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A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Application and Practical exercises

8.14 : Miscellaneous notes 14: Trusting the Body

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If you observe animals in the wild, and most domesticated animals, they have an implicit and unquestioing trust in their own bodies - their body's ability to perform to or even beyond maximum on demand and necessity, and their body's ability to heal itself.

This trust manifests in several ways, one being that animals tend to ignore so far as they can any way in which their body is limited in its capacity by injury or illness and so they do their best to engage with normal responses to the world in a normal way, paying absolutely minimal attention to whatever is not right. Contrast this to human behaviour, and it becomes (surprisingly) obvious that human preoccupation with illness and injury is actually cultural conditioning. They may also if necessary spend a lot of time seeking out natural medicines (see Cindy Engel's 2002 book “Wild Health: How animals keep themselves well and what we can learn from themrdquo; Publ. Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN-13: 978-0297646846) and/or just resting to allow their body to recover. So one manifestation of that trust is also an innate sense of “rightness” that includes some kind of “instinctive” sense of what might help (though Engel points out that this instinct is far fron random and expresses significant intelligence) - requiring in turn a trust that what they feel coming from their body may also be considered information that can inform best action.

This kind of trust has several requirements :

...all of the above being congruently put into practice by their parents and peers as they grew up, so that this is simply “how it is done”.

As a medicalised society we have created a distrust of the body, have tended to lose that degree of sensitivity, immediacy and self-honesty when it comes to feeling subtle minutiae of information arising form the body, and have placed ourselves a meta-position of trust in others who have specific trained knowledge in how bodies work. It is simply not possible for most people to re-gain this complex combination of trust, sensitivity, normalised attention to somatic information, and self-honesty by just deciding that this is a good idea. What has been lost can take years or even decades of hard work to re-gain, and in the meantime it's a good policy to not throw the meds down the toilet or refuse sensible medical interventions!


 
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