A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Theory

43 : Summary

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Note that simplification means there are a lot more "Gods of the Gaps". Also, this is primarily a biological and somatic (body-based) viewpoint, so it substantially reframes psychological ways of thinking; but does not directly address the spiritual - such as - questions about the soul.

If my wife is cooking a meal in the kitchen for a dozen guests who are about to arrive in 10 minutes and I go up to her and say "what colour would you like me to paint the front door?" - the answer I will get is fairly obvious.

It's a simple and universally recognised rule that - when we are stressed (i.e. very engaged with one particularly urgent activity) - everything else becomes less important. I fact, human communication varies according to many factors, and the amnount and quality of information is critical to the proper functioning of families, communities, organisations and societies. Too much communication and the necessities of life may be given insufficient attention. Too little comunication and things start to fall apart. What is too much or too little depends on the bandwidth we have available, which in turn depends on the urgency and priority of whatever we are dealing with. If you are talking with a friend on the phone and smell burning coming from the kitchen, it's not unreasonable to say something like "there's an emergency - I'll call you back when it's over" - and put the phone down.

Exactly the same goes for every living physical and/or organisational entity - be that a cell or an organ or any functional combination of processes. If there is a survival-emergency at any level, then the part dealing with it temporarily reduces any non-critical communication. The temporary loss of efficiency (due to loss of fine-tuning) is more than compensated for by increased capacity to deal with critical information bandwidths and the increased energy availability because less communication channels are being employed.

The most obvious and perhaps first place this occurs is in the Vagus Nerve - a major telephone line in the body. It's not the telephone line that has failed or is compromised - but rather a mutual agreement between the people on either end of the conversation. If the external senses are focussed on external danger, the digestive system gets on with its own thing until everything is over. If the immune system or other parts of the metabolism are under strain, then the head get son with its own thing until the body's internal emergency is over. These temporary de-couplings are a normal part of biological organisation when under stress, and only take place at all when some part of the system has reached the limit if its normal adaptive range.

"Exceeding normal adaptive range" equates to "overwhelm". Overwhelm at some level - be that internal or external is therefore not a particularly unusual event for any living organism - meaning that there are very well-developed adaptive organisational fall-backs to allocate resources and responses to deal with overwhelm - and similarly well-developed pathways to recover and return to normal functioning within the normal adaptive range.

For various cultural reasons these normal biological overwhelm adaptations do not re-calibrate, and so we call them "trauma" give them various psychiatric labels. Because they hold the physiology in a non-optimal adaptive state, they also cause all kinds of physical illnesses. In reality the body-mind wishes to be efficient and well-calibrated, so the "problem" of trauma and dissociation is actually one of ensuring the correct kind of cognitive ↔ body communication with a willing and very inteligent organism.

A return to a well-calibrated normality only has two possible pathways :

1. The overwhelming circumstances naturally come to an end on their own, or
2. More resources become available such that the situation (or some part of it) is no longer overwhelming

... After which the whole organic body-mind must accurately re-calibrate itself to the new level of safety. This act of re-calibration between active organic response and reality is (ought to be) constantly happening, and is a process of communication.

Re-calibrating the body-mind such that fragments begin to re-integrate (bringing back adaptive capacity) is primarily enabled by "right attention" – i.e. using attention to enter a feedback loop such that the body’s innate intelligence uses the new information. This kind of attention must meet the body-mind on its own ground as an intelligent organism and apply the rules by which the body-mind lives. This includes using attention – the internal and external senses – as they evolved to be used, having a particular regard to the internal and external worlds, and fully inhabiting the timeframes (>2 seconds, >40 seconds) that the body-mind operates in. Useful states of regard that help re-calibrate the bodymind are genuine unaffected appreciation, gratitude, spacious curiosity, kindness, exploration, and non-forcefulness - an allowing things to be exactly as they are. The body loves to be communicated with in this way, and responds rapidly when the conscious attention actively engages with interoceptive feedback loops.

The main way that this positive effect comes about is by working with natural feedback loops i nthe manner described in the practical section of this book that reproduces critical aspects of the "natural" way our nervous system has evolved to self-regulate. A very general way to describe this approach would be to say that:

1. There is an intial phase of "coming home" - a reduced version of the next part of the "exercise" - in which the immediate environment is given a certain kind of attention
2. We then make a "gesture" (a movement, place attention somewhere, say a particular phrase, etc.) whilst having some interoceptive attention
3. There is a "response" (a change in body sensations or breathing pattern, quality of mental presence, etc.)
4. The change in sensation is welcomed by curiously exploring its textural quality and its three-dimensional presence
5. Further shifts arising as a consequence are also similarly engaged with
6. All of this is guided by a simple three-way schema that discriminates between different kinds of "sensation", and by a respectful, non-forceful, curiously attentive attitude to the body-mind
7. Various knobs, bells and whistles can be added, but the basic schema still has to be followed accurately

The timeframe necessary then becomes a few minutes (maybe ten or twenty minutes at most) to "arrive", then about two minutes to recognise sufficient safety such that the body-mind begins to respond and take in "new" information about your safety status, then about another five or ten minutes for this to process and deepen and consolidate.

The main obstacle to what is essentially a very simple and natural process - is to temporarily put aside the mindset and culturally habitual ways of being in the environment and relating to the body. In particular the tendency to try to make things happen and force a result - to believe that we can rationally know what changes should be made and then to (attempt to) make that happen.

Usually there are several or many layers, but a surprising amount of past overwhelm can sometimes be processed all at once - with no need to re-live the event. The body then re-organises itself by reducing its degree of fragmentation and increasing the level of internal communication, thus freeing-off more adaptive capacity.