How we heal is a fascinating process. You can wake up in the morning with back or shoulder pain, BUT you brush it off, saying “I didn’t do anything at all, I just woke up that way…”, sound familiar? Body aches are something we all deal with from time to time, but when pain becomes chronic, it starts to get in the way of how we want to live our lives – this is where chiropractors can help.

Layers of Healing

Think of healing like an onion. The layers can be many and deep—much the same way the nerve system stores and holds on to experiences. We can think of the core 

of an onion being “the centre” – without stress at state zero. It is the source of all healing as the inner light. The farther away from it we get, the lower our threshold becomes to express that inner glowing light. Total healing becomes less a strain. As we move away from the centre, adding more layers, the life expression within our body can diminish. We experience less, our threshold is less, and our ability to deal with new stress (even if it is simple and minimalistic) is drastically lessened.

Layers add on over the years. Birth, a broken arm, a gymnastics fall, a boating or motor vehicle accident, emotional stress, PTSD – and the list goes on. Now, back to our “sudden shoulder pain” that “just came out of nowhere” doesn’t seem so sudden. As we add on layers and layers of stress that go stored and unchecked, the body changes. We no longer have the same ability to deal with the stress load of life as we bear it as a “Santa’s sac” which just gets heavier. Yet, our ability to deal with the load continues to weaken. Our system structurally may have changed over the years, reflective of the exhaustion to our system.

How Your Body Expresses Stress

Our posture may reflect something like this: head forward, shoulders rolled in, neck arched forward, head down, shoulders up in ears, rounded back, problems breathing. This posture will tell us how the load of life has been. Really we measure your “life to date”. A heavy load of life could be “headaches for 15 years, then a numb toe, then problems sleeping, then antidepressants for 15 years” and so on. When your head is forward your brain can no longer effectively navigate where you are in space and adapt appropriately. We lose the adaptive and flexible edge from the curves in our spine that help us sway and bend (as buildings do) to the loads of life. Chiropractic adjustments can help you begin to improve your posture.

Final Thoughts

It’s time to return back to the source of all healing, so we can express and experience life fully – though it may take time. It can take years of un-patterning what’s been developed, creating a new pattern and then reinforce that pattern with repetition. When the brain learns to get out of the stress state, it will respond better to its environments and adapt appropriately; we begin to heal. How many layers of stress do you have? How thick is your onion? Gravelle Family Chiropractic can help you break through these layers.