Purpose, Desire, and the Design of Life: Introducing Scott Turner

Interoception, homeostasis, and the autonomic nervous system are at the heart of this conversation on trauma healing and body-based wellness—drawing inspiration from Scott Turner’s groundbreaking book, Purpose and Desire.

In this episode of the Autonomic Homeostasis Activation Podcast, hosts Ruth Lorensson and Tom Pals explore the shift from traditional mechanistic models of the human body to a living systems approach—where homeostasis is understood not just as a function, but as the body’s deepest purpose.

Tom shares how Turner's work helped crystallize the core concepts behind AHA, especially the healing power of interoception—the internal sense that allows us to listen to the body rather than control it. Ruth recounts the story of how they connected with Scott and why his perspective has become foundational to understanding what true wellness really is.

Tune in for a story-rich, science-grounded episode that challenges the machine metaphor of the body—and invites us to see ourselves as intelligent, self-regulating systems capable of healing from within.

Key Topics:

• How Scott Turner’s book Purpose and Desire shaped the origins of AHA
• The difference between mechanistic and living systems models of the body
• Why homeostasis is more than balance—it’s the body’s deepest intelligence
• The role of interoception in healing from trauma and chronic stress
• How curiosity, observation, and conversation drive true transformation

Join Ruth and Tom as they lay the groundwork for the next two episodes with Scott Turner—and reveal why changing how we see the body might be the first step in helping it heal.

Transcript

Tom Pals

(0:02) 

Welcome to the Autonomic Homeostasis Activation Podcast.

 (0:07) 

I'm Tom Pals.

Ruth Lorensson

(0:08) 

And I'm Ruth Lorensson.

 (0:09) 

We'll be unpacking what it looks like to activate your brain to holistically manage stress and trauma to facilitate homeostasis.

Tom Pals

(0:17) 

Feel free to experience wellness in body, mind and spirit.

Ruth Lorensson

(0:22) 

Thank you for joining us.

 (0:24) 

Let's get this conversation started.

 (0:27) 

Well, hey there, Tom.

(0:28) 

Hey Ruth.

 (0:30) 

This is going to be cool because we actually recorded a number of sessions, podcast episodes with someone we highly rate and who's become a bit of a friend of ours now.

 (0:44) 

Yes.

(0:44) 

Scott Turner.

 (0:45) 

Now, some of our listeners might know who that is, some might not.

(0:49) 

But we are doing this episode before we're going to really launch the recorded ones that we did with him.

(0:57) 

Mainly because the first one we did with him was like the audio didn't come through very well.

 (1:02) 

And we actually...

 (1:03) 

Technical difficulties.

(1:04) 

Technical difficulties.

 (1:06) 

And then we just thought, actually, this could be a good opportunity just to talk through, you know, what was talked about in that episode.

 (1:14) 

Give a bit of an introduction to Scott because you've got a bit of a history with how Scott, and particularly his work, how his writing really became part of a critical influence in your own work.

Tom Pals

(1:31) 

Oh, absolutely.

Ruth Lorensson

(1:31) 

So we're going to talk about that.

 (1:33) 

And then we just felt like this could really lead very nicely into the other...

 (1:39) 

We've got two other interviews with him that were so good.

(1:43) 

So you guys were in for a real treat.

 (1:46) 

So why don't we start off with who is Scott Turner?

 (1:51) 

Like when I met you a number of years ago, I remember you were like sharing all of these things that influenced you.

(2:02) 

And on your bookshelf, there's...

 (2:05) 

You have a lot of books, but there's a few that are...

(2:08) 

Very special.

(2:09) 

Exactly.

 (2:09) 

So talk to me about, talk to us about Scott Turner and who was he to you in the space of AHA and your own journey with discovering AHA.

Tom Pals

(2:24) 

So AHA is...

 (2:29) 

And why it's able to allow the brain to produce the healing, restorative wellness that the brain itself can do, that humans, we just can't do that, is because of a combination of homeostasis and interoception.

 (2:50) 

Interoception is that sensory awareness of what is happening in my body.

(2:56) 

But homeostasis is life.

 (2:59) 

And when I first discovered and figured out how to get the anterior nervous system,

 (3:07) 

that part of our brain that isn't in our head, it's in our gut,

 (3:11) 

to initiate that conversation, that interaction with the rest of the body,

 (3:20) 

to get everybody on the same page and experience wellness,

 (3:26) 

I discovered that through some personal experiences of my own,

 (3:32) 

physiologically related to seeing some things that were resolving some trauma,

(3:37) 

and then putting two and two together and getting four,

 (3:42) 

where I'd always gotten three,

 (3:44) 

and I couldn't figure out why isn't two and two adding up to four,

 (3:48) 

and it keeps adding up to three, and I can't figure this out.

 (3:51) 

But what was critical to my understanding of, what have I discovered, what have I figured out, what is this, was I understood a lot about trauma and the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic and all of those kinds of things, and how that interacts with the limbic system.

(4:12) 

I understood a lot of that and the physiology.

 (4:15) 

What I didn't really comprehend as fully as I do now was homeostasis.

 (4:24) 

My first encounter with the idea of homeostasis, because homeostasis is life.

(4:31) 

Homeostasis is that stable, steady state.

 (4:34) 

Core temperature stays around or can return to.

 (4:38) 

Healing, a cut.

(4:40) 

Homeostasis, healing, restoration of well-being.

 (4:45) 

My initial understanding of all that was from literally Dr. Walter Cannon's book from 1932, The Wisdom of the Body, and that's where he introduced and really talked about homeostasis and what that was.

 (5:04) 

I had that, but it was from a very medical neuroscience perspective, physiological perspective of homeostasis.

(5:19) 

It was around 2015-ish, maybe a little before or so, that I figured this out.

 (5:28) 

The initial conceptualizations of homeostasis and interoception and how that all worked.

 (5:34) 

It could work together, but Scott Turner's book, Purpose and Desire, came out in 2017.

(5:45) 

It was where the wisdom of the body and Dr. Walter Cannon is incredibly deeply science physiology.

 (6:00) 

This is a Harvard professor and medical practitioner, and he's writing this book, and I could pick up what I could, but it was like, okay, I'm way out of my depth here.

 (6:14) 

Purpose and Desire was much more approachable, and it was much more consistent in its expression, not from just the perspective of the human body, but of life, of organisms, and how organisms function.

(6:34) 

Part of our conversation with Scott was the history of a competing, very conflicted perception of how human beings function.

 (6:50) 

Going back, and Scott unpacked some of the history in this conversation

 (6:54) 

that got technical difficulties, but he talked about way back

(7:00) 

in ancient Greece, there was Democritus, and there was Plato,

 (7:06) 

and there was Aristotle, and Plato and Aristotle had a very,

 (7:11) 

what we would think of as holistic perception of the organism,

 (7:16) 

a very, by modern standards, crude understanding of the humors

 (7:22) 

and vapors and things like that.

 (7:24) 

Democritus was very mechanistic and used the term atom, not the way we would use the term atom, but these little particles bouncing all over the place, and somehow out of all these bouncing little atoms, things function.

(7:43) 

Who would have thought that all these random bouncing atoms could produce all this?

(7:50) 

And Aristotle and Hippocrates were going, no, no, this is life.

 (8:00) 

These aren't just particles bouncing all over mechanistically.

(8:04) 

So these two streams go all the way back there, and Hippocrates and Aristotle carried the day up until the Enlightenment, and then mechanism and human reason and figuring things out and physics and Newtonian physics and all that became very much the way that human beings thought of human beings and health and medicine and that sort of thing, and it was very mechanistic.

 (8:37) 

And as Scott talked about, dripping a little bit of oil into the mechanism, like serotonin into the brain, helps the mechanism function.

 (8:47) 

But it's not life.

(8:49) 

And it comes with all of these other unwanted side effects.

 (8:54) 

Anyway, so getting back to Scott, what I found in Purpose and Desire reflected, as he was talking about the many little lives of the termites in a termite mound and how that was life and it wasn't mechanistic, it was life, and it was purposeful, and there seemed to be design in it.

 (9:17) 

And that resonated with me, because I saw that happening in human beings and the way their brain was sorting out the conversations that were dysfunctional in different parts of the whole being so that everything could speak with one voice, without a cacophony and without distortion, which is ironic, given that Scott's voice isn't here because it was distorted.

(9:52) 

But my point is that Scott's book spoke deeply to that element that is life.

 (10:01) 

And whether that's, as I like to say, the many little lives of a termite mound, or the many little lives of the cells in our own bodies, and the many little lives of the organs in our bodies, there's a conversation that happens.

 (10:16) 

And so Scott really helped me appreciate homeostasis in a much different context than Walter Cannon had physiologically.

(10:30) 

Walter Cannon physiologically is why I can work and guide people in that sensory experience of wellness, working with nature rather than against it, or trying to get it to do something that we wish it would, that is natural, but there's only so much oil we can drip, so to speak, to get the machine to work.

 (10:54) 

The machine itself isn't a machine.

 (10:59) 

The mechanistic is simply the manifestation of things that are homeostatic.

(11:07) 

In other words, as conversations are happening and things are working well, it gives the appearance of a machine.

 (11:17) 

It's a well-oiled machine, but it's not a machine.

 (11:21) 

That's the after effect of life itself thriving.

(11:26) 

So that's how that came to be.

 (11:29) 

So then, years later, I actually got to talk to the man.

Ruth Lorensson

(11:34) 

Yeah, let's talk about that because it's a fun little story.

 (11:38) 

So you know, obviously, Scott's writings were really influential at that point.

 (11:44) 

And for many of these big kind of topics that you've just mentioned, which we're actually going to get into because this is what he talks about in this episode with us.

(11:56) 

But, you know, so what happens is, but that's a book, right?

 (11:59) 

That's someone you don't know, someone you highly admire and very grateful for that because it's actually really helping your work with AHA.

 (12:09) 

And so I don't know how many years ago now, a couple of years ago, was it me?

Tom Pals

(12:15) 

Yes.

Ruth Lorensson

(12:16) 

I had this thought because I obviously, you know, You started the conversation.

 (12:20) 

I did start the conversation.

 (12:22) 

Well, I'm someone who I think just thinks, well, if you don't try, you don't get, you know.

(12:28) 

So I remember, you know, we had so many conversations, Tom, in those early days.

 (12:34) 

And, you know, so in that space for me, you've shared so much about Canon and Scott and all the rest of it.

 (12:44) 

And so I remember one time I just thought, I'm just going to reach out to Scott Turner and see if he'll come on our podcast.

(12:51) 

We'd already started our podcast at that point.

 (12:53) 

And, you know, really thinking none of that would happen.

 (12:59) 

And so I found some email on the Internet.

(13:03) 

I didn't even have like a proper contact for him.

 (13:06) 

I think I Facebook messaged him or something like that, which, you know, like doesn't normally exist for people who have got like books and all that stuff.

 (13:14) 

That's not a good thing for me.

Tom Pals

(13:16) 

No, exactly.

 (13:17) 

I don't even have a book yet.

Ruth Lorensson

(13:18) 

Yeah.

 (13:18) 

So anyway, reached out to him and I remember this so much.

 (13:22) 

And the reason I'm sharing this is because it's a sweet story for me, at least.

(13:27) 

And I remember reaching out to him and I heard nothing.

 (13:31) 

Crickets for like six months.

 (13:33) 

So I just thought, OK, that's not, you know, whatever.

(13:38) 

And then I remember I was driving down here on my way to do a podcast recording.

 (13:44) 

And then on my Facebook Messenger app, it pops a message from Scott Turner.

 (13:50) 

And I'm like driving and I'm like almost like losing my, you know.

(13:57) 

And I'm like, oh, my gosh, he's got just got back.

 (13:59) 

And he literally never, never checks his Facebook.

 (14:02) 

So he just checked it.

(14:03) 

And obviously the the man that we know now is Scott is so such a lovely guy.

 (14:09) 

So kind, generous.

 (14:11) 

He's been so generous to us.

(14:14) 

And he was like, yeah, I'll do a podcast recording.

 (14:17) 

So that was a couple of years ago.

(14:19) 

We got him in and you met you went and met him and lunch.

(14:24) 

And so we connected a few years ago, I think, or at least a year and a half ago.

 (14:29) 

And but now we just reconnected with him this year and and had this series of conversations.

 (14:37) 

There were three episodes that we recorded.

(14:40) 

This one, we're kind of like talking around it because we lost the audio.

 (14:45) 

But the next two will be the three of us talking.

 (14:49) 

So that's really the context.

(14:51) 

That's where we've where we are.

 (14:53) 

But I think one of the things, Tom, that you mentioned and Scott really does go into this in the transcript of this episode.

 (15:03) 

And I think you've already touched on it.

(15:05) 

This this history between mechanism and living systems.

 (15:09) 

And I don't know whether it's very familiar language to me because I'm writing my dissertation right now on leadership.

(15:15) 

And I'm talking and I'm doing a lot of research on this particular topic.

(15:19) 

But I'm not sure how many of our listeners will even kind of know that's even a thing.

 (15:24) 

Some might, some might not.

 (15:26) 

But the point is, it's important how we view something, how we view.

(15:35) 

Like the human body, how we view our wellness, even.

 (15:40) 

Absolutely.

 (15:41) 

If we see that as mechanistic and it's incredibly historic and this is like I mean, I'm looking at organizational leadership.

(15:48) 

So that's one sphere.

 (15:50) 

But there's like physiology, there's mental health, there's all sorts of different spaces that we need to either think, am I seeing this as a mechanism as some or am I seeing this as a living system?

 (16:06) 

And Scott did this amazing kind of historic overview, didn't he?

(16:11) 

I'm so sorry you missed that.

 (16:12) 

Maybe we'll get him to talk about it again.

 (16:15) 

But he just went right the way through.

(16:17) 

And you you've obviously just given us a little bit of that about the history of like cultural thinking and like, you know, scientific thinking and how the mainstay really, even today is mechanism, you know, really is.

 (16:34) 

It's like, you know, people think very mechanically about something.

 (16:38) 

And you've experienced that in your therapy, you know, even in the therapy world, you know, we have our therapy is something we we we give to the body.

Tom Pals

(16:50) 

Kind of behavioral therapy, thought, feeling, behavior, change the thought, change the feeling, change the behavior.

Ruth Lorensson

(16:55) 

Yeah.

Tom Pals

(16:56) 

Very mechanistic.

Ruth Lorensson

(16:57) 

Yeah.

 (16:57) 

So here's this is where I'm getting to.

 (17:00) 

I think one of the really interesting parts of the first conversation with Scott for me was when I think I asked him, you know, because he wrote this book, Purpose and Desire, and I was like, well, OK, Scott, you've just given us this massive history of mechanism versus living systems.

(17:15) 

What happened to him?

 (17:16) 

Because something shifted for Scott.

 (17:19) 

He was incredibly scientific and in that mechanistic space for a long time where he began to see things differently.

(17:30) 

And do you want to share a little bit about that part?

 (17:33) 

Because I think that's really interesting and super helpful for us to hear from him.

Tom Pals

(17:38) 

Yeah.

 (17:38) 

And I'm not Scott's voice, but these are his words.

Ruth Lorensson

(17:42) 

Yeah.

Tom Pals

(17:42) 

He said, well, I'm not a physician.

 (17:45) 

I'm a physiologist and I'm an ecologist.

 (17:48) 

And I was actually very much embedded in this kind of mechanistic approach to life for about the first half of my career.

(17:57) 

And so to give you a little bit of background, most of my research earlier on in my career was in biophysics, physics meaning mechanism.

 (18:11) 

And so I was very interested, for example, on how reptiles, which are supposedly cold blooded, can use their circulatory systems to actually control their own body temperatures.

 (18:25) 

You know, things that this cold blooded metaphor would not allow them to do.

(18:35) 

It's just not possible.

 (18:37) 

And I went from there to look at the same kind of thing with the biophysics of incubations.

 (18:44) 

You know, we don't need to get into all that, but it is still very much of a physical, very much a research program rooted in physics.

(18:53) 

So I was very much into this mechanistic approach to life.

 (18:59) 

And I don't think it was.

(19:02) 

I like to think it was real science, but it was in no way diminishing the notion that, well, we're applying this to a biological system.

(19:14) 

But I never really had to deal with this issue of, well, maybe there's something unique about life.

 (19:20) 

You know, I mean, if you're looking at the transfer of heat from an incubating bird into its egg, you know, you might as well be talking about radiators in cars.

 (19:31) 

You know, the same kinds of physical principles apply to that.

(19:35) 

Early on in my career, though, early on in my career, I spent some time in southern Africa, and I encountered a very interesting group of termites that built very large bonds.

 (19:47) 

And there was a very, very good story about those mounds.

 (19:52) 

What and why the termites built them and what they did.

(20:00) 

I'll try to hurry up.

 (20:02) 

But the idea was that while we, you know, you can understand why these termites build mounds if you just understand the physics of it, right?

 (20:11) 

And the story there was that these termite mounds were air conditioned, you know?

(20:20) 

And the termites generated heat and caused circulation of air within the structures of the mounds and so forth.

 (20:28) 

And I decided to use what I was teaching at the time of a demonstration as a demonstration.

 (20:35) 

And I found that this story was completely wrong.

(20:39) 

There was, you know, you could not see the kinds of patterns of airflow that everyone was saying was there.

 (20:47) 

So that got me thinking, well, you know, what's the real story?

 (20:52) 

And just to cut a long story short, I couldn't get away from looking at this as a purposeful system.

(20:59) 

The defining event for me was we took a termite mounds and these buildings, these things build very large spires and they tend to tilt north.

 (21:12) 

This is in the southern hemisphere.

 (21:15) 

And so one season down there, we just basically sawed off the, well, cut between the spire and the mound and turned the spire around and then just left it there to see what happened.

(21:28) 

You know, kind of like fracturing a bone and resetting it to get it to heal right.

 (21:34) 

And when I came back the next year, the termites had been building it back north again.

 (21:42) 

And I thought, what's going on there?

(21:45) 

You know, why?

 (21:46) 

You know, how are they doing this?

 (21:50) 

And so that was kind of the origin of this.

(21:53) 

And the more I got to look at it, the more clear it became to me that there was a kind of mind at work here.

 (22:01) 

There was intelligence.

 (22:04) 

These things were behaving in a way that was very much like organisms.

(22:09) 

Do you know the way bones heal?

 (22:11) 

For example, I use that analogy.

 (22:13) 

Well, these termites were healing this mound that had been disrupted.

(22:20) 

And that got me just watching what termites did.

 (22:23) 

And I spent one field season there just watching termites.

 (22:28) 

Watching what they did, seeing how they responded to different kinds of things, and I couldn't get away from this.

(22:35) 

The prevailing idea that these termites were not just little robots.

 (22:42) 

They were not just little mechanisms.

 (22:48) 

There was something else going on there.

(22:51) 

And this is where I started thinking, you know, these guys have a mind of their own.

 (22:57) 

How can I do experiments on this?

 (22:59) 

Because they were engaging in purposeful behavior.

(23:04) 

All these kinds of things.

 (23:06) 

So that's kind of the origin of it.

 (23:08) 

But the roots of it were there.

(23:09) 

But that got me thinking about, well, you know, what's biological design?

 (23:15) 

Everyone says that living things are designed.

 (23:17) 

The mechanistic people say that.

(23:20) 

Well, okay.

 (23:21) 

But they only look designed because they can't properly be designed.

(23:25) 

Because design means mind and attention and things like that.

(23:30) 

And the more I looked into it, the more different ways I started to look into this issue of how living things and systems behave.

 (23:39) 

The less I could support the idea in my mind that there was no purpose.

 (23:45) 

That there had to be purpose that we couldn't explain life properly without.

(23:54) 

And now just one other dimension to this.

 (23:58) 

I'm an evolutionary biologist as well, you know.

 (24:00) 

I study evolution, and if you even mention the word design around evolutionary biologists, you initiate something like a bit of apoplexy.

(24:10) 

People get very, very upset about this.

 (24:12) 

And I didn't see why they would be getting upset.

 (24:17) 

Because we're just, you know, we're just exploring a question.

(24:22) 

But nevertheless, they did.

 (24:25) 

And again, the more I encountered these reactions, the more I became convinced that the kind of mechanistic approach to evolution, which of course is what natural selection is, just didn't hold any water.

 (24:39) 

And so Purpose and Desire was the third in a series of three books, basically with me trying to sort my way through all these questions of how does life work?

(24:51) 

What's physiology?

 (24:53) 

What's adaptation?

 (24:54) 

What's the nature of the organism?

(24:56) 

What are we seeing when we are seeing a living thing that appears to be designed?

 (25:01) 

And I just had to.

 (25:03) 

I just couldn't accept the mechanistic anymore.

(25:07) 

It didn't actually make any sense to me.

 (25:10) 

A living thing might appear to you to be designed, but actually it is designed in a way.

 (25:18) 

But we need to think about it.

(25:20) 

Think very carefully about how that design comes about.

 (25:23) 

And of course, that's how homeostasis enters into the picture.

Ruth Lorensson

(25:29) 

So great words there from Scott.

 (25:32) 

And hopefully, you know, our listeners.

Tom Pals

(25:34) 

You can tell I was excited.

Ruth Lorensson

(25:35) 

Yeah, yeah.

 (25:36) 

And just a bit of his story, really, of, you know, how he started.

 (25:42) 

I think basically what it seems like is he started observing nature.

(25:46) 

And he was seeing things that, you know, the textbook was saying, oh, it should be like this, but it wasn't.

 (25:52) 

And he was seeing something different.

 (25:54) 

So that shifted his curiosity into the living systems paradigm.

(26:00) 

And I think, Tom, for you, like you've had your own story with that, too.

 (26:05) 

You know, I think you've always been someone who looks.

 (26:08) 

You know, you've always had a curiosity from what I know of you.

(26:11) 

You've always had a curiosity of like how something is working.

 (26:16) 

Right.

 (26:16) 

That was the beginning of the of the puzzle of AHA, of curiosity there.

(26:21) 

However, you're also being trained by institutions that have a particular way of doing things.

 (26:27) 

And, you know, kind of you were trained as a psychotherapist and you've got tools.

(26:34) 

You've got all of this stuff.

(26:35) 

And then so what happened to you is was it similar to Scott?

 (26:39) 

Like in terms of you started observing things, you started seeing things that you couldn't put into that mechanistic box.

 (26:48) 

Right.

Tom Pals

(26:49) 

I.

 (26:51) 

The way I would describe it is that I am adept at seeing patterns.

 (26:57) 

I just see them.

(26:59) 

I see when patterns happen.

 (27:01) 

And I'm not talking about seeing a pattern of the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.

 (27:10) 

I'm not talking about that pattern.

(27:12) 

I'm not talking about making up things in my mind.

 (27:15) 

And this kind of looks like that or that shadow looks like a T-Rex.

 (27:20) 

I'm not talking about that.

(27:21) 

I'm talking about seeing patterns that replicate.

 (27:27) 

Seeing things that this, then this, then this, then this or this, then this and not that, then this.

 (27:36) 

And I just see things that way.

(27:38) 

And I was seeing the way the mind was working.

 (27:43) 

I was seeing the way my own body was working and I was seeing the way it wasn't working.

 (27:50) 

And then that pivotal moment where all of those kind of things, understanding about trauma and the sympathetic nervous system and all the rest of those kind of things.

(28:00) 

And as I was coming out of that medical testing procedure and my body going into these non-epileptic seizures, but because of the anesthesia, I could appreciate it and interact with it and observe it without the trauma attached to it that normally had been because of the anesthesia.

 (28:27) 

And I could simply observe it and I saw it healing.

 (28:34) 

And then that got me wondering about all sorts of other stuff.

(28:38) 

And then throw in some other things like, for example, a cheetah is running down an antelope and it tackles it.

 (28:51) 

It's not dead and it's not really even injured, but it's down.

 (28:55) 

And then it just convulses for a bit and then it's up and dashes off.

(29:03) 

And the cheetah is going, oh, I'm not going to get a meal today.

 (29:08) 

Those kind of things that we often from a mechanistic perspective would look at and say something is wrong.

(29:17) 

Is it so wrong?

(29:20) 

It's the brain saying, no, this is how we can set things right.

 (29:25) 

But we human beings are too smart, which makes us so dumb.

 (29:31) 

And then the way nature itself just naturally wants to do it.

(29:36) 

Let's let it and let's invite it.

 (29:39) 

And that's essentially what AHA is.

 (29:41) 

And so what Scott and A.D. Bud Craig and Demasios and all sorts of other people have informed me to help me understand, this is what I was observing and this is why it works.

 (29:57) 

This is what is happening.

(29:59) 

I intuitively and interoceptively was able to experience the healing and then figure out, oh, this is how you can invite it to happen.

 (30:13) 

And then just let nature be in charge of it.

(30:17) 

Work with nature, as George Billman put it, not against it.

Ruth Lorensson

(30:23) 

And it's interesting, actually, with AHA that, you know, obviously the foundation there is that isn't a living systems viewpoint.

 (30:33) 

But then in an AHA session, there's an ability through interoception to observe, to observe what's happening in your body.

 (30:43) 

And I think that observation of a living system is really central.

(30:49) 

OK, well, final words before we go into our next couple of episodes, which will be with me, you and Scott.

 (30:57) 

We recorded them not long ago and it's really cool.

 (31:00) 

We go into many little lives.

(31:02) 

We go into this idea of, you know, how there's collective conversations and it's brilliant, guys.

 (31:09) 

So but Scott kind of trans, you know, at the end of what he just said that he talked about homeostasis.

 (31:17) 

So that's what led to this idea of understanding when shifting from mechanistic to living systems.

(31:24) 

And that is really important in homeostasis.

 (31:27) 

And for us, wellness, right?

Tom Pals

(31:29) 

Absolutely.

 (31:30) 

That is wellness.

Ruth Lorensson

(31:31) 

Yes.

 (31:32) 

So what could you kind of sum up some of Scott's influence and some of your own thoughts in that space?

 (31:40) 

What are we talking about here with that viewpoint of living systems, homeostasis, wellness?

(31:46) 

Like, how does this impact the journey of wellness?

Tom Pals

(31:50) 

Yes, because we're dealing, when we're talking about human wellness, we're talking about an incredibly complex issue.

 (32:02) 

Body, mind, and spirit seem so simple, but break them down.

(32:07) 

The complexity of the body, the reason that there are so many things that happen as side effects to all these beneficial pharmaceuticals and things is because we don't understand enough.

(32:21) 

And we can do this, and that's good for this, but uh-oh, it's done all this to this other part.

(32:29) 

And it's just too complex for us.

 (32:34) 

But it isn't too complex for our own brains.

(32:39) 

It's too complex for our minds.

 (32:41) 

It is not too complex for our brains.

 (32:43) 

And this whole complexity issue, Scott talked about that in a latter part of our conversation.

(32:52) 

He said, let's attack the complexity issue.

 (32:55) 

First, you know, and again, we have to do a little bit of history here.

 (33:00) 

The Hippocratic ideal was built upon this notion of vital essences, and we've gone into a little bit of that.

(33:06) 

And in the Christian era, that ideal of vital essences prevailed.

 (33:14) 

And at the end of the 18th century, physicians started saying that, wait a minute, hang on.

 (33:20) 

You know, we can't be right, because every time we have something we want to explain, we invent a new vital essence for that.

(33:31) 

And there's just too many vital essences, which means that apparently they're not vital.

(33:37) 

And maybe they're not even essences.

 (33:39) 

And so, as Scott said, there was a new metaphor for organisms that came out of that.

(33:47) 

And the person behind that was a man named Theophile de Bordeaux.

 (33:51) 

And he actually, interestingly, looked at social insects, like termites, and he actually looked at the bee swarms.

 (33:57) 

And he said, okay, well, these things behave a lot like organisms, but there can't be any vital essences flowing between the individual bees.

(34:07) 

And so he came up with a metaphor of the organism as a conversation among the organisms.

 (34:14) 

Many little lives.

 (34:15) 

And how you define each life varies.

(34:18) 

You know, some people said, well, it's this organ versus that organ.

 (34:23) 

Well, you can actually divide it all the way down to individual cells.

 (34:27) 

Each cell in the organism is one of the many little lives.

(34:31) 

But Bordeaux used the idea that it was to look at health or ill health as conversations that were happening or were not happening.

 (34:43) 

Which I find really ironic, because we're talking about using someone's words that didn't communicate.

 (34:49) 

And so we're getting back to that.

(34:53) 

So among these many little lives, and that was these mutual accommodations and negotiations.

 (35:02) 

And among these many little lives, and that was an entirely new metaphor for life.

 (35:07) 

And that metaphor for life is what Claude Bernard built upon, actually, to formulate his concept of homeostasis.

(35:16) 

Before the term actually was created by Walter Cannon, who took inspiration from Bernard.

(35:26) 

And homeostasis is the result, and this is how Scott put it.

 (35:31) 

That is, homeostasis is the result of a conversation of the many little lives.

(35:38) 

I actually have to turn around a little bit.

 (35:41) 

Bernard actually said, if you look deeply into his writings, that there's a purpose there.

 (35:48) 

And that purpose is homeostasis.

(35:51) 

And that purpose of homeostasis is the conversation of the many little lives.

 (35:58) 

And so you have to ask yourself, well, what's the cause, and what's the effect?

 (36:04) 

And if you take the mechanistic approach to it, what came to be really the cybernetic approach to homeostasis, if you will.

(36:12) 

Homeostasis was the outcome of a mechanism.

 (36:15) 

So you know, if you have someone dripping pharmaceuticals into the brain to correct this, you know, you're actually changing the mechanism of the many little lives, and you change the homeostasis, right?

 (36:28) 

Bernard's thinking was actually just the reverse of that.

(36:32) 

He looked upon homeostasis, really, as the fundamental property of life, from which all the mechanisms followed.

 (36:41) 

And so it's a little bit hard to get your mind around that, because it's totally contrary to the mechanistic approach.

 (36:49) 

In the mechanistic approach, everything is the outcome of mechanism.

(36:55) 

But in the Bernardian approach, it's just the opposite.

 (36:59) 

All the mechanisms, quote-unquote, are the outcomes of homeostasis.

 (37:07) 

And that says something unique about the principles of cause and effect in living things.

(37:15) 

Now, we've lost that approach to it in our modern mechanistic era of medicine and physiology.

 (37:21) 

And I would add, wellness.

Ruth Lorensson

(37:24) 

I think that's fascinating, Tom.

 (37:27) 

And it really leads us, you know, to conclude this episode.

 (37:32) 

And really, I think there is that kind of question right now, today, of how do we find approaches to wellness that are, you know, based in facilitating homeostasis, which is exactly what autonomic homeostasis activation is.

(37:53) 

And what's great for our listeners, I just want to give you a little heads up.

 (37:58) 

We have this one episode with Scott next time, where we'll just be diving into the many little lives more and just kind of really hearing from him on that.

 (38:07) 

But the following episode after that, Scott really talks about his view of autonomic homeostasis activation, which is really fascinating.

(38:17) 

And I remember when we were recording it, we were all like having like, you know, head blowing emoji kind of reactions.

 (38:24) 

We were like, what?

 (38:26) 

So you're in for a treat.

(38:28) 

So thank you, Tom.

 (38:30) 

We just want to extend a massive thanks to Scott Turner, who, even though his voice isn't in this episode, it's very much.

Tom Pals

(38:36) 

Yeah, the words aren't.

Ruth Lorensson

(38:37) 

Yeah, the words aren't, the voice is.

 (38:40) 

And we've used, we just went back over the episodes and read the transcripts.

 (38:45) 

So a lot of what's coming out here has come from Scott's tenure and wisdom in this space.

(38:52) 

So thank you, Scott.

 (38:54) 

And we'll look forward to the next couple of episodes now.

(38:59) 

You've been listening to the Autonomic Homeostasis Activation Podcast.

(39:04) 

Join us next time as we continue in our conversations with Tom.

Tom Pals

(39:07) 

If you're interested in pursuing your own wellness journey, please check out our website, autonomichealing.org.

Ruth Lorensson

(39:16) 

You can also reach out to Tom at innerworkings.org.

Keywords:
interoception, homeostasis, autonomic nervous system, trauma recovery, nervous system healing, body-based wellness, somatic healing, self-regulation, mind-body connection, living systems theory, mechanistic vs living systems, biological intelligence, healing through interoception, Scott Turner, Purpose and Desire, Ruth Lorensson, Tom Pals, AHA Podcast, Autonomic Homeostasis Activation, design in biology