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In order to return to Health, it is essential to define where we are heading towards – rather than just what we wish to get away from.
Western medicine has an excellent understanding of pathology – but it has no coherent view of Health; largely defining it as an absence of illness. This paradox arises because the reductionist scientific method studies single "systems" sanitised of complexity and subjectivity. The definitions of health that do exist are based on measured parameters that consider either psychology or physiology, and even if put together they are in essence a photo album of holiday snapshots instead of the actual lived experience. Interventions to change any particular aspect will inevitably be piecemeal. In contrast, the organic Health in your body relies on subtle optimisations acting across the entire body-mind complex and relationships in both the external world and with the internal microbiome. Many traditional cultures insist that supportive relationship also extends through time, to our ancestors and descendants. Health is a wholly integrated process that arises primarily from the inside, and is at least 50% subjective. We feel healthy or not regardless of what any scan or blood test might show, the classic case of this being back pain, in which there is almost no correlation between MRI/X-Ray findings and subjective pain or mobility – except in the most extreme of cases.
In order to return to Health, it is essential to define where we are heading towards – rather than just what we wish to get away from.
No single physiological state may be identified and defined as "healthy" - because your body is constantly seeking an optimum balance between many apparently irreconcilable demands. To list just a few of its many tasks, it has to manage homeostasis and its immune status on both global systemic and very local cellular levels, manage physical resources such as major ions and trace elements, maintain itself through cellular division, produce and recycle a vast array of proteins, adapt to all of the challenges, opportunities and sporadic changes in the ambient environment (including eating, drinking, breathing), rally itself to act according to your will, deploy its senses and memory at various scales to anticipate the immediate future (etc.).
This adaptive dance is common to every life-form. It is a multidimensional version of a circus juggler riding a unicycle; and much of that internal organisation requires absolutely no cognitive input… It happens "automatically." However, as you will see later – what you do with your mind and attention does have a major impact on the non-cognitive, automatic layers of organisation of the body-mind. And vice-versa, the body and its physiology have a significant effect on mental-emotional states and capacity.
