Earlier I talked about the forth-dimensional body, looking at the human body from an evolutionary point of view, to see how our bodies have evolved over eons to be a certain way - essentially super-efficient and physically activity. We also looked at the survival instinct, evolved to protect this body of ours. It is a fairly harsh master; sensitive to every threat, able to perpetuate the stress response seemingly indefinitely, able to extinguish our pleasure drive at the flick of a switch if it conflicts with our 'survival'. Moreover, our survival instinct doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between a real threat and an imaginary one, a true life-threatening situation or a socially unpleasant one. A difficult boss at work is as liable to trigger the same response as a hostile tribe seeking your food source. The same pathways are triggered: appetite is suppressed, sleep becomes shallow, cortisol is released, blood sugar levels increase, the pleasure centres become numb, our attention becomes fixated on the threat. The difference between us and our ancestors is that in our age of information overload there is no shortage of threat - indeed fear is cynically deployed everywhere we look to hook our attention. Competition and comparison have become woven into our economy and culture, triggering our social anxiety at every turn. 

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The survival instinct is not confined to a certain part of the brain or body. It is part of what I call the 'subtle body' - a phrase borrowed from Tantra. Before the development of modern medicine, certain systems were used to explain disease and by extension the working of the human body. We had the 'humoral' system of the ancient Greeks - black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood all in balance; the meridian system of energy channels in ancient China. In the Tantric system of ancient India and Tibet, the Subtle Body was an energy system originating around the base of the spine, which could be mobilised, via meditation and visualisation, to travel up points of concentration or chakras to harness creative and healing powers. 

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Like these ancient systems, the subtle body is a way of looking at our body as an integrated system, intimately connected with our mind and moods, via pathways we are only just beginning to appreciate. Day to day, we are largely unaware of our subtle body. We may be aware that we are tasting or touching something, but are we aware of our gut detecting what we eat ('enteroception') or our sense of balance and joint position making dozens of adjustments while we stand, or our immune system as it constantly 'tests' the outer world? A time we might be aware of the subtle body is when it rebels against us. Instead of protecting us it misfires, causing distress. This might be unexpected pain or inflammation, often at a 'barrier' part of the body such as the sinuses, the gut, the skin or the immune system. Or it might become overprotective: ramping up our sensitivity to pain or causing crippling spasms in the muscle tissue. This type of disease can be difficult to pick up with conventional tests and scans. As medics we see a lot of people suffering from unexplained symptoms: irritable, uncontrollable gut pain, migraine-type headaches, back pain, gynecological pain, rashes, itching, fatigue, palpitations, breathlessness. In almost all cases there is a degree of stress and anxiety causing or exacerbating the symptoms. Medications can be of little help. For me it was cluster headaches - random excruciating headaches - which eased off only once, for whatever reason, my life became less stressful. Depression cannot be picked up on any blood test, but the profound sense of physical numbness and inertia, the heaviness of the heart, is undoubtedly as physical as it is mental. So where do we draw the line between physical and emotional? The subtle body is an attempt to see the body without these distinctions.