Bioharmony Glossary: The Words We Use
The language of Bioharmony connects awareness with everyday life. These definitions explain how Toast & Fig Jam approaches capacity, support, self-trust, and a life that feels like yours.
Bioharmony is the philosophy. Body-compatible living is its practical application. Capacity, conditions, and support help us consider what is workable; participation is the person-defined direction. Notice → Support → Choose is one practice for connecting those ideas in an everyday moment. The wider philosophy also considers your physical needs, sensory environment, work, relationships, resources, and participation without self-erasure over time.
These definitions describe Toast & Fig Jam’s approach to Bioharmony. Some terms also have meanings in research, healthcare, and other fields; the related reading offers that wider context.
Bioharmony
At Toast & Fig Jam, Bioharmony is an awareness-led approach to living in greater cooperation with your biology. It brings body, mind, nervous system, environment, relationships, and everyday life into the same picture, with the goal of greater self-authorship, fuller participation, and more presence in life.
Everyday example: A person who wants friendship explores a shorter, accessible gathering and later considers whether it helped them connect.
Body compatibility
Body compatibility describes the fit between your changing capacities, needs, preferences, and circumstances and the demands of everyday life. It asks what would make participation more workable, from the clothes you wear to the way your workday is arranged. Here, the term concerns everyday living; medical biocompatibility has a different meaning.
Everyday example: Comparing the practical demands of a crowded café and a quieter accessible meeting space.
Further reading: WHO ICF; FDA biocompatibility.
Body-compatible living
Body-compatible living is the practice of adapting routines, environments, expectations, relationships, and support to the person who actually exists today. It makes room for changing capacity and real constraints while keeping the parts of life that matter to you in view.
Everyday example: A caregiver arranges one shared task rather than adding another wellness routine.
Neurowellness
Within Bioharmony, neurowellness is the understanding: learning about how nervous-system responses, energy, sensory needs, emotions, health, relationships, and surroundings relate to your experience. The term is also used more broadly in wellness, where its meaning varies across practices, services, and technologies.
Everyday example: An explainer separates evidence for an individual practice from a device manufacturer's category language.
Further reading: GWS.
Nervous system support
Nervous system support brings your experience and circumstances into the search for fitting support. That support can be bodily, sensory, environmental, relational, practical, protective, or professional. It might mean fewer demands, a change in surroundings, help from another person, or appropriate care.
Everyday example: Asking someone to accompany you to an appointment.
Regulation
Regulation describes processes through which responses are adjusted to changing demands and circumstances. In Toast & Fig Jam's everyday language, the focus is flexibility and access to choice. Activation, sadness, anger, withdrawal, and rest can all serve purposes; the goal is a fuller range of responses, rather than permanent calm.
Everyday example: Anger can inform a considered request for change.
Capacity
Capacity is what you can realistically engage with in a particular situation, considering energy, attention, skills, health, support, time, and material conditions. It changes across tasks and moments. Naming capacity gives you a starting point for adjusting demands, finding assistance, and choosing what fits today.
Everyday example: Attending remotely rather than commuting.
Further reading: CDC ME/CFS.
Self-abandonment
Self-abandonment is a nonclinical phrase for repeatedly overriding needs, limits, preferences, or values in ways that leave someone less connected to themselves. We use it only when the person finds it useful. Survival choices, caregiving obligations, discrimination, limited resources, and necessary compromises must never be reduced to personal moral failure.
Everyday example: Repeatedly agreeing to discretionary commitments while wishing for time to decide.
Self-honoring choice
A self-honoring choice takes a person's needs, values, limits, preferences, responsibilities, and circumstances seriously. It may involve action, waiting, compromise, protection, rest, or asking for help. It need not feel comfortable or satisfy every desire. The person remains its author, and can reconsider the choice as information and conditions change.
Everyday example: Asking for time before answering rather than issuing an unsafe ultimatum.
Self-trust
Self-trust is a revisable confidence that you can notice what matters, seek support, make choices, and respond when those choices need changing. Our belief is that lived experiences of having your own back can contribute to it. Self-trust includes uncertainty, correction, and help; it does not require always being right.
Everyday example: Recognizing an unsuccessful plan and asking for different support.
Self-authorship
Self-authorship means increasingly shaping your choices and direction through considered values, preferences, relationships, and commitments. It includes responsibility, support from others, and room to reconsider. In Bioharmony, it is the direction of the work: a life that increasingly reflects who you are and what matters to you.
Everyday example: Testing a creative commitment while keeping necessary paid work.
Further reading: Academic context.
Participation
Participation means being involved in the activities, relationships, and situations that matter to a person. It can include creating, connecting, working, resting, receiving care, or being present in a small way. More activity is not automatically better. Meaning, access, support, consent, and the person's own account determine what participation means.
Everyday example: Enjoying a visit for fifteen minutes with an agreed exit option.
Further reading: WHO ICF.