Eight Wonders of the Third Dimension

By Nadya Bell, RMT, CMRP

I like to be in the woods when a solar storm hits. 

The birds seem to have a special message, the river an extra sparkle, and something about the landscape feels awake.

The sacred Earth is full of ants, and everything is busy, ready to reveal cosmic energy coming into manifestation. It’s the moment - sometimes minutes or days later - when the Earth’s magnetic field responds to a flare impulse or solar wind storm energy. We feel the surge of the magnetic strength rising from the Earth, and its synchronizing and stimulating effects on all life around us. It’s one of the wonders of the third dimension. 

Solar storms remind me that we live immersed in invisible forces. As a manual therapist, I've come to appreciate several of these patterns—little "rules of thumb" gathered from anatomy, physics, and clinical practice. I think of them as eight wonders of the third dimension.

Polarity itself is a wonder of life on this plane.  In nature, as in life, orientation often matters as much as force. The Sun and Earth are never isolated—they are always interacting. Sometimes the geometry between their magnetic fields opens a pathway for energy to pour into Earth's magnetosphere, and sometimes that pathway remains mostly closed. It isn't simply a question of more or less energy, but of relationship.

Down with heavy pressure, up with light is another wonder. Bone, and to a lesser extent collagen itself, exhibits piezoelectric and streaming potential effects. A compressive force on bone tissue tends to produce relative electronegative potentials, while tension pulls toward electropositive potentials. By gathering awareness through everyone I’ve ever laid hands on, I’ve come to feel the body’s preference for a deepening or a lightening touch. Some things need to be put back together, and others loosened off a little bit! Thank you again to Hugh Milne for the extraordinary nuance of touch and movement he describes in Part Two of The Heart of Listening.

Another observation that has stayed with me comes from the Dosimetry Handbook. An engineering reference on electromagnetic fields and their interaction with the human body from the 1980s, it offers several practical rules of thumb. Generally, rapidly changing fields tend to have their strongest effects nearer the surface, while slower-changing fields often extend more deeply. Like most rules of thumb, it isn't absolute—biology is far too complicated for that—but it has proven surprisingly useful when thinking about how different forms of energy move through living tissue.

Corners, ridges and points naturally concentrate electric fields. The geometry of the body is fascinating, but the shape itself tells us something about the field, making it easier to work on an unfamiliar skeleton like an animal. I watch for energy concentrating in angles and corners, rising up to the tip or edge.

Elbows; fingertips and toes; the acromion of the scapula; the medial and lateral malleoli; the edges of the pelvis; the zygomas; the bumps of the cranium – whatever the anatomy, I’m often holding these places lightly while my hands burn. 

Different bodies present different electrical landscapes. Engineers know that long conductive pathways and compact loops interact differently with electric and magnetic fields. Antennas are long and batteries are fat. I find it difficult to believe human anatomy is indifferent to these same principles.

Understanding a body's natural inclinations is part of understanding how balance is restored. Certainly the analogy of the body as natural topography works very well for the Traditional Chinese Medicine approach. The body is built from rings, spirals, arches, cables, sheets, and branching trees, but all of those exist within the whole body’s electromagnetic field, which must itself be balanced and in healthy proportion.

Then there is water—the body's quiet absorber. Engineers describe water as a lossy dielectric: a material that readily interacts with electromagnetic fields, absorbing part of their energy and converting it into molecular motion. It is one of the reasons our bodies are so electrically interesting. Muscle, blood, and other water-rich tissues don't simply conduct electricity; they shape, redistribute, and dissipate energy in ways that dry tissues cannot. Whenever I think about environmental electromagnetic exposures—or therapeutic ones—I find myself wondering not only about the field itself, but about the landscape it enters: where is the water, and how deep?

While all these invisible influences shape us, somehow they never completely determine our experience. Which brings me to the final wonder of the third dimension: choice.

The debate around free will and agency is only an attempt to fathom the mystery of the dimension we inhabit. The universe may be full of organizing principles like those found in physics, but none of them abolish our unique agency. 

We are individuals on our own paths, but also united as one, walking towards the same horizon. We all live within the unconditional love of a mother planet that allows us the freedom to choose our path.

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” Among School Children,  William Butler Yeats.