the individual patient.

Two people may arrive with the same diagnosis, similar blood work and what appears to be the same presentation, yet I may approach them very differently because their histories, physiology, diets, stresses, habits, tolerances and responses are not the same.

Every protocol therefore becomes, to some degree, an ongoing conversation between what I observe, what the patient experiences and what we learn along the way.

That means I cannot always know beforehand exactly what will work.

I can make a change in a protocol, watch what happens during the week, listen carefully to what the patient reports and adjust from there. The patient has to participate in that process by monitoring themselves closely, while I pay equally close attention to what they are telling me.

A treatment may work exactly as expected, work only partly, do very little, or show us that we were moving in the wrong direction.

None of that information is wasted.

A small failure, recognized early and carefully evaluated, becomes useful information. It changes what we do the following week and may influence what we do for months afterward.

That is very different from failing because nobody was paying attention.

Little failures are not failures at all.

They are part of treating the patient rather than the diagnosis.

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There comes a point in serious illness when surrender can begin to masquerade as wisdom.

Sometimes there truly is nothing more medicine knows how to offer. Sometimes a disease will progress regardless of courage, discipline, prayer, treatment, diet, or determination. I know that. I would never tell another human being that every illness can be overcome if only they try hard enough.

But I also know what happened to me when I was told there was no hope.

I was not simply being given a diagnosis. I was being handed a conclusion. The distinction matters. A diagnosis describes what someone believes is happening in the body. A conclusion can reach much further. It can tell a person what future they are permitted to imagine. More dangerously, it can take away hope and quietly remove them from participation in their own life.

I could accept that I was seriously ill. I could accept that the physicians treating me did not know how to reverse what was happening. What I could not accept was that their inability to see another road meant that no road existed.

So I continued.

I did not continue because I believed I had discovered a miracle cure. I had no miracle cure. I did not know what would work, and much of the time I did not even know whether anything I was doing was working.

What I had was persistence.

For years I spoke to my body every day. I asked it to return to its perfect size, shape, form, and function. That became my mantra.

Did my cells hear me? I have no idea.

That isn’t really the point.

I heard me.

Every day I reinforced the direction in which I intended to travel. I protected that image so carefully that there were periods when I did not want to look at my own reflection. What I saw externally was too powerful a contradiction to what I was trying to cultivate internally. I already knew what illness looked like. I did not need to study it every morning in the mirror. I needed to keep looking toward something else.

Perhaps it is not always the patient who should surrender.

Perhaps sometimes persistence asks the pathology to surrender instead.

I do not mean that literally. Disease is not an opponent with a mind, and I am not suggesting that determination conquers every pathology. It doesn’t. But the metaphor describes something important about the attitude that carried me through those years. I simply refused to agree that the present condition had been granted permanent ownership of my future.

There was no single morning when I awakened and announced that I was getting well. Recovery came in crumbs.

For months I had awakened in beds soaked from drenching night sweats. Then there was a dry night. There had been mornings when I found blood on my pillow. Then one morning there was none.

These were not small things. They were major thresholds, unmistakable signs that something had shifted.

But not every sign along the way was so dramatic. There were also smaller changes, brief glimpses of light that did not prove I was recovering but were enough to tell me that the road was still moving beneath my feet.

I learned to pay attention to both.

They did not persuade me that the work was finished. They persuaded me to continue. Even when laboratory results began changing, I continued. Even when my life widened enough for me to enter traditional Chinese medicine school, I continued.

Recovery was not an event.

It was a direction.

That distinction has remained with me ever since.

I think we often make the mistake of looking for the intervention that did it. What food was it? What herb? What exercise? What treatment? What supplement? What meditation? What practitioner?

I cannot answer that question about my own recovery. What I can describe is a process.

I would introduce something and observe. I would remove something and observe. I would increase something, decrease something, abandon something, reconsider something, and observe again. Then I would make another adjustment.

It was less like following a recipe than riding a motorcycle down a winding road. You cannot choose your line, lean, and speed at the beginning of the ride and hold them for the next fifty miles.

Every curve presents something different. You lean, adjust your speed, change your line, and respond to the road as it unfolds. What carried you through the last curve may not carry you through the next.

I had teachers. Many of them.

I learned from people whose ideas sometimes contradicted one another. Aajonus Vonderplanitz influenced the way I thought about food. Ann Wigmore influenced me from another direction. B.K. Frantzis taught me through movement and internal practice. There were physicians, healers, traditions, books, and eventually my own body and the people who trusted me with theirs.

But I never wanted anyone else’s system badly enough to surrender my own observation to it. I accepted some things, rejected others, and modified many. I harvested the best fruit I could find from every field I entered.

What eventually emerged was not somebody else’s protocol. It was a life assembled one observation at a time.

That is still largely how I think as a physician. I am far less interested in the name of a disease than I am in the human being sitting in front of me with that disease.

The diagnosis matters. Of course it matters. It gives us information. It gives us a language. It may tell us what dangers require attention. But the diagnosis is not the person.

Two people can arrive carrying the same diagnostic label and present as entirely different human beings. Their histories and bodies are not the same. Neither are their fears, strengths, circumstances, or willingness to change.

So I don’t begin by pretending I know precisely what another person’s body requires simply because I recognize the name attached to the pathology. I begin with the person. I observe, we adjust, and we observe again.

I remember beginning work with someone who carried a diagnosis I had never treated before. I said so plainly. I wasn’t interested in manufacturing confidence I did not possess.

What I did know how to do was work with the human being who presented with it. We started there.

The progress that followed did not teach me that I had discovered a treatment for everyone carrying that diagnosis. It reinforced something much more useful:

Treat what is actually in front of you.

That also means the person receiving care must participate. I cannot observe for someone who refuses to look. I cannot help change a life while the person living it is determined to preserve every condition that created the need for change.

There is a sentence I have carried for some time:

You cannot return to the dirt that got you dirty and stay clean.

Recovery cannot mean merely feeling better long enough to return unchanged to whatever preceded the illness. Something has to be learned.

The lesson may concern food, work, relationships, movement, sleep, fear, isolation, excess, or the relentless demands someone has mistaken for normal life. It may require recognizing that something once considered indispensable was slowly causing harm.

Getting better and going back are not necessarily the same thing.

The question eventually becomes: What kind of life can sustain the person who is emerging?

That is why I am reluctant when people ask me exactly what I did. The question is understandable. If someone survives something terrible, we naturally want the recipe.

But my recipe belonged to the body I had, during the illness I experienced, in the circumstances in which I lived, at that particular moment in my life.

Another person needs their own observations, their own corrections, their own winding road.

I can walk beside them. I can bring what I have learned. I may see something they do not yet see. I can question assumptions, teach, and sometimes point toward a turn before they reach it. But I cannot hand another human being my road and call it theirs.

That is why I don’t ask people to do what I did.

I ask them to do what it takes.

And perhaps that is the deeper meaning of persistence.

Persistence is not stubbornly repeating the same action because we are frightened to change course. Persistence is remaining in relationship with the process long enough to keep learning from it. It is the willingness to notice, to alter direction, to relinquish what no longer serves, to continue when the evidence is small, and to refuse both false hope and premature hopelessness.

At the beginning of this journey, I was told there was no hope. I was handed a conclusion about where my road ended.

I did not know that conclusion was wrong. I did not know that I would recover. I did not know what the next seven years would require of me.

There were no guarantees.

There are never guarantees.

But I was still alive. I could still observe. I could still make another adjustment. And as long as those things remained true, I saw no reason to surrender simply because someone else could no longer see where the road went.

Seven years later, I was still here, and the symptoms that had once defined my days were gone.

Nearly twenty-five years after being handed that conclusion, I am still here.

Still observing.

Not out of fear, and not because I am waiting for something to return, but because I have learned to witness what is arising in front of me. My body changes. Circumstances change. Life changes. I pay attention and respond when response is required.

Perhaps that is what I misunderstood about recovery when I first began. I thought I was trying to reach a destination.

There was no destination.

We put a period at the wrong place when we say, “I recovered.”

There was never a period.

I am still here.

Still watching.

Still going.

Still going strong.

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For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been writing and speaking about a concern that has only become more urgent.

Technology is not the enemy. It never was.

The danger is a civilization that increasingly demands we submit to technology in order to survive, to belong, to be seen, and to be valued. Little by little, we have accepted the role of cogs in the machine. We remain flesh and blood, yet many of us now function as components of vast technological, economic, and bureaucratic systems instead of members of a living human community.

Culture was once the natural expression of civilization. Today, too often, it serves the machinery that shapes us, measures us, and ultimately reduces us.

I am not against technology. I use it every day. I diagnose and treat patients around the world through a screen. I write with it. I learn with it. I communicate through it. But I refuse to let it define me, measure my worth, or replace the direct experience of being human.

The irony is not lost on me. I hold in my hand one of the very devices that has helped create this condition. Yet I have chosen to turn it around and use it as a megaphone.

My message is simple:

We are losing our humanity.

Stop. Remember who you are. Take it back before we forget how.

Everything I write is yours to read, free of charge. Paid subscribers may send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being. Those seeking a more extensive private clinical consultation may select the Clinical Membership.

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There was a time when I was told to prepare to die.

The advice was straightforward. There was no treatment being offered that held any real hope. I was encouraged to put my affairs in order and accept what was coming.

I chose another path.

Not because I knew I would survive. I did not. I chose it because I could not accept that my life had been reduced to waiting for death. If there was another possibility, no matter how remote, I intended to search for it.

The truth is, my journey into health did not begin with that diagnosis.

It began decades earlier.

As a young touring rock musician in the late 1960s, I found myself asking questions that few of those around me were asking. While others were chasing the next party, I became fascinated by food, health, and the remarkable ability of the human body to heal itself. I became a vegetarian and entered a world that was still considered strange by most people. During the 1970s, I lectured on nutrition and natural health. I believed I understood what it meant to care for the human body.

Then life happened.

In 1990, I was living exactly as I believed I should. I was sober. I was eating well. I had left alcohol and drugs behind. I owned a successful business, managed a production facility in Hollywood, and felt that life was finally moving in the right direction.

Then, over the next several years, everything unraveled.

My brother took his own life.

My father died.

I discovered that my wife had been unfaithful.

My marriage ended. My children left. I became the primary caregiver for my mother as Alzheimer’s slowly took her away. Financially, I lost almost everything.

None of those events caused my illness.

What they did was cause me to abandon myself.

I returned to the only coping mechanisms I had ever known. Alcohol. Drugs. Late nights. Pizza. Chicken wings. Beer. A sedentary life. I withdrew from family and friends. Little by little, I stopped living according to everything I had spent years believing and teaching.

Knowledge is not enough.

We must live what we know.

Years later came the diagnosis.

Looking back, I do not believe those painful events gave me a bone marrow disease. I believe they led me to stop caring for the very human being I had been entrusted to care for, myself.

The diagnosis became my awakening.

If I was going to survive, I needed more than hope. I needed understanding.

I returned to school and earned a bachelor’s degree in Health Sciences, followed by a master’s degree in Oriental Medicine, qualifying me to practice as a primary care holistic physician. I studied anatomy, physiology, pathology, laboratory medicine, herbal medicine, acupuncture, tuina, moxibustion, and nutrition. My education did not stop there. I went on to study French osteopathy and visceral manipulation. I studied with Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt and learned neural therapy.

I have continued to study both sides of the fence, not to collect credentials, but because no single system contains everything needed to understand a suffering human being.

Yet the degrees and certifications were only part of the education.

My greatest teacher was the road I had already walked.

The years of searching.

The years of health.

The years of self-destruction.

The painful disappointments.

The illness.

The recovery.

And the years spent listening to patients whose stories were often hidden beneath laboratory values and diagnoses.

Over time, all of it became one education.

Western medicine taught me invaluable science.

Oriental medicine taught me to recognize patterns and relationships.

Osteopathy taught me to listen with my hands.

My own illness taught me humility.

My patients continue to teach me what no textbook ever could.

Today my medicine belongs to no single tradition. I borrow gratefully from many, but I am confined by none. I am interested in one thing above all else: understanding the human being sitting in front of me.

Somewhere during my own recovery, I made a promise.

If I were given another chance at life, I would spend the rest of it helping those who were suffering as I had suffered.

That promise has never left me.

I do not measure success by the number of patients I see or the income I earn. I measure it by the moments when someone who has been living in fear begins to rediscover hope. Sometimes laboratory values improve. Sometimes symptoms disappear. But something even more profound can happen.

Not long ago, a patient said to me,

“I’m not the same person I was when we began.”

To me, that is healing.

Health is more than the absence of disease. It is the restoration of the human being. It is the moment when fear begins to give way to confidence, when despair loosens its grip, and when someone realizes that life is no longer only something to endure.

I want more opportunities to do this work.

Not for my sake, but for the sake of those who are suffering. I know the fear that comes with hearing words like terminal and incurable. I know the loneliness. I know what it is like to lie awake wondering whether your life is slowly coming to an end.

No one who has walked that road easily forgets it.

This has never been a career.

It is a promise.

I do not believe that serving others purchases God’s favor or guarantees an easy life. I have simply come to trust that if I remain faithful to the work placed before me, I will have enough to continue doing it. I do not seek wealth or recognition. I seek the opportunity to help those who are still searching for another way.

Everything I have lived through has become part of the physician I am today.

The music.

The addiction.

The searching.

The health.

The loss.

The illness.

The education.

The recovery.

The patients.

None of it was wasted.

It all became medicine.

Many years ago, when I did not know whether I would live, I made a promise that if I were given another chance, I would use whatever remained of my life to help others find their own way through suffering.

I was given that chance.

And so, as long as I am able to listen, to study, to question, and to stand beside another human being who has not yet given up, I will continue.

The promise remains.

And today, I make it again.

Everything I write is yours to read, free of charge. Paid subscribers may send me occasional brief questions about health, diet, movement, healing, and well-being. Those seeking a more extensive private clinical consultation may select the Clinical Membership.

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We’re all looking for answers, and when we find something that agrees with us, it suddenly becomes a certainty.

Certainty can be dangerous because it is not flexible. What is yes today may be no tomorrow. What is a blessing today may become a curse tomorrow.

Everything changes. Our lives change. Our bodies change. The world changes. Our awareness changes.

Being rigid about what we think we have found is often a trap, not a gift.

Surety can keep us tied to an explanation that once served us well. But if we become too attached to that answer, we can find ourselves living in yesterday, unable to recognize what is being asked of us now.

Today is the day we must live. Today holds the issues we must encounter. Today requires the answers we must find.

I have many things that I tell my patients, and many things that I offer to those who read my essays. But you will rarely hear me say, “This is certainly the answer.”

Why?

Because I believe there is an ongoing stream of universal consciousness, a continuous broadcast of information available to be received.

When I am doing my diligence concerning a patient, I sit quietly and ask questions. The answers that come on a particular day are exactly what that patient needs at the time, and I offer them during our next consultation.

But I continue to ask.

A week later, the patient may present differently. Something may have improved. Something new may have appeared. The body is now asking a different question. And because the question has changed, another answer becomes available.

That does not mean the earlier answer was wrong. It was right for the patient seven days ago. It did what it was meant to do. But today, something else needs to be found.

The information is there, waiting to be retrieved, but we do not receive what we never ask for. And I cannot ask a question that the patient’s presentation has not yet given me reason to ask.

Everything can change in twenty-four hours.

And when we find an answer, we should not carve it in stone. Write it on paper with a pencil so you can use the eraser. Crumple the paper and begin again, if necessary.

I know that we all want certainty. After searching for so long and finally finding something, we don’t want to let go of what we believed would be our forever answer.

But let me encourage you to keep looking.

Even after you find what you believe is the answer, bring it into the light of each new day. Look at it again. See whether it still applies.

And if it no longer does, let it go.

Let it go.

A new answer is waiting.

It is sitting there in the silence.

It is sitting there in the stillness.

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Twenty-five years ago, a human being in a white coat looked at me and told me my disease was terminal.

I was advised not to fight. To prepare. To put my affairs in order.

I disagreed.

Not with anger. Not with arrogance. I simply refused to accept that another human being possessed greater authority over my future than I did.

There was no treatment offered, only the recommendation that my spleen be removed.

I refused.

I went home.

And then I got to work.

I changed my life. I changed what I ate. I changed how I moved through the world. I sat quietly with my suffering until it began to teach me. And when I realized I did not know enough, I spent the next ten years in school learning how to help myself and, eventually, others.

None of it was easy.

The only record I have kept from that time is the letter.

I still have it.

Terminal.

Palliative care only.

I do not keep it as a reminder of what was done to me. I keep it as a reminder that no human being, regardless of education, title, or experience, gets the final word on another person’s life.

Terminal.

It is a remarkable word. It suggests an ending, a final station, the last stop on the line.

But I have come to wonder if terminal is sometimes less a statement about the patient and more a confession from medicine:

“We have reached the limits of our understanding.”

That is a very different sentence.

Likewise, I have grown suspicious of the word chronic.

Too often it means, “We have learned to manage this, but we are no longer willing to ask why it remains.”

The question is not whether a disease has become chronic.

The question is whether we have become comfortable with its persistence.

Of course, there are diseases that take people from us despite our best efforts. Human beings are fragile creatures, and humility demands that we admit this.

But humility cuts both ways.

If it is humble for a patient to accept that he may die, then it should be equally humble for a human being in a white coat to admit that they may be wrong.

Every morning, I woke up and was presented with the same question:

“What are you going to do today?”

That, I have come to believe, is the question that matters.

Your path will not be my path.

You may choose surgery. You may choose chemotherapy. You may choose medication, prayer, herbs, acupuncture, diet, or all of the above. I am not interested in prescribing your road.

I am interested in reminding you that it is your road.

Somewhere along the way, we came to believe we are cosmic victims.

We have begun to believe that our lives are happening to us, that our bodies have betrayed us, and that our future belongs to experts who have never spent a single night inside our skin.

I reject that completely.

This flesh and blood is not my enemy. It has carried me for more than seventy years. It has survived my ignorance, my excesses, my fears, and my mistakes. If anything, my body has been trying to save me my entire life.

So when someone tells me that something is chronic or terminal, I listen respectfully.

And then I remember that these words are not prophecies.

They are opinions, educated opinions, perhaps, but opinions nonetheless.

Human beings possess a remarkable capacity to heal, adapt, endure, and surprise.

Will everyone survive?

No.

Will everyone be healed?

No.

But every human being deserves the opportunity to participate in their own healing.

They must.

Do not hand your life to another human being simply because they wear a white coat.

Listen carefully.

Ask questions.

Seek counsel.

Learn everything you can.

Then decide.

Twenty-five years ago, medicine gave me a terminal diagnosis.

I disagreed.

And if there is one thing I have learned since that day, it is this:

Never surrender your faith in this human creation before it has finished telling you what it is capable of.

Dr. G

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There is something I have been observing for many years, and I suspect it will not be well received by a culture that worships intensity.

Every morning, before the sun has fully risen, millions of people lace their shoes, fill their water bottles, and set out in pursuit of health. Some make their way to the gym. Others take to the streets, the trails, and the neighborhood parks.

I have borne witness to it for decades and, yes, have even participated.

I was once guilty of the same.

I was a gymnast, a martial artist, and a competitive cyclist, all before I learned how to be, and how to move, like water.

They push, strain, sweat, gasp, and collapse. They wear watches that congratulate them for elevated heart rates and applications that reward them for suffering. They compare their exhaustion with one another and, at the end of it all, leave believing they have done something noble.

“That was a great workout,” they say.

Was it?

I am not speaking against movement. Movement is life. Exercise, at least as we know it today, is something else entirely.

For most of human history, there was no such thing as exercise. There was only life.

We walked to gather water. We carried children. We climbed hills. We tended gardens. We danced, worked, built, and rested. Movement was woven into our existence, not separated from it and scheduled between appointments.

Somewhere along the way we began confusing movement with punishment.

Hard exercise asks one question: “How much can you endure?”

Soft movement asks another: “What does your body require?”

The distinction is not insignificant.

When we exercise with great intensity, day after day, we repeatedly place ourselves into a sympathetic response. The body does not know whether it is being pursued by a tiger or running on a treadmill. It responds as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, with vigilance, acceleration, and a temporary suspension of repair.

Fight.

Flight.

Survive.

Do this occasionally and the body responds beautifully. Do it chronically and one begins to wonder if we are stealing from tomorrow in order to feel accomplished today.

In my observation, millions of people are doing harm to themselves while pursuing the aesthetic appearance of health.

They leave the gym, step off the trail, or return from their run flushed and exhausted and mistake depletion for health. They admire the soreness that follows and call it progress. Yet if we were to ask the body itself, I suspect it would offer another opinion.

“Please,” it might say, “stop chasing me.”

I have come to believe that living in a prolonged sympathetic state steals years from us. Not only years, but presentation. It changes the face, the eyes, the quality of our sleep, our digestion, our patience, and our capacity to heal.

There is a reason the old masters moved like water.

Water does not struggle against the rock. Given enough time, it shapes mountains.

The soft overcomes the hard.

A quiet swim. A walk beneath the trees. Qigong at sunrise. Gentle stretching. Carrying groceries. Working in the garden. Riding a bicycle without urgency. These things nourish us differently.

When the body feels safe, it repairs.

The breath deepens.

The heart settles.

Healing, after all, is not what happens during effort. Healing is what happens after every meaningful effort. The pause is not empty. It is where the body repairs itself.

Perhaps this explains why, at this stage of my life, I no longer ask, “How hard can I push?”

I ask, “What would love look like in movement today?”

Sometimes the answer is a few soft laps in a pool.

Sometimes it is qigong beneath a live oak.

Sometimes it is a ninety-minute nap on an afternoon when I have already slept ten hours.

The body possesses an intelligence that far exceeds my own. My role is not to dominate it, but to listen.

If I am wrong, then I have merely encouraged a few people to walk more softly through life.

If I am right, then our culture’s worship of intensity may one day be recognized as one of the great misunderstandings of modern health.

P.S. I write in generalities intentionally.

There are those who would like me to tell them precisely what to eat, how to move, what supplements to take, how long to fast, and what path they should follow. I understand the desire. We live in a time when everyone seems eager to become a doctor, coach, guide, or guru from behind a camera.

That is not my work.

I believe there is a kind of malpractice in offering specific medical advice to people we have never met, touched, listened to, or come to know. Human beings are not diagnoses. They are histories, relationships, constitutions, traumas, habits, and mysteries.

What nourishes one person may harm another.

So I speak as one man sharing his observations after a lifetime of study, practice, illness, healing, and listening. My intention is not to convince, prescribe, or sell. It is simply to open eyes and ears.

If something I write resonates with you, wonderful. Sit with it. Question it. Explore it. Speak with those you trust. Look deeper, whether with me, with another practitioner, or through your own diligent inquiry.

The responsibility for your life has always belonged to you.

I have no wish to take that from your hands.

Dr. G

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An old tune...

When I fall in love, it will be forever.
When I give my heart, it will be completely.
Or I’ll never give my heart.
And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too,
is when I fall in love with you.

It is a beautiful song.

It is also a dangerous one.

Not because it speaks of love, but because, if we are not careful, we begin to mistake poetry for instruction. Somewhere along the way, we allowed the lyrics of songs, the stories of lovers, and the promises of fairy tales to become the foundation upon which we built our lives.

These are dreams, and dreams only sometimes come true.

Be wise.

Throughout our lives, we create maps. They tell us how to behave, how to react, what to expect, and where we believe we are going.

Many of these maps were drawn when we were children. Others were created during times of suffering, disappointment, or great hope.

Yet the strangest thing happens: the maps remain, even after the landscape has changed.

We continue following yesterday’s directions while wondering why they no longer lead us where we wish to go.

Wisdom is not found in faithfully obeying every map we have ever drawn.

Wisdom is found in recognizing when the map has become older information that no longer serves us.

We also build our lives upon expectations.

We decide where we should arrive and how we should get there. We tell ourselves, “By this age I will have found love. By this age I will have succeeded. By this age I will have become the person I imagined.”

Then life, as it often does, refuses to cooperate.

When our plans fail, we rarely question the plans themselves. Instead, we question ourselves. We conclude that we have failed, that we are somehow deficient, when perhaps nothing is wrong with us at all.

Perhaps it is the map that was inaccurate.

Every day we are overwhelmed by information, opinions, and so-called wisdom.

We pick up our phones and are immediately told: “This is the mark to meet. This is the body to possess. This is the life to pursue. This is the goal to achieve.”

But these are not our desires.

They are someone else’s desires, someone else’s business model, someone else’s definition of a life well lived.

We are being taught to want more, spend more, achieve more, and remain forever dissatisfied.

Insatiability has become an industry.

And yet, none of this is new.

Did not our parents do the same?

“Look at Cousin Johnny,” they would say. “He went to college. He’s a doctor now. Look how happy he is. This is what you should do. This is what you should become.”

They pointed toward admiration and applause and asked us if we wanted them too.

But there is a question that is seldom asked:

Is that your life?

Not everyone is meant to become Cousin Johnny.

Not everyone is meant to fall in love forever.

Not everyone is meant to arrive at the same destination.

Your task is not to fulfill the expectations of your parents, your culture, social media, or the younger version of yourself who drew maps decades ago.

Your task is to pay attention.

To observe.

To ask, “Does this still belong to me?”

And if the answer is no, have the courage to fold the map, place it gently in your pocket, and continue walking.

After all, the landscape has changed.

and so have you...

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Skepticism is not an attempt to break down the beliefs of others. It is the acceptance of three simple words:

I don’t know.

That does not mean I will not try to find out. Quite the contrary.

If there were never a question, why would anyone do research? Why would a scientist spend a lifetime in a laboratory? Why would a philosopher sit beneath a tree? Why would a physician spend decades asking why one patient heals while another does not?

Every discovery begins with a question. Answers are simply the remedies we apply to them.

What I have come to appreciate in my now long life is that every answer I have ever found eventually gave birth to another question. The road does not end. It simply continues in another direction.

There was a time when I thought skepticism meant doubting. Today, I believe it means remaining available.

There is a great freedom in admitting that we do not know.

“I don’t know” has led me to books, to teachers, to monasteries, to churches, to laboratories, to patients, and ultimately, to silence.

And it is there, in silence, that things become interesting.

There is a way to come to know in the vacuum of self, because the vacuum is not empty at all.

Space is information.

Fifty years ago, a man could stand in an empty room and confidently declare, “There is nothing here.” Today, we know better. That same room is saturated with information: radio waves, cellular signals, Wi-Fi, and satellite transmissions, all moving silently around us, awaiting a receiver.

Perhaps consciousness is not so different.

There was a time when I carried my questions to God. Later, I carried them to myself. Today, I carry them more often to space itself.

I do not know what is listening.

Perhaps nothing at all.

Perhaps something without ears.

I only know that when I become sufficiently quiet, answers often arrive with a familiarity that makes me wonder where they had been hiding all along.

This is what I mean when I say that space is information.

A library is filled with information, but an unread book remains unread. Likewise, silence appears empty until we are willing to sit within it long enough to discover what it may have to offer.

I cannot promise that everyone who sits quietly will discover what I have discovered. I can only say that silence has been a generous teacher to me.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly comfortable with my ignorance.

Not because I enjoy the void that ignorance inhabits, but because there is so much to know that I do not know.

At some point, if we are fortunate, we stop interrupting ourselves. We stop worrying about what others might think and saying, “There goes Gabriel again.”

We simply become willing to pay attention.

After seventy-six years, I remain unconvinced that I have arrived anywhere of significance. But I have learned this much:

Skepticism has not made me cynical.

It has made me available.

And so, with gratitude to Cat Stevens, I remain on the road to find out.

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Sometimes I wish I were a tree.

I would have no choice but to grow upward. I could not pull my roots from the earth and wander down the street looking for better soil. I would have to learn to draw nourishment from where I had been planted.

I have not lived that way.

I have lived as a man who plants himself, grows for a season, and then, just as the roots begin to go deep, pulls them up and looks for new ground.

Music. Electronics. Ministry. Medicine. Qigong. Writing. Martial arts.

Looking back across seventy-seven years, I see a pattern, and for a long time I misread it as failure. It was not failure. In every one of those fields I developed real competence. I could play. I could build and repair. I could counsel a congregation. I could diagnose and treat and still do. I did not leave because I lacked ability. I left because cultivation had begun asking for more than competence, and something in me reached for the exit instead of the depths.

There is a reason for this, and it is not flattering, but it is honest.

A beginner is free. Nobody expects anything from a beginner, least of all himself. But a competent person becomes vulnerable. Once you are good at something, you risk finding out how good you could actually become, or worse, where your limits are. As long as you keep beginning again, you get to remain forever promising. You never have to discover your ceiling.

The temptation to begin again is often strongest when cultivation is asking the most of us. That is not a coincidence. It is the moment when life quietly asks, “Will you stay?”

Novelty can feel an awful lot like growth. It keeps us moving, keeps us interested, keeps us believing that we are changing. But movement and cultivation are not the same thing. One carries us across the surface. The other asks us to go deeper.

There used to be a structure that allowed for both, and it is worth remembering.

A young person went to a liberal arts college for four years and was given the chance to taste many things, to sample what suited them and what enriched them, before committing to a direction. Only then did they choose, and having chosen, they gave themselves to it.

Today, we ask children to decide what they will become before they have had enough life to know who they are. At twelve, they are already being pointed toward careers. At eighteen, they are expected to commit to a future they have barely begun to inhabit.

I have great respect for those who never needed that stage at all, who knew early that they wanted to be a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician, or an auto mechanic. These are not lesser paths. They demand enormous commitment, and the people who walk them well are not the ones who kept jumping between trades.

They are called master carpenters, master mechanics, and master plumbers for good reason.

They stayed.

They concentrated.

They allowed one discipline to shape them over decades.

That word, master, is not handed out for sampling. It is handed out for remaining.

There was a time when I saw this tendency in myself as a defect. Today, I see it differently.

Every path gave me something.

Music taught me to listen.

Ministry taught me to sit with suffering.

Medicine taught me to observe.

Qigong taught me stillness.

Writing is teaching me to gather all of it into one place.

Perhaps I was never changing directions as often as I imagined. Perhaps life was simply preparing the soil.

At seventy-seven, I no longer think the question worth asking is what else I can become. I have enough in my hands to occupy several lifetimes.

The question that matters now is different and, frankly, more frightening:

What would happen if I fully inhabited the life I already have?

What happens if I give the remainder of my life to the things already in my hands rather than to one more beginning?

The challenge was never finding another path.

The challenge is walking farther down the one I am already on.

So this is the question I ask myself now, and the one I would offer you if you recognize any of this in your own life. If you find yourself wanting to begin again—in music, in a relationship, in a discipline, or in a body of work you have not finished—stop and ask an honest question before you take the first step toward the new thing.

Why?

Not the story you tell yourself about opportunity, curiosity, or timing.

The real reason.

Because sometimes the true answer is that you are escaping the difficult work of cultivation, the part where competence asks for commitment, the part where life finally asks you to stay long enough to discover who you might become.

And perhaps that is why, from time to time, I find myself wishing I were a tree.

Not because trees have easier lives.

But because once they put down roots, they have no choice but to discover how tall they were meant to grow.

Dr. G.

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