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4.2: The Miracle of Stability: Why the Body Is a River and Not a Machine

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4.2: The Miracle of Stability: Why the Body Is a River and Not a Machine

If the metaphor of the body as a machine is misleading, what alternative do we have?
The answer lies in a radical shift inspired by modern biology and the philosophy of Iain McGilchrist.

The Real Question Isn’t “What Changed?”

For a static machine, the right question when something goes wrong is: “What changed?”
A screw must have loosened, a cable must have broken.
But organisms are the exact opposite of static — they are in constant flux.
The real, deeper question is: “How does anything ever stay the same at all?”

This may sound philosophical, but it’s crucial.
The reality of our body is one of permanent, radical change. Consider this: every second, between 10 and 50 million cells in our body die and are replaced by new ones — up to 70 billion cells per day.
Given this unimaginable turnover, the stability of our body — the fact that we look and function similarly today and tomorrow — is the true miracle.

The New Metaphor: The Body as a River 🏞️

If we’re not a machine, what are we then?
Modern biology describes us as a stabilized process — not a collection of fixed parts, but an ongoing flow within a persistent form.

The best metaphor for this is a river.
A river consists of water that constantly flows and banks that give the water its shape. You cannot separate the two: the banks shape the water’s flow, and the water continuously maintains the banks’ form.
The river is this dynamic process — flowing within form.

And that’s exactly what we are.
Our body is a constantly changing cosmos in which everything is connected and in continuous relationship with its environment.
This holistic, living perspective corresponds precisely to the worldview of our right hemisphere: a perception of life as an integrated whole, greater than the sum of its parts.

We are not things that can break, but self-organizing, living processes.
Health is not the absence of faults, but the outcome of well-functioning, constantly adapting processes.
This insight changes everything about how we can understand and support healing.

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