Field Notes #2: Matter Matters—Encountering the Body as Intelligent Assemblage

Welcome back to Field Notes. In my first post, I explored how healing work is inherently collective work. Today, I want to go deeper into why this is true by examining the nature of matter itself—and why understanding matter as alive, intelligent, and interconnected transforms everything about how we approach healing.

When someone enters my practice carrying chronic fatigue, persistent anxiety, or mysterious physical symptoms that conventional medicine can’t quite explain, we’re not just working with an individual body that has somehow become ‘dysfunctional’. In fact, often, the language of ‘dysfunction’ is entirely inapt for what we’re really working with. We’re working, in reality, with an intelligent material assemblage—a living system of living systems that is radically entangled with everything from gut bacteria to social environments, from ancestral patterns to atmospheric conditions, from personal habits to economic and legal systems—and more.

This isn’t metaphor. This is the reality revealed by cutting-edge research across multiple fields, from neuroscience to ecology to complexity theory and beyond. And this shift in understanding changes everything about how we understand both illness and healing.

Beyond the Brain-Centred Healing Model

Much of the current conversation around healing from chronic conditions—particularly in the ME/CFS and Long Covid communities—centres on the brain. ‘Brain retraining’, after all, is all the rage. And a lot of that model centres (rightly) on the neuroscience of the ‘predictive brain’. This important neuroscience model suggests that our brains are constantly generating predictions about what will happen next. And they are. And the brain retraining model rightly observes that the brain can get into a loop of predictive processing out of habit and that these habits of prediction can be responsible for symptoms. And so they can.

But. And it is a but that matters: pop interpretations of the neuroscience often miss something crucial: the brain isn’t some CEO of the body, making executive decisions from ‘head’quarters. Instead, it’s one (admittedly vitally important) participant in a vast, distributed intelligence that includes trillions of microbial collaborators, complex hormonal networks, immune system communications, and continuous environmental interactions—many of which are never processed by the brain at all.

What does this mean? One thing it implies is that when we reduce our response to chronic illnesses such as MECFS to ‘retraining the brain’, we miss the profound intelligence operating throughout the entire system in ways that matter for our healing process. We miss the wisdom of the gut microbiome, which produces neurotransmitters and influences mood. We miss the intelligence of the immune system, which carries cellular memories and responds to environmental threats. We miss the intelligence of fascia, which holds tension patterns and emotional memories throughout the body. We miss this and so much more.

Similarly, contemporary approaches that focus on ‘nervous system regulation’ can fall into what I think of as ‘nervous system reductionism’—treating nervous system work as a sufficient condition for healing rather than recognising it as one necessary but not necessarily sufficient component of healing. While nervous system regulation is undoubtedly important, positioning it as the primary or exclusive pathway to healing overlooks the complex interplay of factors that generate and sustain chronic conditions. Certainly, nervous system over-activation can make people ill, but not everyone gets ill that way—or stays ill that way. And it can lead some people to despair when they are told that ‘all they need to do’ is retrain their brain or address nervous system ‘dysfunction’ and they just don’t seem to get better. Such people are then sometimes told that they are not ‘doing it properly’. More often, the framework that positions brain and nervous system work as a sufficient condition for healing silently and implicitly primes people who don’t get better using such approaches to see themselves as failures. I’ve met many such people in my private practice: mature, intelligent, willing to learn—many who have done most of the programmes they can find, faithfully—and they know that in their own case, brain retraining and nervous system work just wasn’t enough. It might be for some—for many even. But it wasn’t enough for them. Or for many others. And that’s because there is more going on.

The Material Basis of Nervous System Function

Even when we focus on nervous system regulation, we need to recognise that the nervous system itself operates through fundamentally material processes that extend far beyond what we typically think of as ‘neural’. The nervous system relies on a constant flow of material signals and substances to function optimally. Sunlight, for instance, doesn’t just provide vitamin D—it directly regulates circadian rhythms through the suprachiasmatic nucleus, influences melatonin and cortisol production, and affects neurotransmitter synthesis: all of which affects the function of the nervous system. The quality, timing, and intensity of light exposure literally shapes nervous system states throughout the day.

Similarly, amino acids aren’t just ‘nutrients’—they’re the material building blocks of neurotransmitters. Tryptophan becomes serotonin, tyrosine becomes dopamine and norepinephrine, GABA emerges from glutamate. The nervous system’s capacity for regulation depends entirely on having access to these material precursors, which come from food, are processed by digestive systems, and are influenced by gut bacteria that can either support or interfere with neurotransmitter production. Even something as apparently ‘mental’ as mood regulation is thus thoroughly material, emerging from complex interactions between light exposure, nutritional status, digestive health, and environmental conditions.

This material basis of nervous system function reveals why purely brain-centred approaches to nervous system regulation often fall short. You can’t think your way out of a dopamine deficiency any more than you can meditate away the effects of chronic light deprivation or amino acid depletion. The nervous system is a material system that requires material support—which brings us back to the importance of understanding healing as working with complex material assemblages rather than with neurological processes alone, whether those are ‘bottom up’ or ‘top down’. In fact, ‘bottom up’ v ‘top down’ thinking doesn’t avoid the trap of reductionist thinking. We have to appreciate the truly distributed nature of the system—and the intelligence of its many intelligences.

Why This Understanding is Healing

When we truly grasp that we are intelligent material assemblages, several profound shifts become possible:

First, we can release the burden of total responsibility. Your chronic fatigue isn’t simply the result of your thoughts, your choices, or your willpower. It emerges from complex interactions, such as between your microbiome, your environmental exposures, your social context, your ancestral patterns, industrial food systems, pollution levels, economic stressors, and countless other factors. You are not failing or ‘dysfunctional’—your entire system is responding intelligently to challenging conditions—including your thoughts and choices—which are themselves material too. (Thought is electrochemical activity emerging from neural networks that are shaped by nutrition, sleep, social interactions, and environmental conditions. And choice itself emerges from this same complex material assemblage—our capacity to choose is influenced by neurotransmitter availability, blood sugar levels, stress hormones, social support, and countless other material factors that extend far beyond individual willpower.)

Second, we can access new pathways for healing. If symptoms emerge from complex assemblages, then healing can happen through multiple entry points. Sometimes the pathway is through nervous system regulation. Sometimes it’s through changing your physical environment. Sometimes it’s through addressing social isolation or finding community. Sometimes it’s through working with ancestral patterns or spiritual practices. And all these share in common the fact that such practices (and others) align with the ancient evolutionary intelligence of a body in which that evolutionary deep time is still alive in every cell.

Third, we can trust the body’s wisdom. Your symptoms aren’t random breakdowns—they are not, truly speaking, ‘dysfunctions’—they’re intelligent communications from a system trying to restore balance. Fatigue might be protecting you from overextension. Anxiety might be alerting you to environmental toxins or social conditions that need attention. Pain might be drawing your awareness to areas that need care or change. Mitochondrial refusal to produce energy might be giving you vital feedback about some kind of evolutionary mismatch between your body’s intelligence and the conditions of modern life—or refusing to feed an invading virus that is not yet symptomatic enough for you to even notice. Imagine what becomes possible once you embrace the body as a guru—when you start to learn and practice what the body evolved to flourish on.

The Political Dimension of Matter

Understanding matter as intelligent and interconnected also reveals why healing work is inherently collective, even political, work. Your individual symptoms don’t exist in a vacuum—they emerge from the same material conditions affecting countless others. When industrial food systems create ingredients that dysregulate metabolisms, when urban design eliminates opportunities for natural movement, when economic systems create chronic stress, when environmental toxins accumulate in bodies—these aren’t just ‘external factors’. They’re active participants in the assemblages that generate illness as an emergent property of a complex system.

This understanding—of the collective dimensions of our own becoming—calls us beyond purely individual healing approaches towards what we might call ‘ecological healing’—practices that attend to the full complexity of the material conditions shaping our wellbeing.

Practical Implications for Your Healing Journey

So what does this mean for your own healing practice? Here are some initial ideas:

Develop interoceptive awareness. Learn to sense the subtle communications happening throughout your body-system. Notice how different environments, foods, people, and activities affect your energy, mood, and physical sensations. The human body is constantly providing information—we just need to develop the capacity to listen to the more-than-cognitive signals of an organic system that largely runs on implicit intelligence.

Attend to your micro-environments. Since your system is continuously interacting with environmental conditions, become curious about how different spaces, lighting, sounds, and atmospheres affect you. Create environments that support your body’s capacity for regulation and restoration.

Honour the temporality of healing. Your current patterns have been configured over time through complex interactions. Their reconfiguration also requires time and patience. Healing isn’t linear—it’s recursive, cyclical, spiralling. Trust the intelligence of the process even when it doesn’t follow expected timelines or your own linear aspirations for recovery. Time lives in the body. Respect that.

Seek complexity-aware practitioners. Look for healers and healthcare providers who understand symptoms as intelligent communications rather than problems to fix with any kind of ‘one size fits all’ approach, who recognise the interconnected, entangled and emergent nature of health, and who can work with multiple dimensions of your experience simultaneously.

Remember your place in the larger flux. Your healing contributes to collective healing. As you develop greater capacity for self-attunement, regulation, and embodied presence, you become a stabilising influence in the social and environmental systems you’re part of.

An Invitation to Wholeness

The understanding that matter matters—that we are intelligent material beings entangled in a flux of relationships both human and more-than-human—invites us into a fundamentally different relationship with our bodies, our symptoms, and our healing journeys.

Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals battling against dysfunctional bodies, we can recognise ourselves as living, bodily expressions of a vast, interconnected intelligence that is always working toward balance and wholeness. Our symptoms become communications. Our healing becomes participation.

What does it feel like to consider yourself as an intelligent material assemblage rather than an isolated individual? How might this shift your relationship to your symptoms or your healing journey? I’d love to hear your reflections.