Historically this question implies that there’s something wrong with you and you’re looking for something to take what’s wrong and make it disappear. For example, researchers are looking for the cure for many types of cancers. And what they’re specifically looking for is some sort of chemical compound or procedure that will eliminate cancer cells. Another example can be seen with surgery. One may have a tumour and the surgeon goes in and cuts the tumour out. Something is wrong with the body and the surgeon/doctor/practitioner takes it away. Problem solved.
Or is it?
The process of curing doesn’t take into account how the problem got there in the first place or what a person can do to avoid the problem altogether. Another example of a cure is taking an aspirin for a headache. If the headache goes away, the cure was successful.
Healing is a whole other animal. While a successful cure is based on a sign or symptom being gone after an intervention, healing is based on healthy functioning regardless of whether or not there are symptoms or signs.
In other words, if someone comes in with back pain and I adjust their spine and the pain goes away, that was a successful cure. The spine may or may not have healed. In order to know whether it was healed, you’d have to assess if proper function was restored.
If you had a symptom, would you want that particular symptom to just go away, or would you rather find out if everything was working properly? The difference here is that if you only measure success by the presence or absence of symptoms, you may still have a problem, but it might be invisible to you.
So how do you know if things are working properly?
At the Happy Spine, we measure your structure and we measure how well your nervous system is working. This way we can tell if your body is actually healing or if it’s just stuck in a chronic state of stress/illness.
One of the main measures that we use is called Coherence. Coherence is the measure of how well your heart and brain are able to communicate. In the picture below, you can see the difference between less coherence and more coherence. When there’s low coherence, we tend to experience more draining emotions such as frustration, irritation, anxiety and worry. Low coherence inhibits brain function and impairs physical and cognitive performance.
High coherence on the other hand is associated with regenerating emotions such as appreciation, love and gratitude. High levels of coherence improve brain function and performance. We’re more loving and smarter when we’re coherent.
The other super important point about Coherence is that it needs to be present in order for us to be able to heal. In order for things to work as they should in our bodies, coherence is key. With low coherence, we become much more susceptible to illness and disease.
This coming Thursday, September 12th at 6 p.m., I’ll be presenting a workshop on How to Improve your Coherence. For those of you who want to be more loving and smarter:), I hope you can join me. There are still a few spaces left!