As we were talking about bringing ATTA back, we found ourselves asking where we wanted to begin. There are so many conversations we’d love to have with you over the coming months, but somehow we both kept ending up back at the same place.
Water.
It made us smile because, when we first started ATTA, neither of us imagined that we’d still be talking about water all these years later. We certainly didn’t set out to become fascinated by it. We thought we’d read a few books, interview a few people, learn what we needed to know and then move on to the next subject. Instead, every conversation seemed to leave us with more questions than answers, and somewhere along the way water stopped being just another health topic and became something that quietly changed the way we look at life.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll probably remember some of those conversations. We’ve had the privilege of interviewing Professor Gerald Pollack, Mario Brainović, Veda Austin, Zeev Zohar from Mayu and many others who have dedicated huge parts of their lives to understanding water. They all came at it from different directions, but every one of those conversations encouraged us to look beyond the simple idea that water is just H₂O in a glass and to start asking much bigger questions about life itself.
One of our favourite memories actually happened during one of those early podcasts. We were in the middle of chatting when Tracy suddenly stopped talking altogether. You could literally see the penny dropping. She looked at me, completely wide-eyed, and said, “Claire… we’re living in water! We both burst out laughing because it sounded so obvious, but neither of us had ever really thought about it in quite that way before.
We spend so much time thinking about the world around us that we rarely stop to think about the world within us. We see through fluid-filled eyes. Every breath we take is humidified before it reaches our lungs and every breath we breathe out returns water back into the atmosphere. Around sixty percent of our bodies is made up of water, and every single cell depends upon it. Water isn’t just something we drink. It’s the environment that life exists within.
That conversation has stayed with us ever since because it changed the questions we were asking. Instead of simply wondering which water was best to drink, we started wondering what water actually is. We became interested in where it comes from, how it moves, what happens to it as it travels through nature, whether minerals matter, whether water may be capable of carrying information, whether light matters and whether the way we treat water changes anything at all.
One of the people who really influenced our thinking was Viktor Schauberger, We were introduced to his work by Zeev during our podcast about Mayu, and his observations have stayed with us ever since. Schauberger spent years watching rivers rather than trying to control them. He believed that if we wanted to understand water, we first needed to observe how nature had been working with it for millions of years.
When you watch a river, you realise water doesn’t rush in straight lines. It bends, spirals, tumbles over rocks, gathers minerals, cools itself and constantly interacts with everything around it. It’s alive with movement. That simple observation made us stop and think because modern life often gives us water that has travelled through long straight pipes before sitting still in tanks or bottles. We found ourselves asking whether nature might already have been showing us something important.
That question led us in so many different directions.
Gerald Pollack’s research introduced us to the idea that the water inside living systems may be far more organised and dynamic than many of us were taught at school. Mario Brainović shared his work around coherence and why the quality and organisation of water might matter just as much as the quantity we drink. Those conversations encouraged us to think about health less as a collection of separate parts and more as beautifully connected systems that are constantly communicating with one another.
Then we met Veda Austin, and she took the conversation somewhere much deeper.
Veda didn’t simply encourage us to think differently about the water in our glass, she encouraged us to think about our relationship with water itself. She speaks about water as Source rather than simply a resource, which stayed with us because it shifts water from being a commodity we consume into something that has been with us from the very beginning of life.
From the moment we are conceived, water is there. It surrounds us, forms us, moves through us and continues travelling through every living system on Earth. The same water can move through a tree, an animal, a river, a cloud and a human body, without judgement, hierarchy or separation. There is something both humbling and hopeful in that, because it reminds us that water is not only essential to life, it is one of the things that connects all life.
Veda’s years of observations and experiments have also invited us to consider water as responsive and intelligent, capable of receiving, carrying and expressing information. That led us to a much bigger question, because if the water around us is continually responding to its environment, what might the water within us be responding to all day long?
Our bodies are constantly receiving information through light, sound, food, breath, touch, thoughts, emotions, hormones and the nervous system. Every cell is sensing its surroundings and adapting to what it finds, and water is present within every one of those conversations. It surrounds our cells, supports the movement of nutrients and signals, and creates the environment in which the body communicates with itself.
Perhaps water is not simply transporting information from one part of the body to another. Perhaps it is also helping to hold, organise and communicate that information in ways we still do not fully understand. We don’t know the answer to that, but we do know that it has completely changed the way we think about health. Instead of seeing the body as a collection of separate organs and systems, we increasingly see it as one extraordinary network of communication, where everything is influencing everything else.
That idea has become one of the biggest lessons we’ve taken from all of our conversations over the years.
The more we’ve learnt, the more we’ve realised that life isn’t really built from separate parts at all. Water, light, air, minerals, movement, food, thoughts, emotions and our environment are all constantly interacting with one another. We spend so much of our time looking for one thing to fix us, when perhaps the real magic lies in understanding the relationships between everything that supports life.
Water has certainly changed the choices we make. We think more carefully about where our water comes from, how it has been filtered, how it is stored, whether it still contains useful minerals and whether it has had any opportunity to move before we drink it.
We also notice water more now. We pay attention to how different waters taste, how we feel around the sea, rivers and springs, and how much better water seems when it has been handled with a little more care and respect. We use filters, glass bottles, vortexing and structuring products because they have naturally become part of our lives, and we often take a moment to acknowledge the water before we drink it rather than treating it as something ordinary.
It has also made us more aware of the water within our own bodies and a little more thoughtful about the way we speak to ourselves, the environments we spend time in and the information we surround ourselves with.
Most of all, it’s been about rediscovering a sense of wonder for something that most of us have overlooked for far too long.
Without water there probably wouldn’t have been an ATTA. It was our shared fascination with this extraordinary substance that first brought us together, introduced us to so many wonderful people and ultimately shaped the conversations we continue having today. We still feel as though we’ve only scratched the surface, and somehow that’s one of the things we love most about it.
The conversation certainly isn’t over.
In fact, we’re delighted to say that Veda Austin is joining us again for a brand new episode of the Happy, Healthy & Healed, which will be released in August. Since our last conversation, both we and Veda have continued learning, and we can’t wait to sit down with her again to explore where that journey has taken her
As always, thank you for being part of this journey with us.
With love,
Claire & Tracy
