Heroes Not Zombies

This pool with the concentric ripples radiating out towards the edges from the centre has always fascinated me. One of the trains of thought it sets off for me is the amazing powers of self healing which all living creatures possess.

This power comes from within and radiates through the whole being. In one telling this is the Vital Force, or Life Force, a mysterious phenomenon which flows through all animated substances. But my issue with that telling is it suggests this energy is an entity of some kind, a thing. And I’m pretty sure no such “thing” exists – well that could send me down the whole rabbit hole of our habit of separating ourselves out and reducing all we encounter to objects, things, resources or whatever. A big mistake in my opinion!

Another telling is that self healing is one of a set of characteristics possessed by all “complex adaptive systems” and all living organisms can be viewed that way. I’ve written plenty here on “complex adaptive systems” so if you want to read more put that term in the search box at the top right of the page.

From that perspective living creatures can self heal, self repair, and self defend themselves. But how do they do that?

I reckon we are at a very early stage of understanding these processes but it strikes me there are at least three major “systems” or “processes” which are most commonly involved.

The first is balancing. The term homeostasis was coined to describe this. It’s our ability to maintain a pretty steady internal environment. Through a vast web of interconnected feedback systems involving cells, molecules and structures such as the blood vessels and nerve fibres, when there is “too much” of something we self regulate to reduce it, and if there’s “too little” we increase it. You can see this in blood pressure, as well as in a host of circulating levels of different nutrients, enzymes and hormones.

The second is the inflammatory system. We tend to think of inflammation as a bad thing because too much inflammation is highly destructive but this ability is at the basis of our ability to defend ourselves and to heal wounds. You’ll be very familiar with the changes in your skin around the site of a cut, or in response to an infection. This is the inflammatory system at work.

The third is integration. I find that integration can be both a simple and difficult to grasp….which is interesting because integration is all about our ability to handle paradoxes. There are two opposite and essential patterns in the universe – wildness and discipline or chaos and order. We need both the play together nicely to have the world we live in. It’s that classic “and not or”.

Too much organisation and order and everything becomes rigid and stuck. Too much chaos and disorder and everything falls to pieces, implodes or explodes!

We need all our systems to integrate – not balance in the sense of cancelling each other out – to flow, to grow and to flourish.

So even if we don’t understand these processes in detail, these three viewpoints can help us to understand how we got sick and what we need to do to mobilise and support self healing – homeostasis, inflammation and integration. All three are constantly present. All three interact with each other perpetually. It’s not about reducing the problem to one of them. It’s paying attention to them all.

And here’s the thing – sometimes there are small specific adjustments to make, but, generally self healing is a holistic function. It’s individual, unique and embedded within multiple contexts. So we need to be wary of one size fits all solutions and we need to tend to the environments in which the individual lives – the physical, social and cultural environments.

I don’t know if this way of thinking is helpful to you but it’s how I came to understand both how patients became unwell and what my job was to help them heal.