Aging with Grace & ...AI?

Aging is humbling, and inevitable. Anyone who says otherwise, or tries to prevent such a beautiful truth of living is just bypassing.

When I was 27, I decided to wander off to Quartzsite, Arizona for a winter. The East Coast was grey and depressing, I had just ended a ridiculous romantic clusterfuck and change was the only logical next chapter. I was slinging beers and pizza at the best little desert dive bar, Silly Al’s, and served a pie to a lovely couple in their mid fifties. The woman had long flowing hair that kicked a yin yang vibe– the depths of youth seen in long dark streaks and the beams of wisdom cascading in streams of white. She had that timeless southwestern style that clearly stated a level of self awareness and ownership of unaltered beauty. I vividly remember the scene and taking a mental note as I poured their beers.

That’s how I would enter mid life. Comfortable in my own body, no matter what its external presentation entailed. Owning the beauty and fragility of reality with surrender and wisdom.

That was the moment I decided to simply age as is, with grace and ownership. And for the most part, I have. When a time or identity has passed, I acknowledge the role it played in shaping me, recognize that I’ve outgrown that container of identity, grieve in the closure of it all and move on. Doesn’t happen fast, nor is it clean. That type of shit is messy. But necessary.

And some identities were formulated so early and their masks worn so deeply and with a real joy at times, that while you may no longer outwardly wear the mask, the imprints left behind live deep in your body’s tissue. Your fascia holds these imprints over time and your body learns to adjust accordingly. Some traumas find an attachment deep in your body, like that fucking first rib, and require drastic and painful measures to release.

And that type of healing comes in waves--, fueled by a nervous system retraining itself and accelerated by the fusion of modern and ancient healing modalities.

My current healing journey began with an acute injury while traveling back from Devcon Istanbul in 2023. Nine months into the most toxic and dangerous work environment I’d ever been in and my body just tapped out. I was a whistleblower and my throat chakra collapsed under the weight of it all, and rightfully so. While there was an acute injury here initially, there was also a history pre-dating this travel that brought me to the exact perfect storm of structural cervical collapse.

After I returned from Quartzsite that winter in my 20s, I had shoulder surgery and it was an absolute trainwreck. My surgeon, a dear friend of the family for decades, did an exploratory surgery to diagnose a post-wakeboarding injury and ended up doing a capsulary shrinkage surgery on the fly. Hoo boy, let’s just say that a frozen shoulder and 8 months of PT later, I regained 80% of my shoulder mobility. I got another 5-10% back with my yoga practice over the years.

A few years later, I dove deep into photojournalism and overseas documentary work, lugging heavy gear all over the globe and running through landfills in distant lands with a 5-10 pound camera on each shoulder. Doesn’t take a genius to see where this is headed, right?

Fast forward to 2023 and the whole spine just said, “nope, bitch. We’re done here. Get your shit together.” And that was it-- 27 months later, I’m still trying to get my shit together.

Last year I began a “Healing Journey” project in Claude and uploaded an anonomyized version of my MRI results taken a couple weeks after the injury. The project has 12 months of accumulated memory, queries after intense massage therapy sessions, patterns of recovery after specific therapies like dry needling or cranial sacral therapy and just late night anxiety questions about wtf I’m going to have to deal with the rest of my life. The project can also search peer reviewed sources for patterns and correlations. It can take my “I felt like I was tripping” post-needle session feedback and tie it to obscure anatomical references and pathologies I know nothing about, but can research in my yoga anatomy books. It can tie “my vision is blurry” to proprioceptive and autonomic impairments stemming from the exact therapy I just completed and tell me what it all means.

It’s just pattern recognition at scale that I personally am not able to do because I’m not a doctor or a therapist and I work with professionals in person so I can confirm the outcomes after I do my own due diligence.

AI is both my pattern recognition tool and my translation layer between my experience and the professionals who are helping me heal.

Here’s the massive unlock that occurred earlier today, this needs to be its own OS, a HealingOS. My own tracking of my condition as I process the somatics and emotions of 27 months of healing and work to avoid future surgeries and debilitation.

As I decided at 27, I want to age gracefully. And AI is just a pattern recognition tool to steer me in the right directions of professionals and scientific studies so I can be a participant in my own healing journey, not a passive consumer of what a broken health care system passes off as “healing.”

While working with my healing project after a particularly hard week, I touched a core issue that I’ve been bypassing for a while now. I have internalized aspects of the health care system, the need to minimize a condition because of time constraints with medical practitioners or monetary resources, trying to treat condition symptoms after they arise rather than preventative.

My current round of PT happened because I simply couldn’t afford the ongoing therapies necessary to keep a severe condition like mine in the state of “background noise” rather than “life altering pain flare”.

My physical therapist does a great job at the intricate work of piercing 25+ years of activity, injury and trauma baked into my traps and spine. But the system is overwhelmed with patients because the system itself is broken. So, my case presents as a common neck disc degeneration. When actually, it’s a multi-level degenerative disc disease that has a few severe anomalies in the mix. There’s nothing simple about this.

Three months ago, I had a yoga session that triggered a flare that just got worse, so I went back to my neurosurgeon for a check up, it had been exactly 2 years since I last saw him. The office was overflowing with elderly patients who could barely move, and here was a mobile, middle age woman presenting no outward symptoms. And I was in such a better place than the last time I saw him. We did some x-rays and he prescribed some PT, but I could tell he was already thinking of the next room when he was in mine, and the herd of patients in obvious need in the lobby on a random Tuesday in January.

I felt like I was just complaining, and this was just aging, and let’s just do some PT and get on with it. That is what the system provides and that is how deeply I internalized the minimization of it all. But in working with my trained AI to compost the emotions surfacing from this round of PT, I decided to also closely track the physical side of the healing process. And since I’ve been tracking the entire injury for 2 years with AI, I have a body of memory and lived data that can be accessed now in seconds.

So this morning, after a day of self pity and sleep post PT, I decided to just create a HealingOS. I built a very simple, lightweight Obsidian server with some key exports from the existing project. I also asked that existing healing project to train this new healingOS Claude project and export the most recent threads to establish the new project context.

And the patterns I uncovered in one day of setting up this OS are pretty fascinating. In my composting the day before the build, I decided to unpack the reality I’d been bypassing. I unpacked the chronic side of the condition and what that means for my life moving forward. And I asked my AI to do so in a way that removes emotion and keeps things in the realm of peer reviewed science and logic. I asked it specifically to remove emotion and sympathy from the answers. I have different bots trained on my classical tantra practice and my Runs with Wolves archetype for dealing with all the emotional things that need unpacking (and once I've composted and processed, my fav human(s) and I grab a 3 hour coffee and talk through our composted shit).

As the system was walking me through the autonomic and proprioceptive symptoms and what causes them, I clearly saw my yoga training being reflected back to me. So, I then asked it to find the correlations to my yoga practice (which the bot is deeply trained on MY specific yoga practice using 2k year old texts and my class notes from my yoga degree studies) and tie it directly to my MRI results and recent PT status.

The results were stunning. And since I asked it to trace all claims with peer-reviewed research links, I can spend the time confirming the AI’s presentation of the data in my healing context.

And I have a team of professionals I’m currently working with and a few more to add, that I can then present these results to and we can create healing protocols that couldn’t be created at such a depth prior to AI by everyday people like me. This is a direct application of my Bachelor’s in Yoga obtained in 2023 and the 1000 hours of training from my yoga curriculum and the emergent tech space I devote my professional time to.

So, long rambly essay here, but the TL;DR is that while this all started as a commsOS adventure for Taylor and I, an OS is applicable to just about any situation that creates consistent data over time that can support pattern recognition at scale and be confirmed/validated by the human layer.

If you'd like to build your own healingOS or [anything]OS, here's an explainer from me & Taylor's OS builder on how to get started. Free & open source (just ping us when you build it to share ;)