Dropping Love Bombs
Change is the great paradox of certainty in our lives.
Every day, in some degree, we are experiencing its waves. Sometimes the waves rock us gently, and other times the waves crash on board, ripping us apart. Then we are left broken, with the opportunity to decide: Are we broken open, or are we broken down?
For me the big wave was 9/11. All of us have a memory impregnated in our minds from that day, as it was like a tsunami across the United States, and indeed, across the world. It impacted us in thousands of ways. For me the impact resonated deeply, as I had quit my job at the World Trade Center only nine months prior, and witnessed from my Brooklyn apartment the shock of billowing smoke where the towers stood.
It shattered me open, as there was such a sudden ripping away of the veil of feeling that life could happen “someday”; I felt the immediacy of the truth of death. It also awoke in me a deep, burning desire to be a part of a different story for humanity. What could happen if we human beings transformed enough to live more from our love than from our fear?
Disruption of the status quo brings about a powerful catalyst for change. It breaks us out of the habituated sensory living we might be doing and awakens us to the hyper senses of our experiences, in the moment. The disruption I experienced on 9/11 awoke in me a deep prayer for a way I could move forward in my role in life in a positive and powerful way.
The answer came to me when I listened to the desire to become a chiropractor. Saying yes to that calling opened for me a deep participation with life through opportunities to serve in a variety of ways. I continue to live the prayer of “How can I be of service?” as my conversation with life itself through the central connection place, my heart. In chiropractic I have learned that we call that living “innately guided.”
You might ask, why would chiropractic be a calling of service? How is that a part of the desire to be a part of the story of humanity that arises from the question of how we can live more from love?
Chiropractic as an Act of Love
Love is the essence of who we are. It is what connects all of us. When we are feeling it, we are at our best. When we are giving it, we are at our best. When we feel like we are connected to others, we are living in love. When we feel that we are separate, isolated and alone, generally we are in some state of disconnection stemming out of a feeling of fear in some degree. When we open to love we feel ourselves to be connected, at our deepest core, to all of life. It is the impetus for all human endeavors that are beautiful. At its deepest essence, love is the creative impulse itself, giving to life unconditionally for the sake of creation.
The chiropractic story is connected to love because chiropractors work with this vital force. When a chiropractor removes the interference to the life impulse, allowing its full expression from the brain through the spinal cord and out through the nerves to every cell of the body, the loving impulse of life is being freed up for expression.
When we are living in a variety of stressed-out states that stem from fear, isolation and disconnection, then we are more apt to be creating a state of being that chiropractors refer to as subluxation. This subluxation interferes with the full flowing of loving life force as a stressed distortion in the spine itself. This results in a lack of fluidity and a decreased capacity to adapt to change and to express life. In a rudimentary way this often expresses as being stuck in the expression of the sympathetic nervous system. From this place we are less creative, less adaptive and, in a nutshell, less loving. We are in “fight or flight” mode, ready for the attack, whether it is physical or verbal. From this coiled place we cannot experience our life with ease, with joy, with love.
The adjustment frees up this disruption in the nervous system and allows for the expression of our parasympathetic nervous system. From here we regain our ease, our breath, our creative capacity and, in essence, the place from which we can express our greatest gift of love with life.
When we are in the chemistry of love and relaxation, we are in the chemistry that allows us to pursue a deeper connection with ourselves and with one another. It is from this place that we can more easily open to our nature as a connected being to the whole.
When I deliver an adjustment, whether it is to a newborn baby, a pregnant woman or an elder, I know that in that moment I am doing my part to contribute to a loving expression of humanity, one person at a time.
With every adjustment, I have had the opportunity to experience my own feeling of healing and transformation from the days of 9/11, as I receive the opportunity to feel that I am a vital part of the whole of life. The more time I spend in love, and bringing about more love, the more I get to magnify this quality within myself.
The Making of a Love Bomb
The practice of living innately guided, and saying yes to the voice within, has led me to the most recent journey of living love: the making of a feature documentary film called Love Bomb.
Love Bomb brings together a variety of voices on the topic of living love and weaves it into the story of how 9/11 opened me to this path of love and service. It catches me in action with a special team of two other chiropractors as we serve love through chiropractic in the Sacred Valley, Peru, in collaboration with a medical clinic called Kausay Wasi.
The film has brought me into the offices, and in some beautiful instances, the living rooms, of some incredible people. They are assisting me, in chorus, to tell the story of what human beings are capable of when they connect to living from love, versus the old story of fear. It inspires us all to ask, “What is my love bomb?”
A love bomb is something that makes an impact in a positive way. Change is something that destabilizes the status quo. The love bomb infuses this change with love, so that as the transformation occurs, it is a transformation to a higher level of expression.
The chiropractor’s love bomb is the chiropractic adjustment, delivered with love. The adjustment breaks up the status quo of the nervous system and introduces the capacity for change to the body and being. It allows for the firing of new neural networks and stimulates change. Held in the container for love, this change can be constructive, healing and transformative.
What Is Your Love Bomb?
Everyone has a gift that is naturally present to be given to life. Like a flower grows and blossoms to give of itself to life around it, so we have our natural gifts when the circumstances allow them to come to the surface.
In my experience, the gifts continue to ripen the more I commit myself to living from love—the more I rise and ask the questions, “How can I be of service today? How can I share my love today?” The questions move me out of my own self-concern and the feeling of what can I get from life, and they move me into a more constructive, creative way of being with life, which is: What can I bring to a situation?
The desire to live from love is a daily experience.
It requires practice, dedication and focus. It can be my yoga, a run in the woods, a breath practice, an affirmation. How I decide to show up for my closest relationships, and how I show up for those that I serve through chiropractic. For me it is also the loving creation of the film, and all of the relationships it has already been opening for me with people who are on the path of living love.
The love bomb can be small. It can be a smile that changes someone else’s day, or our own. It impacts the giver and the receiver. We all have them, and we can all give them today. Whether they involve grandiose gifts of money, time or organization, or more humble displays, they are all infused with love. When we live from this love we uplift ourselves, and all of life around us.
The most important thing I have learned from the creative process of making the film and meeting these incredible voices who have now become a part of my own, is that living in love, connected to the creative fabric of life itself, is meant to be fun. It is meant to be joyful.
So I ask you, will you join me in the joyful practice of dropping love bombs?
What They’re Saying in Love Bomb
“Some of the greatest growth that we have usually comes in the wake of some kind of trauma or loss, so that we can look back on our lives and say about certain experiences: That was the worst thing I ever went through, I never want to go through it again, but boy did I grow from that.” —JOHN WELSHONS
“Events like 9/11, or whatever the event might be, start cracking where we might be holding on to and cause us to think about what is my life about, why am I here, maybe there is something more to this existence.”—KUTE BLACKSON
“I think praying is talking to God, and meditating is being quiet so God can talk to you.” —PETER AMLINGER, D.C.
“There is a spirit of life in you that has to be connected to the physical entity that you walk around with. So the adjustment connects the two.” —JAMES SIGAFOOSE, D.C.
“The moment you start studying where everything is connected, it is too big. Nevertheless that seems to be the nature of reality. In which case, we are a part of it, so parts of us are connected with the universe.” —DEAN RADIN
“There is only one heart, and I know that to be the truth. The one beating in my chest, and the one beating in your chest, are the same heart. Big little egos up here in the head, but only one heart.” —JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE
“As we can find places to watch our breath, to be together in a place where we are supporting one another, where we are breathing together, where we are working together, where we are practicing love together, those are very healing opportunities.” —MARILYN SCHLITZ
“A bomb goes out and impacts what is around it in a devastating way but a love bomb is something that impacts everything around it in a way that is loving and amazing.” —KUTE BLACKSON
“If you are coming from the heart and you are releasing what you have from your heart to their heart, that is the biggest love bomb that I know.” —PAT CHELENYAK, D.C.
“Each one of us has a purpose, and we find it by experimenting and trying and feeling into things. Sometimes we strike a chord that is completely dissonant, and sometimes we strike a chord that is perfectly harmonic. And there we are, doing the service that we are supposed to be doing. Lost, the name is gone, and the purpose of the mission is there.” —ELENA BROWER
“One of the things that I had discovered, I call it unconflicted behavior, if you give up all fear. I mean radical throwing of all self-defense or all self-protection—throw it to the winds. A radical risk of self, and something can happen that can’t happen any other way.” —JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE
“I am going to serve God by serving man. I’m going to serve Spirit by serving man. I am going to serve this omniscient energy of life by serving my brothers and sisters.” —JAY KOMAREK, D.C.
“The purpose of life is to wake to remember, and wake up to who we are. To evolve to grow and realize the fullness of who we are, and to express that as love in the world.” —KUTE BLACKSON
“Opening your eyes and opening your heart and looking at the fact that you are part of this incredible oneness, I think most people find that pretty joyous. And that joyfulness manifests as playfulness.” —JOHN WELSHONS
“I am convinced that we are born into this world to play in this world. We are given this incredible playground and all we are asked to do is play.” —JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE
*All quotes from interviews in Love Bomb.
