I’ve long held that a way of thinking about health is to use the concept of flow. When the various different aspects of our selves and our lives integrate in a coherent way we experience flow – good energy, good vitality, strength, the feeling of being alive (there are many ways to describe it)
I recently came across an interesting expansion of this idea when I read “Mindsight” by Dan Siegel (ISBN 978-0553804706).
He describes health as being like a flowing river and he says the river has two banks, either of which we tend to drift towards as we become unwell.
One bank is rigidity, and the other is chaos.
It’s true. We can see that in some illnesses we are stuck, caught in loops, trapped in ever decreasing circles which shrink our world. What should be flowing has become solidified, sluggish, frozen, or blocked.
In complexity terms, this kind of pattern exists around “point attractors”. You’ll be familiar with point attractors in the universe; they are the black holes which suck everything into them. Nothing escapes.
In other illnesses everything seems to fall to pieces, life itself falls apart and we find ourselves lost, or overwhelmed with confusion. We don’t know who we are, or where we are, and we don’t know how to find a way out.
In complexity terms, this kind of patterns exists as a “chaos attractor”, a zone of chaos where there are no clear patterns but which somehow maintains itself.
Which of the patterns are most familiar to you?
Rigidity?
or Chaos?
Healing involves a release from these states – from rigidity, or chaos, to flow.
Heroes Not Zombies 
I remembered your piece when reading the wisdom of Heraclitus 6th C, B.C p 270 here ! http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2EPELIBS2UVZT
‘One cannot step twice into the same river, the river is always different , but always the same. Ultimately, of course , rivers themselves,not just the waters that flow through them, come and go:in this too our bodies are like rivers.But stasis , the opposite of change and flux,is incompatible with life, and leads only to separation,and disintegration:even the potion separates unless it is stirred.’
Many accounts of healing and restitution seem to use these metaphors of flow and transition . Life seems to demand them —frenetic activity , turbulence seem to need a counterpoint -rest or a bit of reflection. Sometimes, however prolonged stagnation and continuous rest creates a sort of stasis . Perhaps, Daoist ideas and reflection on nature is not such a bad thing .
[…] to introduce patients to the idea of health as a flowing, adaptive, coherent, energised, stable river, with the opposite banks of chaos and rigidity which we end up on when we become […]