There are images the body recognises before the mind does. This is one of them.
Imagine a bubble. Transparent, held in the air, with that iridescent sheen that makes it look like a small world. Now imagine there is a tree inside it — deep roots, a firm trunk, branches opening towards the dome. Or imagine a human being, standing, arms outstretched, as in that drawing by Leonardo we have all seen at some point.
The bubble contains them. And something in them, in the tree or in the human being, seems to move.
The torus nobody teaches you at school
In physics and geometry there is a shape called a torus — a toroidal tube. It is the shape of a doughnut, of a magnetic field, of the rings of Saturn. And it is also, curiously, the way energy moves in living systems.
The movement is simple and at the same time impossible to forget once you see it: energy rises through the centre, expands outwards on reaching the dome, descends along the outer edges and returns underneath towards the centre. Always in movement. Always returning.
A cycle with neither beginning nor end. Only flow.
What rises needs to come down. What expands needs to return. Not as failure — as nature.
The tree already knew
The tree is perhaps the oldest teacher of this movement.
The roots descend, absorb, receive from the soil what the earth holds. That energy rises through the trunk — the axis, the centre — and reaches the branches, which open, expand, offer themselves to the sky. The leaves capture the light, transform it, and something of that returns to the ground through the roots, the fungi, the matter that decomposes and becomes earth again.
The tree inside the bubble is not a decorative image. It is an exact description of how life works.
And the human being too
Vitruvian Man with his arms open inside a circle — that image is also a torus, even if Leonardo did not use the word.
In us the movement is the same. We receive something from the ground, from our ancestors, from what we inherit without choosing it. That rises, takes shape, becomes what we are and what we give. And something of what we give returns — to our children, to those who will come, to the common field we all drink from.
The problem is not the movement. The problem is when we interrupt it.
When we only rise and never come down. When we only give and never receive. When the ego decides it is the centre and that the energy should stay there, accumulate, be controlled.
Illness, in many cases, is an interrupted torus. A flow that got stuck.
The bubble as boundary and as membrane
The bubble does not enclose. It defines.
There is an enormous difference between the two. A wall encloses — it cuts off contact with the outside, isolates, protects out of fear. A membrane defines — it marks where one form ends and another begins, but it allows exchange.
The bubble of consciousness that you are has that quality of a membrane. You are you, unique, unrepeatable. And at the same time you are in permanent contact with the larger field you came out of.
The torus is precisely that: a form that defines itself and is at the same time in constant exchange with what surrounds it. There is no isolated torus. Only tori within tori, bubbles within bubbles.
What this changes
When you understand that you are a torus — that your fundamental nature is cyclical movement, not accumulation or stasis — something reorganises itself.
To stop receiving is no longer a virtue. It is cutting the flow.
To stop giving is no longer protection. It is also cutting the flow.
Rest is not the opposite of movement — it is part of the cycle, the moment when energy returns to the centre before rising again.
And growth is not linear. It never was. It is spiral — each time the torus completes a cycle, it comes back to the same point but a little more expanded, a little more aware of what it already was.
We do not grow forwards. We grow in a spiral — always returning to the centre, but larger each time.
To finish: the image we started with
Go back to the bubble. The tree inside, or the human being with open arms.
Now you can see what is moving. It is not decoration or poetic metaphor — it is the most precise description we have of how life works at any scale: from a cell to a human being, from a tree to a galaxy.
We are all bubbles of consciousness with a torus inside.
And the torus, when it is not interrupted, simply flows.
If something you have read here resonates with you, we can talk.
Write to me