Practice makes perfect. Cliched as it is, we’re flawed human beings and the only way we get better is by practice.
Why people don’t get better is because they view themselves as Lego sets. If something goes out, you find a person who can put it back in for you. Sometimes that works, most times it doesn’t last.
Viewing oneself as a compartmentalised Lego Person is the bottle neck to healing success because we no longer see ourselves as a system. Systems theory implies that everything is connected within the body and works as a coherent whole. A step beyond that and our system is connected to other people’s systems through field theory. A step beyond that and systems are connected to past, current and future events through consciousness theory. This is entanglement. And entanglement means that everything is linked in such a way that we cannot describe one thing without knowing the state of another thing, even though they are separated in space.
Point in case: My niece sending me a text message, “Poopy pants, you are a LAME chiropractor! From Ashleigh.” This was because I was checking her hip and ankle after she came out of a cast for a broken knee. I tried to explain how all these bits were connected in her leg, to no avail. One reason why twelve year olds shouldn’t have cell phones.
I realised how truly complex the body was, when I was quite young, I saw a cross section of the spine, its surrounding tissue, muscles and nerves, and how dense all this material was all the way through. There was no way this seemingly inanimate object called the spine could be a set of bones, dangling in space like a string of pearls, waiting for somebody to click it back together like a Lego set. No way.
The spine is wrapped in an intricate electrical blanket, layered over that with a chemistry set responding to every nuance of environmental stimulus. Pegged through the middle is an emotional cortex extending down from the brain, which has all its own mental issues we are in constant melee with on a daily basis, simply to keep our faeces in one pile to make it through all the anxieties life continually throws at us (and they are aplenty). If there’s one thing I’m learning in practice, it’s that everybody’s got stuff. Everybody. Most of it has very little to with the spine. But that’s where it manifests because the spine is the control centre. When the fuses blow in the control centre from power overload, that’s when people start noticing problems. My job is to connect the dots.
There comes a very painful dawn of awareness and accountability when people make the transition from Lego Person to Complex System of Stuff Person. Suddenly they see themselves solely responsible. Some even apologise for the fact that they’re not playing their part in their own health care. That’s obviously not necessary, since we’re all learning as we go along and the only way to get better is to practice. We train our minds to stay focused, we train our hearts to love for the right reasons, and we train our body’s to stay functioning with the capacity for which they were designed. There are no Lego pieces popping out and chiropractors putting them back in. All techniques are training programs for the nervous system to rehabituate itself into a new way of being, and a new way of holding itself to present to the world. From this practice comes less pain: Less mental pain, less heart pain, and less physical pain. I’m not sure if we ever transcend that completely to total bliss and a state of being more spaced out than Neil Armstrong, but this is why we practice and get adjusted regularly.
In the meantime, sort your stuff out.