What Chiropractic Is

Background

Chiropractic is based on the philosophical premise that the body has an Innate Intelligence that guides its development, healing, and growth. The easiest way I’ve found to think about this is to use the example of a papercut. When you cut your finger, extra blood rushes to the area of trauma, it bleeds, the blood coagulates, fibers develop between the sides of the cut, the fibers stitch the separation together, scar tissue forms and then disappears. Think about the organization this took! It emerged out of evolution, out of trial and error and the chemistry of the way all of the pieces fit together, but your body acts with purpose to heal an injury.

This Intelligence is constantly adapting all of the forces of the world around and within you to maintain homeostatic equilibrium within you. Constant temperature, pressure, and movement are maintained through the interactions of literally trillions of cells, all coordinated by the nervous system.

Doctors of the Nervous System

Chiropractors are doctors of the nervous system. If you’ve seen a Chiropractor, and they’ve never talked to you about your nervous system, I’m truly sorry. It’s an unfortunate commentary on how Chiropractic education, caught in the requirements of the various state legislations that regulate it, causes budding Chiropractors to miss the point, or to lose their nerve when talking to patients about what they’re really doing. Even graduates of my school, which is very philosophically grounded and focused, often seem to miss the point and talk about pain management and moving bones, even while thinking about the nervous system. This only generates a confusing patient experience, which no one is served by.

The practice of Chiropractic leads to the liberation of the nervous system from patterns of behavior that are not grounded in present-time experience, but previous trauma. These patterns of behavior are represented in the spinal column as distortions in the posture. The crucial point here, though, is that it is not where the bones are that can lead to problems, it’s how the bones can move.

If you cannot bring your spine into any of the positions and postures that the shapes of the bones, tightness of the ligaments and tendons, and the cartilage surfaces have the ability to move into, you are reacting to your environment from within a habitual pattern. The rule of mobility in the body is “move it or lose it.” Any movement patterns that you habitually don’t engage in, you gradually lose the capacity for.

Emotions and the Body

In addition to the physical mobility, psychologically speaking, the positional and movement relationships among the vertebrae correlate with emotional experiences. Think about this in this way: when someone is really angry, you can generally tell by looking at them. You tell this because of their posture, their facial expression, and any number of subliminal clues relating to how they are using their body. If your spine gets stuck in a set of patterns that are implicitly related to anger in this way, other people perceive anger in you, and respond accordingly, if unconsciously. In all likelihood, your own status-reporting mechanisms report “all systems normal” because the implicit anger will be filtered out of the status report if it’s been there long enough.

All of this is to say, Chiropractic is a healing art that liberates the spine from habitual fixations. This liberation leads to greater functioning of the nervous system. This leads to the ability to develop new, more flexible patterns of behavior, both physically and emotionally. Chiropractic increases the individual’s capacity to sit still in readiness to respond purposefully to the environment.

In part 3, I’ll tie together the aims of Chiropractic, yoga, and Alexander technique, in an attempt to triangulate more clearly on just how good a tool for understanding the nature of the total self each of them is. Thanks for following the ride!

As you may or may not know, I’m a student at Life Chiropractic College West in Hayward, California. I began the program with a few reservations. I knew what it was that I wanted to really be helping people with, but wasn’t entirely sure that Chiropractic was exactly the right way to go about it, frankly. I knew that I could use the body as a lever on people’s sense of Self, and figured that the worst-case scenario was that I would be a doctor of using the hands to help people heal, and could do what I really wanted while under a Chiropractic smokescreen.

Before I explain precisely how I had a turnaround in my understanding of Chiropractic and just how well it fits into my view of healthcare, I want to describe as clearly as possible what Chiropractic isn’t, what it is, and what it really can be, when it’s done well.

What Chiropractic Is Not

Chiropractic is not cracking bones. Chiropractic is not jerking necks and making them crunch. It’s not injury rehabilitation. It’s not physical therapy (although physical therapy is technically under the scope of practice of Chiropractors in California). It’s not nutritional consultation or traction. It’s not putting bones back where they go over and over again every week because your normal life puts them in the “wrong” place.

If your experience of Chiropractic has left you with the feeling that this is what’s going on, then your Chiropractor wasn’t doing a very good job. In fact, if your Chiropractor hasn’t been actively educating you on what they are doing with your body, how what they do works, and what kinds of results to expect from treatment, grounded in Chiropractic’s effects on the nervous system, they’re doing an abysmal job. They probably missed entirely the point of their education, and are really just doing fancy physical therapy and spinal manipulation.

In part 2 of this article, I’ll talk about what Chiropractic really is,  how it really relates to yoga, meditation, and the capacity of the human organism to grow into understanding and enlightenment.

Sacrifice is an art largely lost on contemporary mainstream American culture. I think we even view the idea as somewhat barbaric, or at least laughable. The word ’sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred,’ and America is sorely lacking a unifying sense of the sacred that is not seen as rabid and rapacious or flaky and ignorant.

Last April, I had a right orchiectomy because I had two small tumors on my right testicle. When the doctor told me that it was going to have to come out, I was relatively freaked, but knew in no uncertain terms that he was right. I decided fairly quickly, though, that I was going to trust the Universe to be presenting me with exactly what I needed to grow in precisely the way I wished to grow. I’ve found that adopting this view, while somewhat “irrational,” is highly functional for creating an experience of peace and happiness, and as there is no way to objectively determine that the Universe doesn’t work like that, I figure why not go for happy.

With this resolution in mind, I actively chose to view the loss of my testicle as a sacrifice. It was not something being taken from me, but something I willingly offered up to the Gods, the Universe, the Ancestral Spirits, whatever, to show willingness and readiness to receive a greater experience of the sacred in my life.

When I entered surgery, I was calm, I was peaceful, I was smiling and joking with the staff. I was, in fact, doing all I could to keep my mother calm, because she was far more freaked out than I was (as is a mother’s job, I suppose!). The last thing I remember thinking as they put me under was a prayer of offering, to whoever might be listening.

When I had more or less recovered about a week later, I noticed that I was consistently happier than I had been before the surgery. I was more calm, more level, more connected. I was rolling with emotional punches that could have thrown me previously, and I was smiling more. I felt gentle.

I’m certainly not recommending everyone get cancer or have invasive surgery to remove pieces of themselves. What I’m suggesting, though, is that if you tell a story about yourself of sacrifice, humble offering, and willingness to receive what the Universe will send you next, you’re far more likely to have an uplifting experience of life. I sincerely identify getting cancer as one of the single best things that has ever happened to me, not because going through the surgery was fun, but because I dedicated the surgery and loss of my testicle (clearly an emotionally charged part of the anatomy if ever there was one!) to my own growth and understanding.

Next time you’re thrown a curveball that you know could cause you emotional distress, take at least a moment to offer your pain up to whatever you can believe in: your highest self, your subconscious mind and its machinations, the Universe, Jesus, Mary, Krishna, Kali, the Buddha, Great Spirit. Who you’re offering to honestly, in my opinion, doesn’t matter. What matters is making an offering from love and trust, and letting the Universe provide.

When I first stumbled upon the idea of detachment while reading some Buddhist literature in my early days of college, I found the idea repugnant. It sounded like emotional repression and the deadening of the self to the intense wonders of the emotional world.

This was a reasonable error on my part; the concept of detachment is not an easy one to grasp at first glance, for precisely the reason I tripped over it: why on Earth would you want to do that?

Detachment is not the practice of turning yourself into a Vulcan. It is not the process of preventing the uprising of emotional experience, or of stopping the flow of feelings.

What detachment is is ceasing to identify yourself with the flow of your emotions. It’s very easy to confuse “I feel anger” with “I am angry.” In fact, in normal speech, we don’t even differentiate the two. Note that the first assumes that “I” is an observer of sensations, and the second that “I” is, in some sense, the sensation of anger.

While it would be easy to argue that the point is just semantics, the distinction between the two types of “I” is really crucial. The thrust of a detachment practice (which is really a large part of what Buddhism is) is shifting the locus of the sense of Self from what is being felt to what is doing the feeling.

This sounds technical and abstract, so let me turn to an example:

I was watching television the other night, and the program I was watching was about a woman who had so many clothes that her entire apartment was full of bins, and she even had a storage unit full of bins of clothing. I won’t go into details about the show (it didn’t thrill me, overall, because it lacked an emphasis on shifting the participant’s self-perception), but suffice to say there came a point when the woman who had too many clothes had to watch her boyfriend, her good friend, and a fashion consultant throw away quite a lot of her favorite clothing.

She responded by crying and clutching her heart and face alternately, saying “Oh, God, no!” and generally being surprisingly involved with a bunch of textiles. Within the framework that I outlined above, I would describe her as being:

1. Attached (in the technical sense) to her wardrobe
2. (Mis)-identified with her feelings about the clothing

What I mean by the first is that she was so involved with her wardrobe, emotionally, that she clearly was feeling physical and emotional pain on witnessing (in some cases, torn, stained, and moth-eaten) garments thrown away. While I don’t in any sense wish to invalidate her experience by claiming that she shouldn’t have those feelings or that attachment, I do wish to suggest that she could enhance her experience of her life if she did not require that objects (by their nature temporary) never disappear.

What I mean about being misidentified with her feelings is that she was clearly confusing her emotions about the garments (relating, presumably, to how she was feeling when she bought or wore the garments) with the garments themselves.

The most striking moment in the show was when the host said to her “these aren’t your feelings. These are things,” and she looked somewhat surprised, as though she’d never considered such a thing before.

Detachment, then, is simply the practice of reminding yourself that your feelings about objects aren’t the objects, your feelings about events aren’t the events, that your thoughts aren’t you, and needn’t be given the same honor and attention that you habitually give them.

In Buddhism, detachment is about cultivating a sense of control over emotions. Detachment is performed, not to divorce totally from an emotion or not to feel, but to recognize that it is part of the game so that the ego can take a step back and watch the emotion, to feel it and to know it, and in so doing to learn and grow from it without being caught up in it and sucked into the harmful drama of it all.

If you’re attached to an idea that’s preventing you from taking action you want to take, spend some time deciding what perspectives and behaviors you need to change to remind yourself and reinforce the knowledge that you have the ability to choose to take action anyway.

I have struggled with food and weight my entire life. I lost about 70 pounds in college, primarily using Weight Watchers‘ point system, but the bulk of my motivation during that period was self-loathing. Hating my body was the only thing that kept me focused on eating in this way that felt weird and unnatural, but was helping me drop the dreaded fat. Once I’d reached my goal weight, I hadn’t really learned how to eat well, only how to force myself to eat small.
Is anyone surprised that I gained 20 of those pounds back?

I’m not a nutritionist. I’m a Chiropractic student. So what am I doing writing about nutrition and eating well?

In addition to being a student, I’m an artist. I’m almost obsessed with aesthetics, and the relationship between aesthetics and the choices we make. I keep finding that the decisions that always lead me to the greatest health and satisfaction are the most aesthetically pleasing choices I can devise for any given situation. That being the case, when I view the food I eat as being informed by my aesthetics, I have to ask myself: “what would I eat, if…?”

If I were living my dream life, I’d be eating fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, whole grains, nuts, seeds. I’d be eating food that’s handmade with love and passion and consummate care. I’d eat food that is full of my energy, that I made myself. So that’s what I’m doing.

My new rule is simple: if I feel like making it from scratch, it’s good for me. As often as I’d actually want to bake a chocolate cake from raw ingredients is about as often as eating chocolate cake would be a good thing to be putting in my mouth (so far, it hasn’t come up! ). I’m focusing on fresh fruits and vegetables as the bulk of my food intake, because that’s what I would do, aesthetically, in my dream life. I love being surrounded by vibrant living color, so I fill myself with living, vibrant color.

Will this help me lost those 20 pounds? I can’t say for certain yet. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on that front. I love the food I’m eating, love the way I feel, and have a relationship with my food now based on gratitude, love, and, of course, my aesthetics.

I’ve gotten some good insights from:

• Fit for Life, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond [I'm not following this strictly, but all-fruit before noon and avoiding mixing nutrient-dense foods in one meal has really made a difference for me!]