A Balanced Tension
The first instrument I learned to play was the cello. I recall that the first lesson was how to tighten the bow. The “horsehair” threads that are drawn across the metal strings need to be not too tight and not too loose. It wasn’t until later that we learned to tune the strings. The seasoned ear and hand of the music teacher helped keep the violins, violas, cellos, and basses in tune. I can attest that the sawing serenades of 5th grade novices inflicted both physical and sonic trauma to those instruments. However, the generous encouragement of parents and teachers taught compassion, patience, and to trust the reward of diligent practice.
All stringed instruments require a balanced tension within and across the body to resonate their sound. It is this state of balanced tension that characterizes how the central nervous system feels when it is adaptive and resilient. In chiropractic, we refer to this as tone.
We often consider tension a bad thing, relating it to stress. Out of proportion and balance, it is. In proportion, it expresses balance, potential, and creative energy.
Facing Breakdown
Sometimes your internet goes down for 5 days, the washing machine starts to leak, the dryer begins to burn clothes, and your primary electronic device sustains water damage that will take 1-3 weeks to repair. While these examples all reflect non-emergent challenges of modernity, they certainly interrupt the regular pace and flow of what may otherwise be very full days.
What both experience and the second law of thermodynamics tell us is that all (closed/individual) systems break down in the face of reality. Entropy is the tendency for all systems to move toward disorder. The clear exception to this is living systems. For a time, they oppose entropy, intelligently and persistently organizing the way energy is expressed through physical form. The intelligence of life is abundant and the energy available is everywhere. The two things that limit organization (and health) are matter and time.
The aim of chiropractic is to determine whether and where the nervous system is experiencing limitation in its ability to use energy to coordinate normal function in the matter of the body.
Dysfunction, dysregulation, dis-ease all reflect interference to innate coordination. When challenge presents, it’s worth reflecting on what practices, people, and communities we turn to. The extent to which they can contextualize challenge, bridge connection, help alleviate fear, and facilitate right relationship to stress, the better able we are to cultivate trust in our inner adaptive capacity.
The Wheel Turns
From Faust to Frankenstein, the alchemical urge lives deep in us all. The power to transform is magic. We see it in Nature and imagine ways we can harness this power for ourselves.
Both life and the wheel of the year are cyclical. They revolve and evolve, phasing into and out of different rhythms and energies at different times. Samhain, usually halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, is traditionally a time to remember ancestors and those whose lives have transitioned beyond our plane.
Cycles by definition are not linear. Life has found a way to exist on the edge of instability because it dances in and within feedback loops that self-sustain. The balance requires participation. Every healthy cell in your body operates to maximize its advantage while also existing symbiotically with other cells. By contrast, humans have been operating as though a linear materials economy that extracts ever more resources from the finite supply of the earth for the sake of growth is sustainable. A closed-loop materials economy in which the “waste” can be meaningfully converted to new stuff reflects a regenerative model more in line with the cycles of the living world. There is no more obvious nor alchemical an example of this in Nature than healthy soil, for to dust we shall all return.
Death is a part of the cycle of life. Your carbon will be recycled, but the choice to create more light in the world is yours. This principle applies to everything from earlier versions of ourselves to nurse logs and whale falls. This month a full moon illuminates a thin veil. Honor the past, cherish the soil, cultivate the fire of transfiguration to temper the future, fear not the dark, and memento mori.