Your Uniqueness Brought Out Through Chiropractic Care
Nothing displays the complexity of each individual like his or her nervous system. The nervous system includes the brain, the spinal cord descending through the spinal column, the cranial nerves exiting the skull descending down the front of the body, and the miles upon miles of nerve fibers that weave through the body’s tissues and organs. The whole body is innervated by the nervous system. At the microscopic level of cellular function, the nervous system determines the electrical charge of the extra-cellular environment thus mediating internal cellular physiology. So whether we look at the body as a whole, or as a collection of individual cells, we will find that the nervous system plays a vital role in overall function. We perceive, think, and direct our actions every day thanks to the activity of the nervous system, and we regenerate our body on the cellular level thanks to the guidance of this system.
What’s so amazing about the nervous system is how intelligent it is. It’s not intelligent in the way of a sophisticated machine, but in the way of a living and breathing animal that can be felt and can feel us in return. Viscerally and experientially, we can become aware of our innervated nervous system by simply appreciating its vast presence within us and directing our attention on it. In the same way you would use your peripheral vision to gauge your surroundings while looking straight ahead, try to begin to sense the delicate, vivifying nervous system in your body and sense it’s awareness of you. Your body-awareness, whether it be awareness of the weight of your body in your chair, the sounds of your environment, or the electrical vibrations inherent to your body’s natural functions, are all signals of living and responsive presence that’s sensitive not only to your external environment but to your active introspection. Notice how it changes and responds according to passing thoughts and feelings, just as much as it does to changing sounds and sense impressions.
To be somewhat struck in amazement and transformed by this dynamic is what all meditative endeavors and teachings are about. The driving impulse to discover the foundation of life through meditation can bring us to a state of great coherence where we can live with pleasure and ease. Our unique potential as human beings is to tap into this substratum of awareness, while involved with all our human activity, perhaps especially, the tasks that employ the rational mind.
Our particular gifts are no longer in need of our striving. Rooted in our unique blueprint of the nervous system, our gifts become natural extensions of our lives, like breathing.
Whenever we grant ourselves the time and space t
experience is to realize for yourself the foundation of your body’s intelligence. Along with this comes the possibility of connecting to your uniqueness and potential. The insight that your body is intelligent brings awareness and liberation.
Whenever we grant ourselves the time and space to tune in to our body’s nervous system we are accessing this intelligence. In times of distress, angst, or discordant emotions, our nervous system displays its active intelligence effecting impulses that will change our posture, our behaviors, and our lives, if we let it.
The body as a machine analogy is much more difficult to apply once we get into the habit of experiencing ourselves and our inner intelligence that’s mediated through the subtle electrical impulses of our nervous system. To the extent that the life principle has been pushed out of biological functioning over the course of the last 150 years in medicine, it has been absorbed by the nervous system model which displays the core of this intelligence.
it is now understood that the nervous system has an influential role on the physiology of the cell through the avenue of the gut-brain connection linking the body’s immune system to nervous system mediated functions. In large part the vagas nerve descending down the front of the body is responsible for connecting the brain and the gut.
Each person has something important to bring to the world, and each person’s mission is intrinsically valuable because no two people are the same. How do we find out what our greater service to the world entails? One way to discover the unique gift we harbor is to examine what brings us down hardest in life; what really stresses us out. Our uniqueness is displayed whenever we are tried and tested by life’s difficulties. What I find to be difficult is different than you. exist unique to us allows us can be our greatest arrow pointing us forward. Once we find out how we are different, we can focus on maximizing our strengths, by improving the body’s ability to confront our deepest inhibitions.
I’m sure you know that there are some things in life you find to be incredibly stressful, while your friends will pass over these same issues with ease. What this fact shows us is that stressors cannot be objectively labelled. There is a subjective reality to stress that will determine the unique impact it has on our lives. What’s less appreciated, however, is how the greater the stress, the more insight it can bring in telling us who we are and what we are here to accomplish.
What stresses us most in life happens to also be the things we fear most. And by overcoming our deepest fears, we experience our deepest liberation, and thereby we come to see clearly what our gifts are to be shared with the world. When you are freed of your own limitations, your mission becomes obvious–free others.
Are you going to be a great teacher, a great mother, an invaluable friend, a mover and shaker of your profession, a pioneer? Ask yourself, which of these things do you fear the most? If you don’t fear it, you will have the luxury to be just fine at whatever it is. But to be extraordinary you must find the thing you fear, and willingly approach the trembling and the fear which precedes all great accomplishments.
The nervous system is how we interface with the environment around us. Everything we feel, from every stimuli, sensation, or intuition that reaches us, must pass through our nervous system before we can act on it. The things which make us most afraid, pass through our nervous systems with great reverberation. Practically, this another way of saying we are hardwired to activate our systems into high-alert when we are faced with danger. But unlike physical dangers which require us to fight or flee, metaphysical dangers, more appropriately called “inhibitions,” require transmutation, not to be fought or escaped.
You may have the perfect image in your mind of a person who can handle every conceivable problem with ease, or perhaps you even know this person in real life.
A while back, while I was actively engaged in a detoxification regiment that included a strict diet of veges and carrot juice, as well as the avoidance of environmental pollutants as much as possible, I would find myself particularly annoyed by the smell of toxic chemicals, perfumes, smoke and exhaust emissions. What’s amazing is how these things never used to bother me until I changed my focus to the mindset of “detoxification.” While I was thrown into a state of negative internal stress, my friends passed by without a thought. Sometimes, if the chemicals came from someone’s choices or actions, I would protest, leading to arguments and further stress.
Stressors have more to do with our subjective state of mind than the objective qualities we ascribe to them. And indeed, the impact that stress has on us depends on our temperament and state of mind to an incredibly degree.
is the extent to which the total scope of the nervous system can be felt viscerally and experientially in our awareness, by sitting in stillness (not necessarily in silence) and simply appreciating its presence within us. Similar to how we notice our peripheral vision while looking straight ahead, we can begin to sense this delicate, vivifying nervous system in our body. As we do, we can notice that it’s sensingitself. At first we may become aware of a humming vibration transmitted through the body. Then we might notice it’s intelligence, namely, that it responds not only to our bodily motions, but to the thoughts and feelings that pass by.
Not only did each instance of chemical “insult” throw me into a state of stress, it also led to some brutal arguments and negative judgments. My focus on detoxification turned what would otherwise be normal environmental pollutants into catastrophic setbacks for my health. Compared to my peers, these things really stressed me out.