A systems view of biological health

Section 1: A systems view of biological health

1 : Main Index and Foreword

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

 
You have started to enter an online book that re-frames physiology and biology (and the aspects of consciousness attached to that) around the principle of health.

This is in significant contrast to most other approaches that one way or another begin with an idea of illness that has to be "cured". Once we get away from thinking of the body as ill, then the body becomes the source of its own healing. We can treat it (and relate to it) as an intelligent companion - and therefore assist it in finding greater health (as opposed to imposing "solutions") .

Where indicated there are also the following additional resources:
Audio :    |    Video : 

Section 1 : Introduction : to give some necessary context.

Section 2 : Theory behind the practical exercises (the Introductory material is further unpackaged relatively briefly, with acompanying explanatory notes and references).

Section 3 : Summary of Theory : the theory compressed to a few pithy statements.

Section 4 : Practical exercises : including a description of what each exercise does, and its key elements.

Appendices : going even deeper into various theoretical topics.

Foreword

The information you will read here is based on about 15 years of application in clinical practice and some 35 years of reflective personal experience - and represents my attempts to make sense of both clinical and personal experience of dissociation.

Along the way I realised that dissociation itself is a normal - if incapacitating - biological response; and almost all the models of the body and nervous system being used were based on an idea of pathology and "parts" - what I call "Landrover neurology".

As Natureza Gabriel [1] points out, there is a significant difference between anatomy and physiology - between how we (medically oriented humans) categorise the body, and how the body organises itself. Starting from a point of view that the body, the mind, the nervous system, and the human organism is intrinsically flawed and made of discrete parts, the only solution that can be arrived at is to bodge and fix it.

So instead I have chosen to start from scratch and to re-frame the interface between the mind and the body - and the biology that supports that - in terms of Health. i.e. the idea that we have evolved for a few billion years and our biology has an intelligence that prioritises health as one of its survival agendas. This was obviously a zeitgeist, because several other people, organisations and collaborative projects have also been treading this path at the same time and come to similar conclusions (see resources/links).

Our nervous system has evolved according to the environmental demands we encountered over the past five hundred million years. And particularly as we evolved from primates into humans - as we spent a couple of million years moving around in small tribal groups as hunter gatherers, during which time (possibly as far back as 200,000 years) we evolved into something like modern Homo Sapiens. This evoutionary phase included a species-typical pattern of human behaviour [2] (including how the mind and body interface with each other and how we interact with other humans and the entire biosphere), around which the nervous system is optimised.

The modern civilised constructed technological world is so different from that original natural environment that our survival-oriented nervous system gets very confused ... to the point that in the 21st century trauma and overwhelm have become an endemic and largely invisible dis-ease. Which in turn causes problems that affect people to varying degrees at a personal level. Which then also has what are turning out to be catastrophic kock-on effects at a societal level, affecting how we collectively view ourselves as humans and interact with other humans in societies and between nations. And this also affects how we view and interact with the Natural world.

The material on this website is intended to provide an understanding and a small but highly adaptable set of practical tools for use in everyday life. These have the potential to help help reverse that trend; to become more resilient and effective in everyday life; and to cultivate a different understandng of how we optimally integrate our senses and the sensed world, a more personally and globally sustainable way of being-in and interacting-with the Natural environment and ecosystem of this small planet.

I hope you find the material here useful - whether you are a professional or wish to apply it for yourself [3]. Most people need at least a modicum of theory to make sense of the practical exercises - because a health-oriented approach is radically counter-cultural. Although the words might look familiar, the ideas behind them are definitely not.

Andrew Cook MSc RCST, December 2024