Essay One: The Question That Never Left Me
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Albert Einstein
Every clinician carries stories that never appear in patient notes.
Over the past three decades, every person who has crossed my path has left something behind, not simply a diagnosis or a treatment plan, but a memory of shared humanity. There have been moments of uncertainty, profound joy, quiet grief, resilience, compassion, and extraordinary courage. Every encounter has shaped not only the people I have cared for, but also the clinician and human being I have become.
This essay is dedicated to them.
It is not the story of a theory I set out to prove.
It is the story of a question that has accompanied me throughout my professional life.
How does healing happen?
Looking back, I realise that this question did not begin in a hospital.
It began much earlier.
I grew up in Sri Lanka, where nature was never separate from daily life and where traditional systems of healing quietly existed alongside modern medicine. Ayurveda, meditation, prayer and the rhythms of the natural world were woven into everyday experience. As a child, I never thought of these traditions as “alternative.” They were simply different ways of understanding life, health and our relationship with the world around us.
Years later, I travelled to London to study at the British School of Osteopathy. My education immersed me in anatomy, embryology, physiology, biomechanics, pathology and rigorous clinical reasoning. I loved the precision of science. Understanding the remarkable architecture of the human body deepened my respect for medicine and strengthened my conviction that careful observation should always guide good clinical practice.
What I did not yet realise was that science would not diminish my sense of wonder.
It would deepen it.
Shortly after qualifying, I began working in the neonatal intensive care unit at Barnet Hospital in London.
I arrived as a young clinician with enthusiasm, humility and far more questions than answers.
Neonatal medicine three decades ago was very different from today. Medical science has progressed remarkably, and countless babies born prematurely now survive and flourish because of extraordinary advances in neonatal care. When I first entered the unit, however, every day carried uncertainty. Babies born at twenty eight or thirty weeks of gestation faced enormous challenges, and survival could never be assumed.
The neonatal unit became my first great teacher.
Every incubator held a story.
Every family carried hope alongside fear.
Parents sat for hours beside their babies, waiting, watching, praying and learning to live with uncertainty. It was an environment of extraordinary scientific precision, yet equally a place of immense human vulnerability.
As practitioners, we worked with great care and sensitivity. These tiny human beings were so fragile that even touch demanded humility. Their bodies were scarcely larger than the span of my hand. During treatment, it was often only possible to introduce the gentlest contact with two fingertips, respecting the delicacy of the developing body while offering the smallest therapeutic intervention.
What fascinated me was not only the technical excellence of neonatal medicine, but the responsiveness of these infants.
The monitors surrounding each incubator continuously recorded heart rate, breathing patterns, oxygen saturation and other physiological indicators. As part of careful clinical care, I observed how calm presence, gentle therapeutic touch and attentive clinical care were often accompanied by changes in these physiological patterns. At the time, I could not fully explain what I was witnessing.
I only knew that something important was taking place.
These babies could not describe their experience.
Many had not yet developed the neurological pathways that would later support language or conscious memory.
And yet they responded.
Not through words.
Through physiology.
Through relationship.
Through the quiet dialogue between developing nervous systems, skilled clinicians and loving parents.
Those moments stayed with me.
They raised questions that no textbook had prepared me to ask.
How early does human experience begin to shape us?
How does a developing nervous system recognise safety?
What role do relationship, presence, touch and compassionate attention play in healing?
Could the human organism be responding to more than the mechanics of medical intervention alone?
At that stage of my career, I had no language for these questions.
There was no grand theory.
No framework that could fully hold everything I was witnessing.
There was only curiosity.
As my clinical work expanded into paediatric osteopathy, pregnancy care, family practice and eventually the treatment of adults living with chronic pain, persistent stress, burnout, emotional suffering and the lasting effects of trauma, the patients changed.
The question did not.
Again and again, I found myself becoming less interested in fixing symptoms than in understanding the conditions that allowed healing to emerge.
A joint could often be mobilised.
A muscle could often be released.
Pain could sometimes be reduced.
But healing felt different.
Healing seemed to involve relationship.
It involved trust.
It involved safety.
It involved meaning.
It involved the nervous system.
Above all, it seemed to involve the remarkable capacity of the human organism to move towards balance when the right conditions were present.
As my experience deepened, something else began to change.
It was not only my technical skills that evolved.
It was the way I listened.
Patients told me their stories through words.
Their bodies also expressed stories through breathing, posture, movement, muscle tone, facial expression and subtle physiological patterns. Over many years, I found myself becoming increasingly attentive to the coherence of the whole person rather than to isolated symptoms alone. This did not replace careful scientific reasoning or the patient’s own narrative. Instead, it invited me to ask whether different forms of listening might reveal different dimensions of the same human experience.
Alongside these observable patterns, another dimension gradually entered my awareness.
After many years in practice, I found myself becoming sensitive to qualities that were more difficult to describe through conventional medical language alone, the overall coherence of a person, the rhythms expressed through breathing and movement, the responsiveness of tissue, and the subtle ways in which the body seemed to organise itself during moments of safety, trust and therapeutic connection.
I do not present these observations as scientific conclusions.
They remain part of my lived clinical experience.
They are observations that have continued to shape my curiosity and encouraged me to seek a broader scientific language capable of exploring them.
The more I observed, the more I realised that I needed a wider framework.
This led me towards developmental neuroscience, attachment theory, trauma research, interoception and embodied approaches to human wellbeing. The writings of clinicians and researchers such as Bessel van der Kolk, Eugene Gendlin and Peter Levine, together with later conversations with neuroscientists exploring interoception and human development, did not provide definitive answers.
They provided something equally valuable.
A vocabulary.
A language through which the questions born in the neonatal unit could continue to evolve.
As my practice grew, another question gradually emerged.
How do we help people create lasting change?
Not simply temporary relief.
Not dependence upon a practitioner.
But a deeper transformation that enables people to become active participants in their own wellbeing.
This question became deeply personal.
Like many clinicians, I realised that caring for others also requires learning how to care for oneself. If I wished to understand healing, I could not study only my patients.
I also had to understand my own relationship with health, resilience, presence and balance.
That inquiry gradually led me beyond the consulting room.
I began facilitating small retreats, initially across Europe, bringing together evidence informed clinical practice with movement, breath, rest, community, contemplative practice and nature. I observed that when people stepped away from the demands of everyday life, meaningful changes often became possible, not because of any single therapy, but because multiple dimensions of their lives were being supported together.
These observations did not become conclusions.
They became new questions.
Could healing be understood as something larger than treatment?
Could the future of wellbeing require a more integrated understanding of what it means to be human?
Those questions continue to lead me today.
They have taken me into conversations with clinicians, neuroscientists, trauma researchers, contemplative practitioners and Indigenous knowledge holders from different cultures. They have also shaped the creation of Sen Wellness Sanctuary, not as the destination of my inquiry, but as its living expression: a place where science, clinical practice, contemplative traditions, nature and community continue to learn from one another.
After thirty years, I still cannot say with certainty how healing happens.
Perhaps that is the wrong ambition.
Perhaps the purpose of a lifetime in practice is not to arrive at certainty, but to cultivate better questions.
Everything that follows in this series is an exploration of those questions.
