A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

3 : Boundary and Relationality

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Health also requires adequate and appropriate management of boundaries – a homeostatic balance of boundedness.

Psychic, social, biological, cellular, informational, and all other kinds of boundaries and connectivity need to offer the correct balance between permeability and mutuality vs. resistance and separation – something largely organised by the body-mind.

Health also requires adequate and appropriate management of boundaries, Life being completely dependent on – and its awe-inspiring beauty and diversity being brought about by – the balance between relationship and separation.

On the one hand, loss of boundary is a form of death because it leads to some kind of dissolution. Many human cultures seem to struggle with this, having a general fear of death and dissolution. Organic Life on the other hand is a continuously rolling tide in which Life and living organisms emerge and then return to the soup of feedstock that makes more Life.

On the other hand, boundary also provides a necessary clarity[2]. Excess boundary also eventually causes death because we need to take in nourishment, excrete and enter into supportive relationship (etc.). Therefore, the homeostatic balance of boundary permeability within a healthy well-regulated functional window is of critical concern to your self-identity and psychological well-being, as much as it is to the Health of every compartment and cell in your body. It is not unlike the provision and control over opening and closing of doors and windows in a building.

The body is invested with many layers of boundary – housing, clothes, social customs, several layers of skin, a musculoskeletal system that "armours" and an immune system. All of these are "permeable". For instance, the immune system is tolerant of infection, and only activates once bacteria multiply past a certain threshold.

An often overlooked aspect is the boundary between the personal field of consciousness and the collective unconscious. I recently walked through a patch of land devastated by forest clearing, and could feel that the land itself was in shock. Although on one level this might be useful information, it is not useful to be affected by it to the point that my own body would go into sympathetic shock. Similarly, there is a lot of fear, distress and (consequent) aggression in modern cities, and that can have an almost palpable intensity. So all that stuff "out there" also (ideally) has to be regulated and filtered according to its content, just like the food we eat, the music we listen to and the people allowed through the front door of the house. The less resource and resilience, the more consequent need to blank it out – a not unreasonable response. Some people are unable to do this, their psychic "aerials" being permanently stuck open and set at maximum sensitivity. Other people are blissfully unaware of this noise, being permanently shut down (but that feels totally normal). The more adaptive resilience we have, the more it is possible to be aware and empathetic within our reasonable limits.

The body-mind (and not the cognitive mind) is in control of the general task of managing and regulating boundaries – for the purpose of survival – and it also controls these less physical sensory boundaries. But it is also important that the cognitive mind has some say in controlling boundaries and calibrating the body-mind – just one of many important feedback loops between conscious and non-conscious processes. This requires that the regulation of empathy – switching it off and on – is more conscious and discriminatory (we recognise our limits) and less automatic or "unthinking". Empathy of this kind is a relationship beyond the confines of the skin into the proxemic space [3] surrounding the body.

Well-resourced people with adaptive boundaries have little or no need to consciously regulate in this way, so the whole thing is a little Zen-like – if you’re trying then you’re not doing it. However I raise this issue at the very beginning because the route we will be following has to of necessity include some increase in your capacity to "interocept" – to be aware of your body and internal world of sensations, including emotions and the "imaginal" (see later). This will automatically increase your potential for awareness of both yourself and the world, because more awareness equates directly to more permeability. So at some point you’re likely to have to look more at regulation of your "aerials" and increasing your resilience, and put less emphasis on building interoceptive and empathic sensitivity – and there are exercises provided to deal with this.

Its very hard to give specific personal guidelines, because internal experience of being in a body is so individual but the English language and its common usage is vague and non-specific. Most people therefore consider their level and specific kind of body-awareness to be normal, unremarkable and universal.

We are all called at this time to have more empathy for ourselves, other people and for the living world, and at the same time be highly functional when surrounded by that pain. I was – like many other people – "afflicted" by a slight excess of sensitivity when I was born, and over the years realised that this was a very two-edged sword. In order for it to be a gift rather than a liability then there is a journey of learning how to regulate how open all the windows are, of becoming more resilient, and of making the state of those aerials less fixed so there is more ability to self-regulate empathic connection – to be able to choose where the receptive volume control knob is set.

There is some confusion in the English language around this distinction, as people are termed "sensitive" meaning that they are unable to regulate or do not have the resilience to meet that sensitivity. So "sensitive" (or "snowflake") has become a derogatory label in some groups. In others there is a celebration of physical and/or emotional fragility because they are seen to be necessary companions to sensitivity. In contrast, some people walk around in a perpetual state of relative numbness, distance and disconnection - which may (or may not) feel distressing, and that may (or may not) feel qualitatively separate from the rest of humanity.

I believe we are wild, empathic animals, made of the stuff of stars. Many people take their character and way of experiencing themselves and the world to be carved in tablets of stone and say "that’s Me – that’s who/how I am". However, many of the traits described above are frequently mistaken for identity when they are actually imprints. If the "personality" trait in any way limits your capacity to thrive in the world, to feel resilient, to use your body, to easily relate to both people and the rest of the Living world – then at least part of that is an imprint, and is an adaptation you made to an overwhelming situation, most likely in very very early life. Very few imprints – if any – are set in stone, and Life always wishes to expand into a greater range of possibilities. In fact, the defining characteristic of the human organism is that it is un-formed. Far more than any other creature it is able to form itself into whatever a situation might demand of it, but also what it/you wish it to be.