Beauty and Silence

When I was young, there was a small sign that hung next to the bay window that overlooked the backyard. It read, “How beautiful the silence of growing things.” Now, nearly three decades and three thousand miles from that place, I see the verdant green of new shoots on plants I put into the ground last year. I see the slow and enduring cycle of the natural world open to the light of summer. I see…a rainbow unicorn jump all over this keyboard as the laptop screen is forcefully closed by the small hands of a clumsy yet determined toddler. 

These days are a reminder that silence, while essential in its own right, is not required for or characteristic of growing things. What we might take for silence is actually the fundamental - the lowest and most prominent pitch upon which the harmony of nature unfolds. Our task continues to be finding signal amidst a cacophonic information landscape. Perhaps if we open our ears and eyes to the peace of wild things we can come to rest in something not quite silent, but beautiful. 

Process and Return

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

— Viktor Frankl

The total lunar eclipse last night was a reminder that the alignment of bodies is always a temporary phenomenon. The silence of the still point, the momentary pause in which everything is just so connects us to limitless (re)Source. In our human bodies, this is analogous to a return to a regenerative parasympathetic state, in which we “rest and digest.”

Far from a fixed point or a straight line, we express health and wellness in a dynamic process, characterized by motion and change. Our objective in chiropractic, therefore, is to promote our adaptive ability to move and change. We find balance by returning to center after we’ve been away.

Just as the flow of blood in the body moves in a circle (“circulation”) throughout the body, it returns to and emanates from the heart. There is a pause between stimulus and response, between beats, between moments. It rarely lasts long and doesn’t need to. It is the gift of the present.

The Vital Principle

“Life possesses an intelligence which pervades the universe and is expressed with accordance to the environment and the quality of the material in which it manifests itself.”

— D.D. Palmer

At the beginning of the last century, the founder of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer, outlined the foundation of chiropractic philosophy. To this day, chiropractic maintains a vitalistic perspective on health and healing. Vitalism recognizes that life is characterized by an organizing energy or principle. We can use a reductionist approach to break the whole into its parts, which can facilitate understanding. However, just as flipping through the pages of an anatomy book will not reveal the complexity of a moving, feeling, breathing animal, life and health is something more than the sum of parts. When D.D. writes of “an intelligence which pervades the universe” he is acknowledging the presence of an essential organizing energy. He deliberately describes this as intelligence, not simply energy or force. The historic and critical contribution he made to the development of healing arts was precisely this - the animating principle that pervades the universe is also what organizes function in people. Health and dis-ease represent a spectrum on which this energy is able to clearly express in a physical body. And the spine is the interface where this life principle can flow or be obstructed. 

His insight includes the direct impact of the environment and the limitations of matter on the expression of life. Far from a materialist or reductionist perspective, his vision and his writing prefigure what we accept as common understanding today. Of course environmental factors influence health and disease. If there are toxic chemicals introduced into the water of the earth or the water of the body, if the air is unfit to breathe, if the quality of food is weakened by devastated soils, if we are constantly immersed in a narrative of fear, then of course this will affect the expression of health. 

Finally, let us also acknowledge the idea that “life…manifests itself.” One of the most important distinctions that vitalistic chiropractic makes is that health flows from the inside-out. Adjustments are offered to help clear the spine of interference that reduces communication to and from the brain. The free and robust expression of information along the nervous system is the necessary condition for our ability to coordinate adaptive function (i.e. health) in ourselves. As D.D.’s son B.J. would later go on to say, “Nature needs no help, just no interference.”