Aloha and welcome to my first post within Vital Alignments.
Vital Alignments has been developing over many years of practicing and learning about health, wellness, and performance—ideas that I have applied to myself and to those I have been fortunate enough to work with throughout my career.
Vital Alignments is an idea, a philosophy, and a way of life. It is a container I have built to represent how I want to serve people and empower my community to ola pono—to live well.
Ultimately, I believe we can live well and live righteously within ourselves when we have the awareness, the tools, and the dedication to give ourselves what we need to thrive and express health.
To me, health is more than the mere absence of disease. It is vitality. It is a sense of vigor for life that gives us the capacity to pursue our dreams and bring them into reality.
I don’t know everything. My understanding of health has evolved tremendously over the years, and I expect it will continue to evolve as I continue to learn, ask questions, work with people, and honor my own journey.
This first post is an introduction to that journey, why I created Vital Alignments, and what I hope to build here moving forward.
WHERE DID THIS ALL COME FROM?
Healthcare has been around me for as long as I can remember. My dad is a surgeon. My mom is a nurse. Growing up, there were times when I practically lived at the hospital while one of them was working. I got to see healthcare from the inside. I met patients, heard stories about how my parents had helped them, and witnessed the impact they were making within our community.
My dad always told me, “Find yourself a profession where you help people, and you’ll always be satisfied.”
That stuck with me.
For a long time, I thought becoming a medical doctor was the path for me. But as I explored healthcare more deeply, I also began seeing some of its challenges. I saw doctors who were tired and burned out. I saw the pressure of trying to care for large numbers of people in very limited amounts of time. And I began questioning how much of healthcare was happening after someone was already struggling rather than helping people understand how to care for themselves before things became severe.
One experience on Lānaʻi had a particularly strong impact on me.
While working in the hospital, I witnessed a man come into the emergency room after overdosing on pain medication. Watching that unfold shook me. It left me questioning what more could be done to educate people, prevent suffering when possible, and help people take a more active role in their health.
I remember asking one of the doctors I worked with why we weren’t doing more of that.
His response was essentially, “That’s a great idea, Brandon. Why don’t you do that?”
Fair enough.
I didn’t know it then, but that question would follow me.
FINDING CHIROPRACTIC
After returning to Oʻahu, I was surfing in Mokulēʻia when I met a chiropractor.
We started talking about chiropractic, the role it could play within healthcare, and what he was seeing with the people he worked with. I was curious enough that I asked if I could come shadow him.
What I saw was different from what I had experienced before. People were excited to be there. There was an emphasis not only on receiving care, but also on education—learning how to move, how to eat, and how to take greater responsibility for health.
I remember thinking, dude, this is it.
Eventually, I began working at Turning Point Chiropractic alongside Dr. William Moss. I received care myself, learned more about his philosophy and approach, and became increasingly interested in chiropractic.
It felt aligned with me, so I went to chiropractic school.
There, I immersed myself in the art, philosophy, and science of chiropractic. At the same time, I became a patient in a much more significant way. I separated my shoulder skateboarding. I tore my MCL surfing. I had to work through my own injuries and experience different approaches to rehabilitation and recovery firsthand.
During school, one of my close friends, Dr. Kelly Farmer, was learning Advanced Muscle Integration Technique, or AMIT, and began practicing some of the work on me. It shifted the way I thought about the body and planted another seed. I knew it was something I eventually wanted to learn.
ASKING HOW I COULD BEST SERVE HAWAI'I
When I graduated, my plan was to come home to Hawaiʻi and start my practice.
Before I did, I wanted guidance.
I went to the summit of a mountain on a trail behind the place where I grew up. I made an offering, prayed, and asked Akua, dear God, to help me best serve Hawaiʻi and guide me.
What happened next wasn’t what I expected.
Things seemed to go against the grain in Hawaiʻi while an opportunity opened in Utah. At the time, my friend Kelly was completing his preceptorship with Dr. Craig Buhler, and he encouraged me to speak with him. That conversation eventually led to an opportunity to spend three and a half years working alongside Dr. Buhler—studying, practicing, and developing myself as a doctor while working in an environment that cared for some of the highest-performing athletes in the world.
Chiropractic remained the foundation, but my lens kept expanding.
I was exposed to different approaches to movement, rehabilitation, performance, and recovery. The more I learned, the more questions I had. I wanted to understand not only what I was doing with someone, but why that person was presenting the way they were in the first place.
That curiosity eventually led me into further study through the CHEK Institute, which broadened my lens even further.
How was someone moving? How were they eating? How were they sleeping and recovering? What were the demands of their life? How were the choices they were making outside of the clinic relating to what I was seeing when they got onto my table?
I was beginning to understand that there was a much bigger picture.
FROM SURF N SPORT CHIROPRACTIC TO VITAL ALIGNMENTS
When I eventually returned home to Hawaiʻi, I created the practice I had dreamed about while I was in chiropractic school: Surf N Sport Chiropractic.
And it was everything I wanted it to be for that chapter of my life.
I got to work with surfers, athletes, active people, and members of my community. I got to work for myself, continue learning, and figure out how to run a business.
But eventually, I started realizing that I was outgrowing the container.
People would hear “Surf N Sport Chiropractic” and understandably think I was going to adjust them.
But the work I was doing had become much broader than that.
There were times when someone needed hands-on care. There were times when someone needed to learn how to breathe or move differently. There were times when we needed to look at recovery, training, nutrition, or their daily habits.
And there were even times when the most valuable thing I could do was sit across from someone and ask, “What is your dream? What are you actually trying to create here?”
Sometimes I didn’t even need to touch them.
That’s when the idea of alignments began to take on a different meaning for me.
Alignment can come through an adjustment on the table. It can come from learning how to move. It can come from tuning into your breath. It can come through a conversation that helps you recognize that the direction you’re moving isn’t actually where you want to go.
There are many ways we can create greater alignment within our bodies and our lives.
I had simply outgrown the name.
I needed a larger container.
That’s where Vital Alignments began to emerge.
WHAT IS VITAL ALIGNMENTS?
To me, a vital alignment is harmony among mind, body, and spirit.
But there’s also a reason I chose Vital Alignments, plural, rather than Vital Alignment.
Alignment isn’t static. Life is always happening. We’re constantly responding to different demands, challenges, relationships, environments, and seasons of life. What kept us aligned yesterday may not be exactly what we need today.
Maintaining alignment requires continual awareness and fine-tuning. Sometimes the alignment we need is physical. Sometimes it’s in the way we’re thinking, speaking, working, training, recovering, relating to others, or deciding where our energy needs to go.
It’s a series of alignments that helps us maintain the larger alignment.
That’s what Vital Alignments represents to me: not achieving some perfect state and staying there, but continually listening, adapting, and bringing the different pieces of our lives back into greater harmony.
Life tests us. It challenges us. It pulls us in different directions. And when we aren’t clear about what’s important to us and where we’re trying to go, it can be easy to fall out of alignment.
Being aligned doesn’t mean life becomes perfect. It doesn’t mean everything goes according to plan. And it definitely doesn’t mean we’re always aligned.
Alignment, to me, is having clarity about your North Star and moving toward it while maintaining the awareness and adaptability to pivot when what you’re doing simply isn’t working anymore.
It begins with asking what the dream is.
Then looking honestly at the thoughts we’re thinking, the words we’re speaking, and the actions we’re taking.
Because those things add up. They influence our relationship with ourselves, our health, our families, our communities, our environment, and ultimately the reality we’re creating.
And alignment isn’t going to look exactly the same for everybody.
What alignment means to me may be different from what alignment means to you. That’s part of the beauty of it.
One of the easiest ways for me to visualize alignment is through surfing.
There are people who are so graceful on a surfboard that they make something incredibly difficult look easy. They’re connected to the ocean. They’re connected to their board. They’re reading what is happening around them. They know when to push, when to release, when to change direction, and how to adapt to something that is constantly moving underneath them.
They’re not controlling the ocean. They’re responding to it.
I think life can be a lot like that.
When we’re in alignment, we’re dancing, we’re expressing, we’re adapting. And when we’re significantly out of alignment, life can start becoming much harder.
I’ve experienced that myself.
During parts of my time in Utah, I was tired and wired. I was working hard, struggling to set boundaries, not eating enough, and leaning heavily on caffeine to keep pushing. At times I felt anxious and scattered. My energy wasn’t centered.
There were also moments when life forced me to slow down.
I remember snowboarding one day and sending myself off a big jump. I completely blew myself up. I concussed myself and tore cartilage where my ribs attach to my sternum.
I can’t say that being dysregulated caused me to crash. Accidents happen. But looking back at that period of my life, the injury became another reminder of what can happen when I’m continually pushing and not listening closely enough to what I need.
Sometimes we choose to slow down. Sometimes life creates the opportunity for us.
That’s something I continue to work on myself, and it’s something I see in many of the people I work with.
It brings me back to three questions I ask often:
What is the dream?
What demands does that dream place upon you?
Do you have the capacity to meet those demands?
Those questions deserve a much deeper conversation, and we’ll get there.
OLA PONO - LIVE WELL
Underneath Vital Alignments is an idea that has become increasingly meaningful to me: Ola Pono. Live well.
To me, living pono means living righteously.
Righteous within ourselves. Righteous in our relationship with God. Righteous in how we treat our families, our communities, and our environment.
It is about responsibility, reciprocity, integrity, and understanding that how we choose to live affects more than ourselves.
Living pono does not mean being perfectly aligned all the time.
We’re human. We mess up. We lose our way. There are times when we don’t show up the way we wish we had.
But part of living pono, to me, is recognizing it, taking responsibility, and making it right.
Alignment isn’t a destination. It’s a practice.
We notice when we’ve fallen out of alignment. We learn. We adapt.
We make things right when we need to, and we find our way back. That’s something Vital Alignments is meant to remind me of just as much as anyone else.
HEALTH IN SERVICE OF THE DREAM
Ultimately, I don’t want health to become another thing that people obsess over.
I want health to create opportunity.
The opportunity to surf. To raise your kids and have the energy to play with them. To compete. To build a business. To travel. To serve your community. To adventure. To create. To do whatever brings meaning and joy into your life.
I want people to understand their bodies, understand the tools available to them, and learn how and when to use those tools.
I’ve used the phrase “become your own best doctor.” To me, that doesn’t mean believing you can do everything yourself or that you don’t need doctors or other healthcare professionals.
It means educating yourself and developing greater awareness around your own health. It means understanding what you can do for yourself and also recognizing when you need help.
And when you do need help, intentionally build a team around you.
Find people with different skills, perspectives, and tools who understand what you’re trying to accomplish and can serve as members of your dream team.
That’s how I see my own role with the people I work with.
I don’t need to be everything to somebody. I want to bring what I know and what I do well to the table, while helping that person continue moving toward what matters to them.
Because ultimately, that’s the big idea.
What are you trying to do with this life?
And how can your health help make that possible?
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM VITAL ALIGNMENTS
Moving forward, I want Vital Alignments to become a resource for health and life.
I want to share principles, tools, and practical resources that help people take better care of themselves and better understand the options available to them.
Sometimes that might mean a mobility routine for a surfer who’s been spending hours paddling. Sometimes we’ll explore movement, strength, training, recovery, nutrition, sleep, stress, or different aspects of chiropractic care.
I’ll talk about what I’m seeing and learning through clinical practice. I’ll explore different tools and techniques I use, what they’re intended to do, who they may be appropriate for, and where their limitations are. I want to introduce people to ideas, teachers, practitioners, and perspectives that have influenced me.
And I want to continue asking questions.
Because I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t intend for Vital Alignments to become a place where I tell everyone exactly how they should live.
I want it to become a place where we can learn, question, experiment, develop awareness, and become more skillful in how we navigate our health and our lives.
A healthcare and life-care resource that can help us navigate life mindfully, skillfully, and intentionally.
THIS IS THE BEGINNING
Vital Alignments represents where my journey has brought me at this point in time.
I’m sure it will continue to evolve.
So will I.
My intention is to continue learning, practicing, sharing what I discover, and helping people develop the awareness, tools, and capacity to live the lives they’re here to live.
To take care of ourselves so that we have more to give to our families, our communities, and the world around us.
To recognize when we’ve fallen out of alignment and develop the awareness to find our way back.
And ultimately, to get after it, live the dream, and live well.
I’m stoked to finally put Vital Alignments into the world, and I’m grateful that you’re here at the beginning.
Aloha and welcome to Vital Alignments.
Ola Pono. Live well.