Your Body Isn’t A Machine, It’s A Garden - Why healing requires tending, not just fixing.
When something in the body “breaks,” we look for the part that needs repair or maintenance. Modern medicine has given us extraordinary tools for doing exactly that. A medication may regulate a chemical imbalance. A procedure may repair or remove damaged tissue, or even replace a failing part. A therapy may restore lost function. This model—seeing the body as a machine that can be repaired—has saved countless lives, and remains essential in many situations. But machines and living systems are not the same.
Living bodies do not simply return to a previous setting after a repair. They are constantly adapting—to stress, nourishment, environment, relationships, genetics, and meaning. They grow, weaken, repair, and reorganize themselves continuously.
A body is less like a machine and more like a garden. And gardens do not heal through repair alone. They thrive and heal through care.
The Limits of the “Fix-It” Mindset
When we approach our health primarily as something to fix, we often ask questions like:
What’s wrong with me?
What treatment will solve this?
How quickly can I get back to normal?
These questions are understandable, especially when symptoms are disruptive, painful, or frightening. But they can unintentionally narrow our attention to a single intervention instead of the larger conditions that may be needed for healing, or health, to occur.
A garden does not recover because one leaf was trimmed or one weed removed. It recovers when the conditions that support growth are restored: soil, water, sunlight, space, air, protection, and time.
Our bodies work in a similar way.
When the conditions of our internal environment become challenged—through chronic stress, disrupted sleep, inflammation, poor nourishment, stasis, grief, trauma, or prolonged illness—the body may struggle to return to balance even when we address the one specific symptom or complex.
This doesn’t mean treatments are unimportant. It means they are often only one part of the picture, and can sometimes keep our attention away from the other factors that impact our overall condition.
Learning to TEND
Dr. Michele Renee and Dr. Brenna Erickson coined the TENDing Method as a body-based, trauma-informed approach to finally making sense of what your body has been trying to tell you — and building practices that actually stick. I’ve joined their teaching team for a TENDing Foundations program— a 6-week virtual offering for people living with Long COVID, ME/CFS, chronic Lyme, MCAS, and other complex chronic illness. We start March 31st as a 6-week virtual group that meets for 90 min. on Tuesday late afternoons. [Full details at bodyluminary.com.] While I know this model can be very helpful to individuals challenged with such difficult conditions, I truly believe that it is a framework and perspective that can be supportive for all of us, regardless of current health status.
The name TENDing intentionally echoes the language of gardening, because healing often requires nurturing rather than fixing. It stands for four foundational practices that support the body’s capacity to adapt, heal, and thrive through the fluctuations of life.
T — Tune In
Healing begins with attention. Tuning in means noticing what the body and mind are actually communicating—energy levels, breath, pain, tension, emotional signals, and the subtle shifts that often get ignored when we push ourselves to keep going. Many of us have spent years overriding these signals. Often ignoring signals allows an illness to arise or worsen. Tuning in is not about hypervigilance; it is about re-establishing a conscious relationship with the body’s information.
E — Engage the Nervous System
The nervous system is the central regulator of how the body responds to everyday challenges and opportunities, to stress and recovery. When the system remains in a prolonged state of protection—fight, flight, or freeze—the body’s healing processes can be impaired. Practices that support nervous system regulation—breath, gentle movement, grounding, rhythm, and safety in relationships—can help shift the body toward states where prevention, repair and restoration become more possible.
N — Nourish
Nourishment is broader than nutrition alone. It includes water and food, certainly, but also sleep, restorative rest, meaningful connection, supportive environments, and experiences that bring steadiness or joy. A garden does not thrive on water or fertilizer alone. The same is true for human beings.
D — Direct Your Path
True, illness often disrupts the direction of our lives. It’s also true that life is full of challenges and unexpected twists in the road. If we are TENDing to ourselves through these events, we may be less likely to develop illness. Many people feel pulled off course by symptoms, uncertainty, or limitations they never expected. Directing your path does not mean forcing a predetermined outcome. It means identifying what matters now—what values, priorities, and forms of participation in life still feel meaningful—and allowing those to guide choices moving forward—whether we are coping with an illness, or endeavoring to prevent it.
TENDing Is Not Only for Illness
Although we use this framework in programs for people navigating complex chronic illness, the principles of TENDing apply to all of us. Every human body benefits from tuning in, regulating stress responses, receiving nourishment, and choosing direction with intention.
In other words, TENDing is not only something we do when the garden is struggling. It is how we help it thrive and be fruitful.
Many of the health challenges that eventually bring people into medical care develop slowly over time when the conditions that sustain wellbeing have been neglected or overwhelmed. Small, consistent acts of tending may not feel dramatic in the moment. But over months and years, they create the conditions in which resilience grows.
Returning to Relationship
The shift from a machine model to a garden model is ultimately a shift in relationship. Instead of asking only, What needs to be fixed? We begin asking, What needs care?
Instead of focusing exclusively on a broken part, we begin to notice the environment the whole system is living in. And instead of waiting for health to return before engaging with life, we begin participating in the slow, steady work of tending.
Gardens do not transform overnight. But with attention and care, they change. So do we.
