Everything your body does runs on six categories of physical input. Understanding them changes how you relate to every environment you walk into.
Every environment you walk into is some combination of six things acting on your tissue. Pressure, temperature, vibration, light, fields, and chemistry. The first five come from the world around you. The sixth is your own internal signaling: hormones, neurotransmitters, metabolic shifts.
Most people have never been taught to sense any of them deliberately. Understanding that changes everything.
Six inputs. One system. Always running.
Every surface you touch, every breath you take, every gravitational load on your skeleton. Pressure is the most constant input your body receives. It shapes your posture, your fascia, your proprioception. When you lie in a sauna, when you stand barefoot on grass, when someone holds your hand, that's pressure, acting on tissue, changing signaling.
Your mechanoreceptors (Merkel cells, Pacinian corpuscles, Ruffini endings) are translating pressure into neural signals right now. Your body is reading the world through touch at a level of detail you've never been taught to notice.
Not just "hot" and "cold." Your body is a thermal engine. Every metabolic process runs at a temperature-dependent rate. Thermoreceptors in your skin are mapping the thermal landscape of your environment continuously. A two-degree shift in skin temperature changes vascular tone, nerve conduction speed, enzyme kinetics, and mood.
This is where infrared therapy enters the picture. Your body emits infrared light continuously. When an external source matches your own emission wavelengths, the interaction is qualitatively different from convective heat. That's not metaphor. That's physics.
Sound is vibration. Your voice is vibration. The hum of the room you're sitting in is vibration. Your cells respond to mechanical oscillation at frequencies from sub-hertz to ultrasonic. When a didgeridoo resonates in your chest cavity, that's not a feeling. That's a measurable change in tissue state.
Vibration is also how fascia communicates. Tensional waves propagate through your connective tissue matrix at speeds and frequencies that encode information about posture, load, and movement. Your body is a vibrating system, always.
You are photosensitive at every level. Retinal photoreceptors set your circadian rhythm. Melanopsin in your skin responds to blue light. Cytochrome c oxidase in your mitochondria absorbs red and near-infrared. Your skin emits roughly 500 watts per square meter of infrared light, continuously.
If you could shift your own emission into visible wavelengths, you'd be several times brighter than noon sun. That's not poetry. That's physics measured by instruments. Bright Blood is the book I wrote about what happens when you take that seriously.
Electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, the bioelectric fields generated by your own nervous system and heart. Your heart produces an electromagnetic field measurable several feet from your body. Your brain generates oscillating fields that synchronize with other brains in proximity.
This is where entrainment lives. When two nervous systems are in a room together, their fields interact. That's not woo. That's physics, and it's why the container matters as much as the content.
The internal input. Hormones, neurotransmitters, metabolic byproducts, pH shifts, blood glucose, cortisol, oxytocin. This is the input you generate yourself. It's modulated by everything above: pressure changes hormone release, temperature shifts enzyme kinetics, vibration alters neurotransmitter balance, light resets circadian chemistry, fields influence cardiac coherence.
The six inputs aren't separate channels. They're one integrated system. When you learn to notice them, you start to understand why certain environments feel restorative and others feel depleting. The difference isn't subjective. It's physical. And it's trainable.
Interoception, proprioception, nociception, and the dozens of senses you were never taught to count.
Read more →Your body runs on timescales from femtoseconds to years, all at once. When they sync, you experience flow.
Read more →The architecture underneath everything I teach. Each law is observable, each is trainable.
Read more →Curiosity is the master key. If you're curious, reach out.