In this video, I share a simple yet challenging exercise to help you determine if you have genuinely let go.

The Exercise:

1. Find your “Unconditional Love” anchor: Think of something you love without reservation. Maybe it’s your children when they were babies, or a puppy. Feel that intense warmth and love in your chest right now.

2. The Swap: While holding that exact same feeling of love, imagine swapping that image for the person you say you’ve forgiven.

If that feeling of love wavers, tightens, or disappears when you see their face, there is likely still work to be done.

Why This Matters

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but true forgiveness means reaching a state where you can send love even to those who hurt you.

Remember: Forgiveness is for you, not for them.

By forgiving, you aren’t letting them “win” and you aren’t “losing” anything. You are simply choosing to stop carrying the weight. You are choosing to be done.

Watch the full breakdown here:

​Have you REALLY forgiven them?

Stress affects everybody, myself included. Even though I talk a lot about not giving in to fear, trusting God, and staying positive, the truth is, sometimes life still gets to you.

A little while ago, I found a lump in my neck that grew pretty quickly. At first, I thought maybe it was just an inflamed lymph node or something like that. I did a few sessions of electro-lymphatic therapy to see if we could get things moving again.

That didn’t really fix it, so I finally agreed to get it checked out. They ran tests, and eventually the diagnosis came back: cancer.

I’ve always said that if I ever got sick like that, I’d want to start with the natural route first. I’ve seen family members, close friends, and clients get hurt more by the treatments than by the disease itself.

But here’s what I didn’t fully think through: the impact on the people around you.

My daughters lost their mother to cancer about seven years ago, so just hearing that news from me was traumatic for them all over again.

Christi, my fiancée, immediately went into action mode, which is exactly what she does. She starts looking at everything from every angle, trying to figure out every possible outcome and every possible path forward.

She wants me to follow the plan she has carefully researched. I don’t. That’s causing tension in our relationship. She says she will respect my wishes no matter what, but I can still feel her disappointment.

My staff at the office and my clients all look at me with that same expression — concern, pity, all of it — and honestly, I hate that.

So is it selfish for me not to want to follow the standard protocol?

Ever since I was officially diagnosed, the whole machine has kicked in. I’m getting calls and referrals from oncology centers, diagnostic labs, imaging centers — people calling from everywhere.

I can see how easy it would be to get swept up in all of it. I’m pretty sure I signed something in the fine print on one of those visits that gave them permission to start sharing my information with all these institutions.

Honestly, it feels a lot like when you request an insurance quote from an “independent” app — suddenly everybody is calling and messaging you nonstop.

I want to make my own choices.

Is that selfish?

It’s stressful, no question.

I’ve also been stressed about cash flow. Business is good, but I just invested in something I’m not really liquid in yet.

And I’ve been paying out of pocket for all of my medical care. I know that might sound crazy to people who don’t live in a chiropractic or natural-health world, but the last time I went to an MD for anything “routine” was more than 20 years ago.

I’m not saying I never get symptoms or anything like that. I just usually let my body handle things naturally.

Honestly, I don’t even know why I’m putting all of this out there, because I really don’t want sympathy. But writing has been therapeutic for me, so maybe I’m just trying to sort through it in real time.

I feel like I need to stay positive if I want to get healthy, but I also want to make sure Christi, Chloe, Audrey, and Forrest are taken care of if I don’t.

So if you’re reading this and starting to look at me in that “certain way,” don’t.

I’m an empath. I feel things deeply. So if you want to lighten the mood, tell me a dirty joke. I’d appreciate that — something funny enough to make me laugh, not cringe.

Live long and prosper,
Dan

Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it.

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This is trust.2:10

The adjustment itself was the kind of thing that looks alarming from the outside. He took me off balance, told me he had me, and I just had to believe him. My daughter does that same trust fall off the back of the couch, and watching her do it gives me the same feeling I had in that moment: pure, helpless faith that someone is paying attention.

“Look how much straighter he is.”

When it was over, the difference was visible. People around us could see it. He was working on something real, and it worked.

I genuinely appreciated the whole thing. I appreciated his daughters bringing him to camp. I appreciated that he didn’t charge me. And I appreciated that somewhere between the shoulder adjustment and the trust fall, I stopped hunching, at least for a little while.

He could tell what was wrong just by feeling.0:26

A displaced rib can quietly hijack everything above and below it. That’s the central finding of this hands-on session, where a chiropractor works through a patient who had just been treated a few days prior and comes in carrying a misaligned rib that’s pulling on the shoulder, tightening the hip, and compressing the breath.

The work starts at the legs, where one is running slightly short. It’s minor, and the practitioner notes the patient was recently seen, so the body is already in a better state than usual. What isn’t minor is the rib. The moment it’s located, the reaction is immediate.

One Rib, Full Chain

The rib displacement isn’t just a local problem. As the session unfolds, it becomes clear the same misalignment is affecting the shoulder on that side. Fix the rib, and the shoulder problem changes character. That’s the pattern here: a single structural issue feeding tension through an entire kinetic chain.

After addressing the rib, the practitioner moves to the cranial region, finding tightness around the mastoid. A small torque release at the neck, with minimal force, is enough to shift something downstream.

Hardly any pressure, hardly any force, but just a little torque.

The effect is visible almost immediately. What had been restricted breathing opens up into something coordinated, the hips begin to move, and the body starts to settle into a more organized rhythm.

Tension Travels Down

Once the neck work is done, a core of tension that had been locked in place becomes traceable. It runs straight down to the hip on one side, specifically around the piriformis. The practitioner addresses it directly, and the tenderness confirms the connection.

“All of a sudden we have a whole core of tension going down to this hip.”

The shoulder gets a final look. The collarbone is involved, and once that’s released, the shoulder restriction clears. The practitioner checks the other side, finds something subtler, and decides not to push it.

The Result

The session closes at the belly button, a reflex point used to check overall integration. When it produces that characteristic wobble, the work is done.

The patient’s report: feels good. For a body that came in with a displaced rib, a compressed shoulder, cranial tension, and a locked hip, that’s a reasonable outcome for one visit. The rib was the linchpin, and once it was addressed, the rest of the corrections held.

Hope you enjoyed the video. If you are interested in learning more about DeFT, please join the TIC Healer Academy, follow our You Tube Channel and make sure you subscribe to our posts!

Live Long and Prosper,

-Dan

“You don’t have to be a chiropractor to do this,” he explains, and he means it technically. DEFT is built around a different premise than chiropractic adjustment. Rather than moving a joint in the direction it should go, you’re searching for the direction the body will allow. If you push and the tissue tightens, you’re on the wrong track. You back off, find a different angle, apply a gentle torque, and wait for the body to say yes.

That “yes” is unmistakable once you know to look for it. It shows up as a softening, a deepening breath, a visible release traveling down the spine. During a session, you can watch the moment it happens: the shoulders drop half an inch, the ribcage expands, the breathing pattern shifts. The patient described feeling the release “all the way down to my toes” from a single pressure point at the base of the skull. That kind of full-body response is exactly what the technique is designed to produce.

Finding Areas of High Tension

The first step is assessment: scanning the body, both visually and through touch, for the spots that are “stuck.” Leg length discrepancy, postural asymmetry, a shoulder blade that won’t rotate freely, a knot in the neck that the muscles are using as a structural crutch. None of these findings are random. Each one tells a story about how the body has been compensating.

“She’s using her muscles like there’s a lot of things going on — she’s not letting the spine hold her up.”5:39

In one session, a pronounced knot in the neck turned out to be the body’s improvised solution to a spine that wasn’t doing its job. Once the spine was cued to re-engage, the knot simply disappeared. Same thing happened at the lower back: a muscle knot that had been recruited as a stabilizer dissolved the moment the spine took over the load. The muscle didn’t need to be released directly. It only needed a reason to let go.

The same logic applies to ribs. During the session, a few ribs were visibly out of place, and that was affecting breathing. Rather than snapping them back directly, the technique works around the tension, coaxing the surrounding tissue to release until the structure can realign on its own. The postural changes that follow are visible enough to catch on camera.

Direction Matters More Than Force

One of the clearest demonstrations in a session is watching what happens when pressure is applied in the wrong direction. The patient flinches, the tissue guards, and the body communicates a firm no. Flip the angle slightly, and the same spot softens immediately. The practitioner isn’t pushing harder — she is pushing correctly.

I’m not saying that didn’t hurt, but your body accepted that.6:31

This distinction is what separates DEFT from brute-force bodywork. The goal is never to overpower a restriction. It is to find the path the body has left open. Pain during release is sometimes unavoidable, but guarding and pain are different signals. A body that guards is saying stop. A body that accepts pressure, even with some discomfort, is saying keep going, this is useful.

Trained Intuition as a Clinical Tool

Perhaps the most unconventional aspect of the technique is the role of the practitioner’s own body as a diagnostic instrument. She describes training her fingers to become sensitive to tissue quality, the way you might assign custom functions to software buttons on a phone. But she goes further than that: she reads her own physical responses as confirmation that something is working.

The practitioner’s body responds to whatever is happening in the patient’s body. That feedback is the feedback.

“I’ve trained myself to use intuition,” she says, and frames it not as something mystical but as a developed skill. Her argument is that the capacity exists in everyone. Developing it is simply a matter of practice and paying attention. When something works, she knows it in herself before she sees it in the patient.

The sinus work at the end of a session follows the same model. Gentle pressure, attention to what the tissue is communicating, and a hold until the body signals release. “I can already tell in myself how my body responds to whenever something works,” she explains, matter-of-factly. No extensive testing protocol. Just accumulated sensitivity put to practical use.

What Changes After a Session

The before-and-after contrast in posture is the most visible marker of what the work accomplishes. One side of the body, treated, looks measurably different from the untreated side — more open through the shoulder, the blade sitting flatter, the curve of the lower back moving toward something healthier than it was even a week prior. When the patient stands up and goes weight-bearing, the whole stack realigns, and areas that felt like hard knots become simply part of a body that is moving the way it was built to move.

The closing check is almost always the same: the treated areas are unremarkable. The tension that made them identifiable is gone, and the body is holding itself without the compensations it had recruited to get through the day. That is the point of all of it — not a dramatic adjustment, but a quiet renegotiation between the practitioner and a body that finally agrees to relax.

Hope you enjoyed the video. If you are interested in learning more about DeFT, please join the TIC Healer Academy, follow our You Tube Channel and make sure you subscribe to our posts!

Live Long and Prosper,

-Dan

The session opens with the patient lying face down, tension concentrated in the upper back and neck. What’s immediately striking is the restraint. No aggressive thrusting, no dramatic cracking for its own sake. Just sustained pressure, applied in the direction the tissue is already willing to travel.

What the body wants, the body gets.0:43

Follow the path of least resistance

The governing technique throughout is simple to describe and harder to execute: find the direction the body resists, then find the direction it accepts, and work from there. When a spot pushes back against direct pressure, that’s a signal to adjust the angle, add a little torque, and let the tissue release on its own terms.

“I push straight in. Nope. Because it’s resisting me. I could go this way and your body’s like, ah, yeah.”

That’s not a failure — that’s diagnostic information. The body is telling you exactly where it wants to go. The practitioner’s job is to listen and match it.

“I didn’t have to thrust. I just, it was just a little bit of sustained pressure. And the body’s like, loved it.”2:23

This shows up repeatedly: a rib that needs to move but won’t respond to force from one angle opens immediately with a slight twist. A knot in the neck that resists direct pressure softens with a small amount of torque. The adjustment isn’t about power — it’s about finding the right vector.

Breathing as a measure of progress

One of the clearest before-and-after moments in the session involves the ribs. The patient’s breath is shallow at first, constrained by restricted rib mobility. The practitioner identifies the stuck spots, works through them with targeted pressure and small directional adjustments, then asks for a deep breath again. The difference is immediate and audible.

Freeing the ribs isn’t just about the ribs. It’s about restoring the capacity for a full breath, which affects everything downstream — posture, nervous system tone, how the body handles stress. A shallow breath is a signal that something mechanical is in the way.

Everything changes when you stand up

The session shifts when the patient moves to standing. Weight-bearing changes the whole picture. A knot that was manageable lying down becomes a compensatory anchor when the body has to balance upright against gravity.

Your body uses muscle knots to stay balanced when the skeleton isn’t doing its job.

The neck, in this case, is working overtime — recruiting tension to compensate for what the spine should be handling. Once that’s addressed, the shoulder loosens, range of motion opens up, and a small pop signals that the joint now has room to move again. The collarbone, which at first seemed fine, turns out to be off; a gentle correction there changes everything downstream.

The jaw, the sinuses, and the ear

The session closes with the face. The jaw is visibly misaligned, so sensitive that barely touching it produces a flinch. A small amount of torque, applied while the mouth is open, releases the tension almost immediately. The tenderness disappears. A second adjustment sends the sensation all the way to the ear.

“It’s not tender anymore. That’s so much better.”

The principle holds at the extremities just as it does at the spine. If something works lying face down, it should work standing up. If something works at the spine, it should work at the jaw. The mechanics are the same; only the location changes.

What makes this approach work isn’t force — it’s attention. Every moment of resistance is a question, and the answer is always somewhere in the tissue, waiting for someone to ask it in the right direction.

Hope you enjoyed the video. If you are interested in learning more about DeFT, please join the TIC Healer Academy, follow our You Tube Channel and make sure you subscribe to our posts!

Live Long and Prosper,

-Dan

That’s the philosophy behind the work shown here, demonstrated on a client who’s been coming in for over ten years — since October 2013, Halloween week, a date he remembers not because he tracks appointments but because of everything else happening that day. After a decade of regular sessions, his body knows the drill. He self-corrects. He breathes into the right places. He lets go before being asked. That kind of body awareness doesn’t come from a single visit; it accumulates.

The body leads, the practitioner follows

The core principle here isn’t manipulation. It’s listening. Each spot that needs attention gets a small amount of pressure applied in the direction the tissue already wants to move. Not forced. Not imposed. Guided.

When a stuck joint in the shoulder gets a little pressure, it moves. The collarbone settles. The posture shifts visibly. None of that requires force — it requires reading what’s already there and meeting it.

The spine gets checked from top to bottom, feeling for where it’s carrying weight easily and where it’s bracing. Tension in the spine shows up as the muscles trying to hold the structure upright rather than just supporting movement. Finding that spot and releasing it lets the whole column decompress.

Find the muscle that’s holding you up. Then let it go.

What most people overlook: the sinuses

One of the more surprising stops in a full-body check is the sinuses. Two large sinus cavities sit in the skull, and they almost never get addressed in bodywork. The reason they matter: without those air pockets, the head would be solid bone and weigh roughly 30 pounds. When mucus fills those spaces, pressure builds, and that pressure ripples outward. A quick check here revealed one side slightly closed up. A breath or two and it cleared.

Ten years of learning your own body

The client in this session needed very little done. A spot here, a shoulder adjustment there, a quick check of wrists and elbows. That’s what consistent work over a long period produces: a body that stays close to baseline and corrects quickly when it drifts.

He’s fixing himself because I’ve worked on him so much. He’s very aware of his own body.1:23

The goal, eventually, is that sensitivity becoming yours. The practitioner describes it plainly: develop the ability to feel what’s happening in tissue, and the rest follows. Intuition, in this context, isn’t mystical. It’s pattern recognition built through enough repetition that you stop thinking and start feeling.

“If you want to teach someone to be that sensitive, the world is your oyster.”

That’s what a decade of showing up builds toward: not dependency on someone else’s hands, but a fluency with your own body that means you need fewer interventions, recover faster, and know the difference between something that needs attention and something that will pass on its own.

Hope you enjoyed the video. If you are interested in learning more about DeFT, please join the TIC Healer Academy, follow our You Tube Channel and make sure you subscribe to our posts!

Live Long and Prosper,

-Dan

What if the words you repeat in your mind are not just emotional events, but biological ones?

The body is mostly water, and for years that fact has made many people wonder whether language, prayer, intention, and thought reach deeper into the tissues than science can fully explain. I’m open to that mystery. But even without needing to prove every unseen mechanism, we already know something important: the way you speak to yourself changes the state of your body.

That is where this gets interesting.

You do not have to be yelled at by someone else for your system to register threat. Your nervous system can be pushed into a defensive state by the voice it hears most often: your own. Negative self-talk is not just a bad mental habit. Over time, it becomes chemistry. It becomes posture. It becomes tension. It becomes the way the body organizes itself around survival.

The body hears the words

Most people think of self-talk as something abstract, like a stream of thoughts floating through the mind. But the body does not experience it that way.

When your inner dialogue is harsh, your system responds as if something dangerous is happening. Stress chemistry rises. Breathing changes. Muscles prepare. Attention narrows. The body begins to organize around defense.

A sentence like “I’m never going to get better” is not just discouraging. It can become instructive. It can teach the nervous system to expect defeat. It can tell the fascia to hold. It can tell the breath to stay shallow. It can tell the blood vessels to remain in a state of subtle constriction.

What that does to blood and fascia

Blood is not just a liquid moving through tubes. It is part of a living internal environment that responds constantly to stress, emotion, autonomic tone, inflammation, and the body’s sense of safety.

When a person lives under chronic internal pressure, circulation can become less free, the tissues can become less supple, and the whole system can start favoring protection over openness. The body shifts from flow to guarding.

Fascia responds too. It listens to movement, pressure, load, hydration, and nervous system state. A body that does not feel safe rarely stays soft. It braces. It shortens. It tightens around old stories and old alarms. And after a while, those patterns stop feeling like patterns. They just feel normal.

This is one reason some people feel dense, sticky, armored, or congested even when no one can point to a single dramatic injury. The issue is not always one damaged part. Sometimes it is an entire system that has learned to hold.

Self-criticism as physiological debris

Self-criticism leaves residue.

Not only emotional residue, though it does that too. It leaves physiological debris in the form of repeated stress chemistry, altered breathing, increased muscle tone, and a nervous system that spends too much time preparing for attack.

Over time, that internal environment can become the soil for pain, fatigue, inflammation, and a chronic sense of constriction. This is why some people cannot simply “think positive” and expect their body to follow. Their suffering is no longer living only in thought. It has been embodied. The blood, fascia, posture, breath, and nervous system have all joined the conversation.

Why words matter

I do not think everything has to be reduced to a lab value before we are allowed to take it seriously.

Words carry force. Prayer carries force. Intention carries force. Whether every mechanism is measurable yet or not, most people already know from lived experience that the body responds to what it repeatedly hears.

And the stronger point is this: repeated inner language shapes repeated physiological states. If the messages inside you are harsh enough, often enough, your body begins to live inside those messages as if they are instructions.

Modified emotional release techniques

In practice, one of the most useful things is helping people interrupt the loop between emotion, language, and physiology.

That can happen through modified emotional release techniques like tapping sequences, guided eye movements, and other somatic tools, through touch, through breath, through prayer, through reframing, or through helping someone notice the exact sentence their body has been obeying for years. Negative self-talk often sounds normal to the person saying it because it has become familiar. But familiar is not the same as true, and it is not the same as safe.

When the internal message begins to change, the body often changes with it. Breathing deepens. Tissue tone softens. Facial tension eases. The spine stops trying so hard to guard. The person becomes more available to regulation, connection, and repair.

The goal is not fake positivity. The goal is not to paste a spiritual slogan over unresolved pain. The goal is to stop using language that keeps the nervous system trapped in a war it no longer needs to fight.

A different way to heal

Healing sometimes begins with touch. Sometimes it begins with truth. Often it begins when the body finally receives a message it can trust.

Maybe that message comes through an adjustment. Maybe it comes through tears. Maybe it comes through prayer. Maybe it comes through tapping. Maybe it comes through the simple, radical decision to stop talking to yourself like an enemy.

Whatever opens that door, the principle is the same: the nervous system listens, and the body follows.

If words can help create bracing, then better words may help create release. If shame can become chemistry, then mercy may become chemistry too. And if the body has been shaped by years of internal attack, it may also be reshaped by a more honest, more compassionate, and more regulating voice.

My great-aunt once carried a revolution in her hands. At seventeen, she boarded a train in Colón with a secret letter hidden in her umbrella and rode across the isthmus to Panama City while a country hung in the balance. By the time I knew her, she was an old woman yelling at us from a window because we were playing too loud.

Her name was Aminta Meléndez. She was born in Colón in 1886 and, as a teenager, she carried a secret letter by train from Colón to Panama City during the 1903 separation from Colombia, the paper rolled and tucked away inside her umbrella. Her father, my grandfather, Porfirio Meléndez, was a revolutionary leader in Colón and later the first governor of the province, and he sent her because a teenage girl attracted less suspicion than a man in that tense moment.

The letter told the separatist leaders that Colón was ready, that Colombian troops were no longer in full control, and asked them to send General Herbert Jeffries to secure the port with the USS Nashville and deal with the Colombian ship Cartagena, which had some 500 troops that were sent to quash a rebellion.

That decision—handing his daughter a letter and putting her on a train—folded my family straight into the middle of national history. In Panama, Aminta’s story became part of the country’s founding memory, the story of a brave young woman helping midwife a republic. I have no interest in tearing that down. She is taught as a hero and one of the founding mothers, and she was one.i

By the time I arrived in the story, all of that was already legend.

Bohío under water

Before Colón and the canal became the backdrop to my childhood, there was Bohío.

My family owned most of the land in that town, along the Chagres River. When the United States built the dam across the Chagres and created Gatun Lake for the canal, entire communities were displaced as the valley flooded beneath the rising water. Family legend says my grandfather refused to leave his land. As the water kept rising, the Americans had to rescue him from the roof of his house as Gatun Lake rose around him.

I can’t document every detail of that story, and I don’t need to. In my family, it has always been told as truth: Porfirio Meléndez stayed put until the lake took the town from under him. Part of the compensation for the loss of that land—the majority of Bohío—was a large wooden house in Colón.

That house would become the stage for almost everything I remember.

Two houses and three avocado trees

My father later built our house behind that one, out of cinder blocks. It was not a tiny little shack. It was a good-sized house, but it only had 2 bedrooms. The house in front felt like another world entirely—something like ten rooms, with formal downstairs areas like a proper well-to-do house where people could receive guests.

Between the large wooden house in front and our house in the back, there was a wide lot that was basically our kingdom. We had three giant avocado trees. The trees were incredibly tall, so the avocados from way up high would fall and split open on the ground. The dogs would eat them, and they had these ridiculously shiny coats and looked super healthy, like they were in on some secret diet.

There was also a guanábana tree that only produced one fruit per season. That single guanábana carried way more emotional weight than you’d think a piece of fruit could. There was always some conflict and quiet bitterness between my mom and the aunts who lived in the big house over who got the guanábana that year, who got the naranja china, who got the bananas from the trees.

So the backyard wasn’t just a place to play. It was where invisible lines were drawn: kids running under avocado trees, dogs eating the split fruit, adults negotiating and resenting who got which sweetness from which branch, season after season.

My great-aunt Aminta lived in the front house. By then she was old, almost in her nineties, and she would yell at us from the window because we were playing too loud.

That is how I first knew her—not as a heroine from a history lesson, but as the old woman in the front house who could not stand the sound of children laughing.

She had never married. In fact, if anyone called her “Señora,” she would bristle and immediately correct them: “Señorita.” She was very particular about that. She had no children of her own, and maybe that meant nothing. Or maybe it meant something. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the sound of children playing scraped against a life she never had.

I can’t know that for sure. It is only one possibility. But I remember the correction very clearly: not Señora, Señorita.

My father and Aminta

My father wanted nothing to do with her.

When she yelled at us from the window, he would tell me not to pay attention to her. There was a firmness in the way he said it that I understood long before I understood why. Later I learned that she had physically abused him when he was a child. In those days, some of what she did might have been written off as “discipline,” but by any honest standard today it would be seen as straight-up abuse.

That does not erase her place in Panama’s history. It does not cancel the train ride or the letter or the courage it took to do what she did. It just means that public honor and private memory are not always the same thing.

So even though we lived on the same property, in houses only yards apart, there was a distance between them that could not be measured in feet.

The day the president came

In 1979, there was a big to-do because President Arístides Royo came to visit her. Royo was president of Panama from October 1978 until July 1982, and I remember the visit as an official ceremony, with dignitaries, formalities, and some kind of declaration presented to her in recognition of her role in the nation’s history.

I remember that I had to dress up in my fancy clothes because the president was coming.

What I remember most, though, is not the language of the ceremony. It’s the food.

They had good catering. There were little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, arranged neatly like something from another class of life. There were sweets everywhere. To a kid, it felt elegant and important and slightly unreal. The same house where she yelled at us from the window had suddenly become a place of state recognition, polished and ceremonial.

People came to honor the patriot. I was there in dress clothes, eyeing the sandwiches and sweets.

A few months later, she died in Colón on April 29, 1979.

Her last days

Toward the end, she had dementia. My dad referred to her as “goofy” — his word for older people who were starting to show Alzheimer’s symptoms.

In those last months, she would call out to my father constantly.

Not to yell at us kids this time. Just calling for him. Calling his name again and again from somewhere inside the fog of her mind.

My father ignored her completely. He would not answer. He would not go to her. He wanted nothing from her, and he was not going to offer anything back.

I have often thought she may have been trying, in her own way, to ask for forgiveness for whatever had happened between them. But my father would have none of it. Whatever words she may have wanted to say came too late.

There was no dramatic reconciliation. No scene of healing. Just her calling, “goofy” in his private vocabulary, and him staying silent.

Leaving Panama

Soon after that, my mother took us to the United States so we could continue high school there. It was not a leap into a new language for me, because I had already attended Canal Zone schools. What changed was not the language so much as the country, the household, and the life around it.

At the time, I thought the move was mainly about school and opportunity.

About a year later, I found out the real reason was that my mother was leaving my father.

Two truths

There are two truths about Aminta Meléndez, and I have lived with both.

One is the truth Panama tells: the brave young woman on the train, hiding a letter in her umbrella from Colombian authorities, helping change the course of a country. That truth deserves to stand.

The other is the truth of family: the unmarried aunt who insisted on “Señorita,” who never had children, who yelled at us from the window, who hurt my father when he was young, who slid into dementia, and who called for him in her final days only to be met with silence.

I don’t want to shatter the legend. I just know that inside many legends there is a house, and inside the house there is another story.

That is the one I remember: the big wooden house with its formal downstairs rooms, our house behind it, the three avocado trees dropping fruit for the dogs, the quiet arguments over guanábana and naranja china, the lot between the houses full of children’s noise, the day the president came with crustless sandwiches and sweets, the old woman at the window correcting everyone—“Señorita”—and the feeling that the girl who once hid a letter in her umbrella and helped create a country was never just one thing, either to Panama or to us.

Author’s note: I’m a chiropractor and writer, the grandson of Porfirio Meléndez and great-nephew of Aminta Meléndez. Her story is still taught in Panama as part of the country’s independence history, and this essay is my attempt to hold that public legend alongside the private memories my family lived in that house between Bohío, Gatun Lake, and Colón.

Healing is not just something that happens to the body. It is a state the body enters.

When the body is in a healing state, it can do what it was designed to do: repair, regulate, restore, and recover. But not everyone is in that state. Sometimes the body is guarded. Sometimes the mind is braced. Sometimes the emotions are carrying so much weight that the system cannot fully receive what it needs.

That is why healing is not always about adding more. Sometimes it is about removing what is in the way.

Fear can interfere with healing. Grief can interfere with healing. Chronic stress can interfere with healing. Even expectation can shape the outcome, for better or worse. At a deeper level, healing happens more easily when a person feels open, safe, and available.

I believe there are levels of healing.

The physical level is the most obvious, and in some ways the lowest level. It is where most people begin because it is what they can see and feel first. Pain changes. Mobility changes. Tension changes. Symptoms improve.

But healing does not stop at the physical.

There is also an emotional and energetic level. This is where people carry stress, trauma, grief, fear, old patterns, and the internal charge that keeps the body from settling. Sometimes the body does not need more force. Sometimes it needs a release. Sometimes it needs permission to stop bracing.

And above both of those is the spiritual level, which I believe is the highest level of healing. This is where people experience peace, surrender, clarity, meaning, and connection with God. Healing at this level is not just symptom relief. It is wholeness.

If you can create a healing state, all three levels can begin to shift.

That is one reason I have spent so much of my life watching what chiropractic can do. I have seen people change quickly. I have seen the breath deepen, the face soften, the body settle, and the whole system move into a different kind of readiness.

I have also had an adjustment that I felt brought me closer to God.

That may sound unusual to some people, but I know what I felt. There are moments when the body shifts and something deeper opens with it. The nervous system quiets down. The internal noise lessens. And in that stillness, there is room for something sacred.

That is why I believe chiropractic can be so powerful. It does not just address the physical body. At its best, it can help create a healing state where the physical, emotional, and spiritual can begin to align. Of all the healing modalities I have experienced, like acupuncture, chiropractic, and reiki, chiropractic is the quickest way I have seen someone reach a healing state.

I went there with my daughter after one of the darkest seasons of my life. She had already attempted to take her own life more than once, and I was willing to do anything, try anything, believe anything that might help. We drove more than two hours to a place in North Georgia where there was a process for healing, and though it feels distant now, I still remember how desperate and open we were.

We waited in line for a while, and eventually we were allowed to continue. There was a short service, and then a call for healing. I took my daughter up, and the process was almost like a baptism. They prayed over people and immersed them in water. As I helped my daughter in, one of the officiants looked at me and told me I needed healing too.

I do not know whether he saw the exhaustion, the sadness, or the despair I was carrying, but he invited me in as well.

When I participated, something in me broke open. I had an amazing emotional release. I cried, and it felt like years of guilt and anxiety lifted away.

That is what a healing state looks like.

It is not just physical repair. It is the moment the body, mind, emotions, and spirit become available again. It is the moment resistance drops. It is the moment the system is no longer bracing and can finally receive.

That day, I saw healing happen through faith, surrender, and spiritual connection.

In practice, I have seen healing happen through chiropractic.

In both cases, what mattered most was not just the method. It was the state that was created.

That is what I am trying to teach through DeFT.

I want DeFT to be a framework that helps a practitioner work through the first two levels of healing — the physical and the emotional or energetic — in a way that may also open the door to the third. Not by forcing a spiritual experience, but by creating enough alignment, safety, and release that a person can become available to one.

Because that is what healing often is: not something we force, but something we allow.

DeFT is my attempt to give that process a framework.

A way to work through the physical.
A way to release the emotional and energetic.
And maybe, when the moment is right, a way to make room for the spiritual.

Because healing is not always something we do.

Sometimes healing is something we allow.

It’s Father’s Day, and I’m reflecting and remembering my dad and my own role as a dad to my daughters and now my grandson.

When I tell stories about my dad, they are usually upbeat and positive. The stories about my mother aren’t as positive.

My fiancée pointed out to me that when my brother talks about his relationship with our mom, it’s generally very different from my experience. Everyone has different experiences.

I always considered my father a trooper for staying with my mother as long as he did. Yes, she was a handful. Today she would’ve probably been diagnosed as bipolar, with a host of other mental health issues.

But my dad was far from perfect. I’ve heard all these stories about how he was such a ladies’ man and such.

My dad was married and had two kids from a previous marriage, and then he ended up in Venezuela in the late 50s and 60s until apparently he was run out of the country by some general. Apparently he was with this general’s daughter and got himself into enough trouble that he had to flee the country. (Sound familiar? Read this post about what happened to his father.)

Anyway, according to my cousin Grace, he showed up at her workplace in Panama, skinny and disheveled, asking if he could stay with her. He hopped on a cargo ship from Maracaibo and ended up back in Panama.

That’s as much as I can find out about this portion of his life—he didn’t talk about it, and that was that.

So I don’t really know how things were in those days, but I’m pretty sure my half‑siblings grew up without a dad, since they lived in the US. I don’t know if he fathered any kids in Venezuela—I’m sure he wasn’t around to see those kids (if any) either.

So we are all imperfect—and we pass our traits, good and bad, to our kids. I think it’s more nature than nurture, like we pass it on in our DNA.

I worry that I inherited the inability to form a long term relationship with a partner like my father did, and I fear I passed that along to one of my daughters.

I like to think I got some of his better traits: his ability to keep going, his knack for landing on his feet in strange places, and his capacity to love his kids in his own imperfect way. And on days like today, I hope I’m passing on a kinder version of all that to my daughters and my grandson.

Happy Father’s Day!

Live Long and Prosper

-Dan

My grandfather wasn’t exactly a choirboy. According to family legend, he got into enough trouble in Detroit that the best advice anyone could give him was, “You should probably leave town.” So he did what a certain kind of young man did in 1898—he joined the cavalry, went off to the Spanish–American War, and wound up fighting in Cuba alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. The paper trail backs at least part of that up: later records list him as a U.S. Cavalry soldier in F Troop during the Spanish–American War, which fits the family version almost a little too perfectly.

Apparently he decided he liked Latin women, because after the war he didn’t point his boots back toward Detroit. He drifted south and ended up in Colón, Panama, where he somehow managed to fall in love with Felicidad Meléndez, daughter of Don Porfirio Meléndez—a serious local heavyweight, former governor of Colón Province, and one of the guys wrapped up in the politics around Panama’s independence. So this kid who’d been told to get out of Detroit suddenly found himself courting into a respectable Panamanian family. That’s about when he cleaned up his name, too. Christian I. Ternes became Charles Ternes DeReuter, a version that sounded right in Spanish and didn’t scream “guy who left town in a hurry” if anyone went looking in old Detroit papers.

In Colón, Charles and Felicidad had four kids, and he traded horses and rifles for hoses and helmets. He worked his way up to Mayor Charles Ternes de Reuter, jefe del Cuartel de Bomberos de la provincia de Colón—basically the head of the provincial fire department. For a man who started out as a bit of a rascal, he ended up with a very straight job: running the fire brigade in a wooden Caribbean port city stacked with bad wiring, flammable buildings, and people living on top of each other.

And he didn’t die behind a desk. In April 1917, during a serious fire in Colón, he went into a burning structure on a rescue with his crew. The scene wasn’t romantic—it was smoke, shouting, collapsing wood, and a spiderweb of early electrical lines overhead. In that chaos, a live wire came down and hit him, another firefighter, and the person they were trying to pull out. All three were killed on the spot. When that happened, my dad—born in 1909—was about eight years old. So the version that got handed down to me was never “grandpa the saint.” It was “grandpa the troublemaker who rode with Teddy Roosevelt, married a governor’s daughter, changed his name so his past wouldn’t catch him, and then went back into a burning building and didn’t come out.”

A rascal who happened to die a hero.

There is a monument in Colón honoring the 3 killed that day. They later kept adding names of all firefighters that lost their lives in the line of duty,

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Live Long and Prosper,

-Dan

parade for bomberos. when I was a kid I’d have to attend the ceremony at the park every year..

There comes a point in every practitioner’s path when the real question stops being, “Which method is best?” and becomes, “Do I trust what I’m sensing?”

That is the tension underneath so much of clinical work, personal development, and even spiritual practice. We want a system. We want a framework. We want proof that we are doing it right. But eventually, if we stay in practice long enough, we realize that technique alone cannot replace presence.

The trap of over-methoding

It is easy to get caught in comparison.

One practitioner uses AK (Applied Kinesiology). Another uses touch. Another barely touches the patient at all. Someone else seems to get better results with less visible effort, and suddenly the mind starts spinning: *Am I missing something? Am I not good enough? Is my approach wrong?*

That spiral is common, but it usually misses the real issue.

The problem is often not skill. It is presence.

When you are too much in your head, you are no longer really with the person in front of you. You are with your doubts, your performance anxiety, your inner critic, and your need to prove yourself. The patient becomes secondary to your mental noise.

And once that happens, no method can save you.

Methods are maps, not masters

Methods are useful. They give structure. They help us organize experience. They can train perception and build confidence. But a method is still just a map.

A map can help you orient yourself, but it is not the terrain.

If you cling too tightly to the map, you stop noticing what is actually happening in front of you. You begin forcing the experience to match the system instead of letting the system serve the experience. That is where many practitioners get stuck. They become more loyal to the method than to the moment.

The best work happens when the method supports your awareness rather than replaces it.

Trust is not guessing

Trusting yourself does not mean making things up. It does not mean abandoning discernment or pretending every impulse is intuition. It means learning to recognize the difference between mental noise and direct sensing.

At some point, the body in front of you begins to communicate in a way that is subtler than a checklist. An area calls your attention. A correction feels right before you can explain it. You sense what matters before you can name why.

That is not guesswork. That is cultivated perception.

The more present you are, the more accurately you can hear that signal.

Why the body matters

You cannot think your way into better intuition.

You have to become available for it.

That usually means being regulated enough to notice what you notice. If your mind is racing, if you are worried about how you look, if you are comparing yourself to another practitioner, your signal gets buried. When you settle, the body speaks more clearly. The patterns become easier to feel. The patient’s presentation becomes less noisy. You begin to trust the first honest signal instead of the tenth overthought one.

This is why presence is not a soft skill. It is the skill.

Confidence and certainty are not the same

A lot of people confuse confidence with certainty. They are not the same thing.

Certainty is rigid. It wants to lock everything down. Trust is responsive. It allows you to stay open, observe honestly, and adjust when the evidence changes.

You do not need to know everything. You need to be clear enough to stay connected. Clear enough to notice what is happening. Clear enough to let the situation speak before your ego does.

That kind of trust is earned through repetition, humility, and attention. It grows when you stop trying to win the moment and start trying to serve it.

A practical way to train self-trust

If you want to trust yourself more, start here:

1. Slow down before you begin.

2. Get clear enough internally to notice your own noise.

3. Focus on the person, not on proving your method.

4. Let your attention go where it is drawn.

5. Notice what changes when you stay present.

6. Use technique as support, not as a substitute for awareness.

The more you practice this, the less you will need to force it.

The real question

So the question is not whether one method is superior to another.

The deeper question is whether you can stay with your own sensing long enough to let truth emerge.

That is where confidence comes from. Not from sounding certain. Not from looking sophisticated. Not from copying someone else’s style. It comes from being present enough to trust what is actually happening.

And once you can do that, methods become useful again — because you are using them, instead of letting them use you.

Closing thought

The goal is not to become a better technician than everyone else.

The goal is to become so present that the right action becomes obvious.

That is where self-trust lives. Not in perfection. Not in performance. In presence

What do you think? Leave me a comment!

And please subscribe if you found this interesting.

Live Long And Prosper,

-Dan

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Check out the TIC Healing Academy to learn how to become a better healer

I usually write about health, healing, and chiropractic care—or whatever’s happening in my life. But today, I’m talking business. Specifically, how some companies make it way harder than it needs to be for customers to keep doing business with them.

We’ve been using a local floor mat service for years. They swap out our mats weekly and keep everything clean. Honestly, we don’t need the service that badly—it’s just nice. Then one day the usual delivery guys showed up with “the boss.” He informed me that their small company had been bought by a bigger outfit, and starting immediately, every customer had to sign a 5-year contract to continue.

I thought he was joking. When I realized he wasn’t, I said, “Well, I guess we’re done then. Go ahead and take the mats—I won’t be using you anymore.” The delivery guys were trying hard not to laugh. The boss stepped away for a minute, then came back and said they could keep servicing us without the contract. I rolled my eyes and muttered, “Whatever.”

That moment stuck with me. As a business owner myself, I started thinking: What policies or procedures in my office might be making life inconvenient for clients?

On paper, the new owners were probably patting themselves on the back for implementing “policies to reduce churn”—classic corporate-speak. Hedge funds and private equity types love buying mom-and-pop businesses, squeezing every last drop of profit, and installing rigid rules. They forget one thing: the actual customer standing in front of them.

The same thing happens in chiropractic. Some offices schedule X-rays on one day, the consultation on another, and treatments on yet another. They don’t seem to realize that when someone walks in with back pain, they want relief today. That restrictive approach drives people straight to places like my office or The Joint—offices that actually consider the client’s real needs and timeline.

I see it all the time: patients show up with $3,000 care plans from other clinics, recommendations in hand, looking for someone who gets it. Those long, inflexible plans might close some sales, but they’re not converting everyone. The result? My schedule stays full because we focus on same-day adjustments and straightforward plans.

If you run a business, I invite you to do this: Step back and look at your policies from your customer’s point of view. Are you making it easy for people to say yes and stay with you? Or are you adding friction that pushes them out the door?

Small things matter. Contracts, scheduling, upselling, hidden fees—anything that feels like it serves your bottom line more than the person paying you. Cut the unnecessary hassle. Make it simple, helpful, and human. Your customers will notice, and your business will be better for it.

What rigid policies have you run into lately? Drop a comment—I’d love to hear your stories.

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You’ll see how I use intuitive fascial‑tonal assessment to pick up on the subtle stress patterns, protective postures, and emotional overlays that keep people stuck in pain even when everything looks “fine” on paper.

I break down what I’m noticing with my hands, why I choose specific contacts and vectors, and how small shifts in the nervous system can unlock big changes in the way someone breathes, stands, and feels. If you’ve ever wondered what’s actually going on in the room when I say your body is “showing me something,” this is your front‑row seat.

Every now and then, a patient says, “I was feeling so good after our last visit… and then this old pain came back.”

If you’re intuitively tuned into the body’s language, that statement isn’t a red flag—it’s often a quiet signal of retracing. In my intuitive chiropractic world—DeFT, fascial tone, nervous‑system memory—retracing is the body revisiting old layers of stress, injury, or adaptation before it can truly release them.

It’s not a mistake. It’s a playback.

What retracing feels like

Retracing usually shows up as:

• Old pains re‑surfacing in areas you haven’t noticed in months or years.

• Waves of fatigue, heat, tingling, or “weird” sensations through the spine and limbs.

• A sense that joints are “moving again” in ways they haven’t moved in ages.

In fascial‑tonal terms, it’s like the nervous system and the connective‑tissue matrix hitting “play” on a pattern that’s been held in standby mode—bracing, guarding, or shutting down those areas to survive old stress.

Why it happens after an adjustment

When we align, unwind, or tonify the spine in a more coherent way, we’re not just moving bones.
We’re shifting the global tension field—the way the nervous system and fascia organize tone, stability, and safety.

That shift can:

• Bring old injuries back into awareness before they’re fully released.

• Stir emotional memories that lived inside a holding pattern—the accident, the fall, the years of leaning into stress.

• Make the body feel “off” even though function is actually improving.

So when someone says, “I was great, then I got worse,” I often reply:
“You’re not going backwards. You’re going through—the body is retracing the path it took to get stiff, guarded, or numb in the first place.”

How to hold it as a patient (and a practitioner)

From a DeFT‑style, intuitive‑chiro lens, retracing is best met with curiosity, not fear.

For patients, I often say:

• “This is the body re‑checking old stories before it lays them down.”

• “Your system is trying to re‑integrate something that’s been on ‘mute’ for a while.”

• “If you’re sleeping better, breathing easier, or feeling lighter, the retracing is likely a side‑effect of things opening up.”

As a practitioner, I pay attention to:

• How long it lasts—retracing is usually a wave of old sensations that resolves within hours to a few days.

• The global pattern: mood, sleep, energy, and breath, not just the “pain score.”

• Whether to soften, deepen, or slow the work—sometimes a gentler, more tonal approach lets the body move through retracing more quietly.

When retracing isn’t “just retracing”

Retracing is usually a gentle re‑awakening of familiar patterns.

But if pain is:

• New and worsening.

• Sharp, progressive, or lighting up a limb.

• Unrelated to anything recognizable as an old injury.

Then it’s less about retracing and more about clinical discernment—and possibly a referral or deeper look.

A simple way to invite retracing into your awareness

In my own practice, I teach retracing as a kind of biological playback.
The body:

• Stores shape and tone in the fascial matrix.

• Stores memory in the nervous system.

• Needs to “feel again” before it can “let go.”

So when old sensations come back, I ask:
“What did you feel emotionally when that pain showed up? Where did your breath go? What moment or memory slipped in?”

Those questions often open into the DeFT layer—the fascial‑tonal‑emotional space—where real change happens.

If you’ve ever felt an old ache, a familiar tightness, or a “weird” sensation after a session, know this: your body isn’t betraying you.
It’s replaying the story, not to keep it, but to rewrite it.