The Law of Inertia — vicious and virtuous circles

“The real key is to live in an environment where the mind feels free to choose the right thing instead of being compelled by habit and inertia to choose the wrong thing.” (Deepak Chopra)

Modern medicine tends to overfocus on the symptoms of a disease (neglecting underlying causes) while some healers from alternative medicines tend to overfocus on the root cause of a disease (neglecting secondary symptoms). Either ways are incomplete because they don’t consider the law of inertia.

Many doctors/healers (including some TCM doctors!) act as if inertia didn’t exist, or without being fully conscious of it. This is very dangerous because it is about neglecting a huge aspect of reality.

In fact, inertia is what explains the specificities of each health issue. So, inertia constitutes the very basis of health diagnosis: the more we understand and recognize inertia in practice, the better we will be at evaluating health.

Originally, inertia is a Latin word meaning inert/inactive or laziness. Literally, it means “without art/action”, or — if we push the etymology further — it could mean “without heart”[1]. So, in any case, we can say it describes something that is motionless (art and heart are about motion).

Indeed, inertia is the quality that makes something to not change, despite possible influences. We can also say that inertia expresses the difficulty of moving an object away from its trajectory. But we must consider that the “trajectory” can be just a passive expression such as the gravity applied to a stationary object. For example, it is much more difficult to move a 100kg rock than to move a small stone.

Inertia is a term commonly used in physics but it can also be used in other disciplines such as health/medicine, biology and even spirituality/metaphysics.

To better understand inertia, we can look at its effects. In fact, inertia can be qualified as low/little or high/great :

- when something has little inertia, it means that, if we use energy in trying to influence that thing, we will obtain a comparable amount of change from that thing. In other words, the thing will be greatly influenced by the “force” we apply to it: there is little resistance to change.

- when something has much inertia, it means that the energy we use in trying to influence that thing will not affect the thing as much as we are affected by our own investment. In other words, the thing will be little influenced by the “force” we apply to it: there is great resistance to change.

In the yogic culture, “karma” is a translation of inertia. More specifically, karma can refer to body’s memory and the memory that is present in the whole universe, allowing causalities/determinism (causalities are inertial because it is hard to change them).

Karma is often seen as a negative thing. But, actually, karma or inertia can be either negative or positive, depending on whether it is involved in a vicious circle or in a virtuous circle.

If we want to use a symbolic/poetic language, karma or inertia can be depicted as a “crystallization” process or a “weight”. Since inertia is associated to heaviness, density, slowed reaction, crystallization, it has a yin quality.

Now, the concept of inertia is trickier than what you may think.

In fact, at a more systemic level, inertia is not just about resistance to change: there is also something like a gravitational pull that increases with inertia.

So, actually, at some level, the effects of inertia can look opposite to the effects we presented before. We can observe the following paradoxes:
— little inertia implies great inertia at some level
— strong inertia implies little inertia at some level, like a gravitational attraction to heavy objects

These paradoxes are caused by the existence of vicious and virtuous circles. Vicious and virtuous circles have their own inertia like everything else, but they have the particularity of being at a systemic level. In fact, they are made of different objects and each one has its own inertia interacting with the inertia of the others.

Now, from the outside, we can see that every object has a strong inertia, but in the inside, every object seems to have a “negative resistance” (negative inertia) in regards to the global inertia of the vicious or virtuous circle. By negative inertia, I mean that, instead of fighting against the vicious or virtuous circle, they may be completely attracted by the inertia of each other.

So, when I say strong inertia implies some little inertia (and vice versa):
— the strong inertia is the great resistance to change of a virtuous/virtuous circle or a specific element.
— the little inertia is the low resistance to change of an element being attracted/influenced by the inertia of another element, creating a vicious or virtuous circle.

Remember that a vicious or virtuous circle has a certain amount of inertia that increases with time. This means that, as a vicious circle acquire more and more power (like a gravitational force), it will also become harder and harder to counteract the process of the vicious circle.

To make things clear, there is little inertia between the elements of a vicious/destructive or a virtuous/constructive circle, because they all share the same nature (as an average), which is destructive (against life) or constructive (supporting life). But there is great inertia between the elements of a vicious circle and the elements of a virtuous circle.

For example, the inertia of the weakness of the spleen will increase/“attract” the inertia of the weakness of the heart. The stronger is the inertia of spleen’s weakness, the stronger will be its influence on the heart, the more the heart will change negatively. At the same time, the more the heart get weakened by the spleen, the less positive inertia (from the strength of the heart) will remain to fight back.

Virtuous and vicious circles are everywhere because of the interdependency of the elements (everything is connected). Since elements are interdependent, when one element is healthy it will support the others, and when one element is imbalanced it will destabilize the other elements.

Because of the interdependency of all elements, the elements forms a closed circuit. Therefore, like a reverberation, an action from one element will end up affecting itself, after a long chain of causes and consequences, travelling through the other elements.

In the body, that interdependency is particularly strong because the body forms a small and closed circuit, with elements that are densely interconnected with each other. As a consequence, vicious and virtuous circles are particularly strong and evident in the body (and all biological systems).

Even if they are less obvious, vicious and virtuous circles also exist at very large scales: ecological/ecosystem level, economic level, etc. They are commonly referred as “the butterfly effect” or “the snowball effect”.

But, now that we know about inertia, what can we learn about it ?

At least in terms of evaluating our health, the concept of inertia has a great importance.

In fact, we know that when one part of the body is imbalanced, the whole body becomes imbalanced, soon or later. But, at the same time, we can’t but prioritize a healing or self-care strategy in order to focus our actions.

At this point, most people will either try to focus on the origin of an imbalance (original cause) or to focus on the most obvious symptoms (last consequences). But, because of inertia, both of these strategies are wrong (in theory).

Instead, we have to look at the most inertial symptoms, because these have the greatest impact on the global inertia of our vicious circle.

In fact, when we want to fight a health issue, we have to fight against the inertia of a vicious circle affecting the whole body, not just against a bunch of symptoms.

Now, the most inertial symptoms are not necessarily the most obvious symptoms and are not necessarily related to the original cause.

However, sometimes, people succeed to develop a certain intuition of inertia without realizing it. For example, they may think they are fighting against the original cause of a health issue, whereas they are actually fighting against the most inertial cause of a health issue. The same thing can occur with people who focus on obvious symptoms.

So, when we try to improve our health, either physically or mentally/psychologically, the first question should be:

“What is the greatest inertia that is negatively affecting my body ?”

Remember that not all symptoms are equals.

Cheers !

Giovanni Navajo
Navajo Heal
Fit Navajo Heal

[1] It is just a personal assumption. There is no certainty about the relationship between the words “heart” and “art”