Chiropractic care is more than just spinal adjustments; it’s a comprehensive approach to achieving optimal health and peak performance. At Complete Wellness Chiropractic, we’re here to support your athletic ambitions, enhance your recovery, and ensure you stay in the game.
The True Cellular Detox™ process begins by determining which sources of stress may be causing body-wide damage and supporting the body’s natural ability to remove them. Removing the toxic source that has accumulated over time in the body is essential to getting results, and can be where health restoration begins.
Appearing in Pathways to Family Wellness Magazine Issue 67
Back in 2012, Elisabeth Badinter released her book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Shortly thereafter, Time magazine ran a cover story, “Are You Mom Enough?”—the confrontational headline flanking an attention-grabbing image of a mother breastfeeding her standing, 3-year-old son.
In both cases, the media energy turned frenetic, with other major news outlets—including Pathways—clamoring to chime in with their fresh take on the story, newspapers churning out editorials, mom bloggers in uproar, and comedians having a heyday. The year before, a similar media frenzy ensued when Amy Chua released Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
As a mom to two daughters, I can’t help ponder why parenting, particularly motherhood, presses such hot societal buttons.
I’ve come to think that part of the problem is our human nature—the tendency to divide into good and bad, right and wrong. It also seems partly due to the viral nature of the news media in this digital age.The other significant piece, I believe, is that when it comes to parenting, we’ve lost our confidence.
There’s a lot of judgment heaped on parents overall. Everyone seems compelled to dole out uninvited opinions whenever children are involved—from friends to family members to total strangers.
Every time I fly with my children, I find myself in a state of alarm. On one five-hour flight years ago, my 2-year-old spent four-and-a-half hours joyfully looking at books, playing with toys, and happily chatting...followed by nine (highly uncomfortable) minutes of loud crying, kicking, and screaming when forced to be buckled into her seat at the start of our descent.
After the plane had parked at the gate and we all stood in that awkward stillness and quiet while everyone waited for the de-boarding process to begin, one woman several rows ahead of us pointed at me and loudly announced, “You’ve got a real screamer there.” Nobody breathed a word while the woman waited for my response. Her index finger remained pointed, ready for battle. The awkward silence as all the other passengers stared at me, too, made me feel as if they concurred.
If it hadn’t been for one woman who later whispered, “I thought she did great!” I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to pull my mind out of the shameful place it was headed, asking myself, several months before Time ran its cover story, whether I was mom enough. In that moment I felt an almost desperate need for outside validation.
I could go on, with dozens of similar examples in my career as a parent. The point is that our parenting confidence is already tender thanks to pervasive societal judgment. So these occasional media frenzies only chip away at that already fragile place, leaving us searching outside ourselves for the answers, never fully trusting ourselves in knowing what’s in our children’s best interests. We’ve bought into the fact that our approach to parenting must fit in, or that our children should act in socially appropriate ways right out of the Baby Bjorn carrier. Our lack of confidence is creating a market for this kind of media hype.
Since I sought out child development material published by ICPA, my parenting confidence has been building. Mind you, I was initially drawn to the material looking for specific answers to very specific struggles. What I found, though, was so much richer than that. I learned the vocabulary to bring various developmental dynamics to consciousness, and I’ve been provided with a map for how to help children reach their full developmental potential.
It sounds lofty, yes, but thanks to my understanding, now, of the conditions children need to truly grow up and mature, for the most part I’m able to turn off those nasty, nagging worries about what I’m doing wrong that’s turning my 2-year-old into a “real screamer,” and instead focus on the big picture: how I can provide a safe, deep attachment to help grow my children into resilient, soft-hearted, independent people.
For me, it comes down to parenting with confidence—believing that I’m big enough, mom enough, and my children’s answer. This confidence comes from within. It’s intuition-based—not expert-based, not technique-based, not learning-based, and definitely not media-based.
During his keynote address at a Neufeld Institute Parent Conference, Dr. Gordon Neufeld said, “What children need is for us to resume our rightful role in their lives, to believe that we are their best bet. If we believe it, then we’ll become that. But it must start from a place of presentation, from believing in ourselves as the child’s best bet.”
I love this reminder, which came for me at exactly the right time—just days before another blast on parenting in the media. And it’s so very true. Parents aren’t in need of the right answer. Parents are the answer. —Sara Easterly
Most of the time when we think of pain we’ve been taught to think of it as bad. Yet what most of us do not realize, is that our pain has insights, which if acknowledged, can greatly improve our future outcomes.
Just last week I had a very real experience with pain. After waking up early one morning, in a half sleepy daze, I was attempting to make it to the kitchen to grab water. I unintentionally decided to miss a step and fall down 7 steps of my staircase. I’m talking the completely unexpected, feet fully kicked out in front of me, landing flat on my body kind of fall. Luckily the stairs were carpeted and I didn’t do any rolling, tumbling or breaking of bones.
The most significant initial injury was to my pride, the shame quickly coursing through my mind of how it was possible for me to fly down my own staircase. In general I consider myself to be a relatively fit and strong individual. I work out five days a week. I’ve played competitive sports my entire life. I eat healthy. Yet, my shame was at an all-time high.
My second brewing emotion was that of anger towards my staircase. After a couple deep breaths, I realized the anger would not serve me very well and the only fault was that of my own.
So what did I learn about falling down my staircase? I learned that it hurts and my forearms and elbows were pretty well scraped up. Alongside that I had a slow onset, increasingly irritating amount of pain firing through my mid back between my shoulder blades creeping all the way up to the base of my head.
Over the course of the next 5 days, that pain taught me the following 5 truths.
I quickly learned that no matter how much I didn’t want that pain to be present, there was a very real reality it was not going away in the immediate future. This realization and understanding is something worth noting.
Many times in my clinic patients come to me after having pain for not only hours, days or weeks, but many times months or years with a very similar statement, “I thought it was going away so I tried to ignore it.” Before moving on further I think it’s worth asking yourself the same question:
What pain or symptoms have you been ignoring, dealing with or hoping will just go away?
As the day progressed my pain started getting worse. Not worse to the point of horrible, but worse to the point of moving my neck. Relatively simple activities such as looking up, down, and side to side significantly aggravated the problem. Even looking at my phone seem to make the pain worse. This leads me to the second truth I learned from my pain.
As seemingly simple as this sounds, I also find it something that is relatively ignored.
Most individuals usually know what causes their symptoms to become worse, yet are unwilling to stop doing those activities.
Most of us also know when we put ourselves in positions that help reduce our symptoms. Yet it is uncommon for us to recognize these because when we’re not in pain we’re usually not focused on the pain or lack thereof. One of the first things most well-trained doctors ask is, “What seems to make your problem worse and what seems to make your problem better?”
As I made my way through the weekend, I instantly realized I had big decisions to make. Would the plans (landscaping, gardening, paddleboarding) for my weekend previous to my staircase episode supersede the symptoms I most likely would exacerbate by engaging in those plans? Which brings me to my next truth.
My typical entrepreneurial, go get it done attitude first kicked in and said, “Suck it up! You can handle it. Get the things done you need to get done.” Yet my intuition and pain were telling me something very different, “Rest, relax, and do the things necessary for your body to heal.”
My question to you becomes:
Which voice speaks louder when you are injured?
We all have obligations and commitments. Yet what hierarchy do those commitments fall in comparison with the commitments we do or do not have in relation to the health of our physical body?
Often times the idea of cancelling plans, changing itineraries, or taking a day off just does not seem possible. Yet at what expense to our own health, healing, and full recovery?
When confronted with pain, have you considered your pain and symptoms as intelligent and guiding?
Your body uses pain to communicate something to you. More times than not, our outside commitments usually come first over healing and rest. On top of not resting, pain medications or medications to reduce or cover up our symptoms are usually the first line of defense to numb the pain. Cover it up. Go on with life.
I considered this concept. By masking my pain, I most likely would have went on with usual plans, been unaware of overdoing it, and ran a high risk of doing further injury without even knowing it; Potentially even for days, weeks or months if medications were what I fully relied on for healing.
My weekend came and went. Come Monday, I did what was most intuitive in my mind.
I called my Chiropractor to get my spine and nervous system checked.
(Yes, even Chiropractors have a Chiropractor).
Upon a careful evaluation and exam, it was found that I subluxated my lower cervical spine (neck) and a Chiropractic adjustment was recommended. With a slight alteration to my normal wellness and maintenance chiropractic care, I was able to quickly, conservatively, and relatively easily put my body into a better position to heal over the coming week.
My problem wasn’t pain, muscle spasms, or fractures. It was damage to the nervous system, which travels through the vertebrae in my lower neck. The trauma to my nervous system put my body in a lowered state of functioning. Typically when this occurs, not only does the body heal at a slower rate, but the nerve irritation stresses other parts of the body as well.
Over the following four days my body began to do what it intuitively and innately knows how to do: it healed.
As my Chiropractor is a good friend, I know he would find it important for me to say this statement: Chiropractic care did not do the healing; It removed interference to my nervous system, allowing my body to better do what it was designed to do.
The nervous system is a master controlling system that coordinates healing within a healthy body. When the nervous system is working at its best, the body is at its full potential to self heal and self regulate not only pain, but all the systems in the body.
The next time you decide to hurt your body (and maybe your pride) like I did, whether it’s from falling down your stairs, a sports trauma, or any other pain that might be occurring in your life, take a moment to discover the five things that you too might be able to learn from your pain.
By being aware and not ignoring what your body is telling you, listening to what your pain is advising you not to do, and modifying your life accordingly to allow for self-reflection and healing, you too may be better guided in faster ways to healing and recovery.
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Do you see what I see?
First off, the idea of writing feels worse to me than changing a flat tire on the side of an expressway, in the pitch dark, pouring rain, with a screaming child in the back seat. Yet after ten years of avoiding writing my thoughts, I’m officially diving in.
So to get started I was very curious to get a glimpse of how other individuals see their world.
Aristotle wrote: “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”
I believe Aristotle knew that beliefs and values, especially taught early on while the mind is still developing, play an enormous role in shaping future decisions and actions.
We also know that many of these belief systems we learn early on in life stay with our subconscious mind, and become the default lense in which we see everyday life and the experiences within it.
Did you know that there are ways you can uncover old belief systems which dictate many of your daily actions… and rewrite them?
So I ask, how does your mind see? Have you ever considered the notion? Have you considered that not everyone sees life through the same lense with the same beliefs and value systems? Contrarily, have you ever considered how many people may analyze life very similar to yourself?
On a daily basis, although it’s not my job, I feel like I have a unique ability to inspire others to create greatness in their lives.
Through my writings, I hope that my words now and in the future might have the ability to do just that same thing for my readers and many others. For any readers who choose to dive into MY mind, and the way it see’s the world. I applaud you and welcome you wholeheartedly.
My mind is one that circulates around health. Everything I see, I see from a context of eating, moving, and thinking well. For whatever reason, my neurology seems to be hardwired to enjoy that type of analysis, taking me back far beyond practicing Tai Chi back in middle school. What does that really mean? It means I believe that there is sufficiency in everything, and also the opportunity for deficiency in everything.
It means that when I see a problem, reaction, symptom or dilemma, I rarely look for a solution to the problem; rather, I always look for the cause of the problem. I believe the body is incomprehensibly intelligent, adaptive, and intuitive. I believe the body and the mind insist on and always give us feedback, letting us know the environment that we’re in is either nurturing or depleting.
I believe this feedback is there to be embraced, and that it is feedback of an intelligent system, reminding us what our past decisions have equaled in our current state.
Unfortunately, not all of this occurs in real time, as our sound bite society would insist it should.
While I believe that crisis intervention, emergency treatment, and symptom management are necessary, they will never provide us with long-term solutions to our everyday health problems.
By truly and deeply exploring with vulnerability, the notion that what we do truly leads us to where we are at, we have the opportunity to change our future.
Throughout my writings, time on this Earth and legacy thereafter, I never intend to imply what is right or wrong. Yet, merely to ask questions and pose thoughts from an alternative perspective, that might provide others further insights, better correlations, and the opportunity to truly create healthier generations for generations to come.
So how does your mind think? No really, I would love to know, and my guess is so would many others. We speak of a world based on equality, beliefs, values, and opportunities, yet do we not look at many of those very same things through very different lenses?
How do you see everyday? How do you analyze the world around you?
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