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There is a strong biological survival imperative for ALL living organisms (including your body) to:
In other words your body wants to be healthy, wants to work as best it can, and wants any adaptation to be well calibrated and optimally responsive to your present situation - BUT it still has to work within the adaptive load it is carrying.
All levels of organisation of life have a fairly narrow bandwidth of sensory and meaning-making attention. This creates a semi-compartmentalised, only loosely coupled whole - what Francisco Varela termed a "Not-One, Not-Two" duality. Which also means that attention - your attention - is of great interest to your whole biological self, and is the means by which the non-cognitive body-mind understands what your cognitive relationship to the world is.
The body-mind is not a unitary organism. Rather, out of necessity, it is a collection of loosely-coupled entities that interleave across many different physical scales and time domains - that communicate with each other through many different mediums, the nervous system being just one of these means of communication.
Communication is modulated (increased, decreased, varied in its form) as one of the main ways in which your body-mind organises itself as it adapts to new circumstances. Living systems want to communicate with each other - something called "amicity" -so do not have to be forced to communicate. Rather, a lack of communication in the biological realm is always due to other needs being perceived to be more urgent. If the urgency is catered for, then communicatuin naturally picks up again.
Much higher-level organisation is carried out by non-cognitive adaptive Gestalts - small intelligent "programs" based on past experiences. Your ability to use your body and senses is dependent on motion and sensory Gestalts you developed in infancy. These speed up response times and may provide very efficient adaptive reflexes. But adaptive Gestalts can continue to exist past their sell-by-date, be incoherent with present reality, and so restrict present and future adaptive possibilities.
The ability to not be held by past programs but to also adapt to new circumstances (including the expression of true free will) is definitive of Life, but particularly definitive of Human life. Generally speaking the Left cortex of your brain uses Gestalts heavily to label the world to make it useful, and the Right cortex is more able to be free of them, recognise the New, and therefore create new Gestalts.
The core evolutionary organisational structure is a three-compartment body plan
... which needs major nerves to interconnect these three - we call this the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). However, the three compartments operate largely independently. Beyond the baseline minimum level of ANS activity necessary to manage the evolved complexity, richer ANS conversations are more about fine-tuning/optimisation and helping each compartment to be more responsive to the other's needs.
There is group of mental-emotional states that meld into each other - that tend to generate an optimum physiological state, where cardiovascular, breath and neurology all become coherent. The fact that the physiology does become more efficient in this mental-emotional state suggests that this is the state we have evolved to be in most of the time!
These are genuine, unforced, unaffected love, gratitude, appreciation, sense of beauty, awe, child-like play, compassion, quiet joy - which all generate a very recognisable quietly present quality of mind and an embodied emotional-somatic state that might be characterised as a "glow".
Meaning-making is a major task for organisms at all levels, and for all organisational levels of your body-mind.
Meaning is determined automatically by sensory Gestalts, but everything also refers back to your cognitive /conscious attention, and to your response (both mental-emotional and physical/motor/movement). New experiences that significantly shift your current state of being have to be assimilated before a new style of movement and response can begin. This is preceded by a "startle-alert" - a pause in which the neck is lengthened and head oriented to the source of new information, the senses become particularly acute, the whole body becomes still but vibratory, ready for movement.
This important gesture of potential transition occurs many times during each day, and a single startle-alert may last just a fraction of a second up to tens of seconds. Exactly the same process is used to assimilate both danger and opportunity. A slightly less intense, less rapid-onset, more spacious version is used to assimilate and settle into appreciation/gratitude.
Meaning-making is largely about predicting the future. Meaning translates into response, which is usually movement, which also predicts the future - because motion does not achieve its goal until the motion is completed.
Resilience comprises several different aspects, including :
Adaptive capacity is a particularly important aspect of resilience. The more adaptive capacity you have (i.e. the less adapt-ed you are), the more adaptive flexibility. So health requires a minimum of energy-using adaptation, a maximum of experience and associated adaptive Gestalts, and a minimum of restrictive adaptive Gestalts.
