Symptoms (secondary conditions) have two main functions:
To get you to stop and pay attention.
To get you to do something different.
Have you ever driven somewhere and once having reached your destination, you don’t remember how you got there? We often go about our lives on automatic pilot.
Our day to day autopilot usually determines our daily actions. We may have a schedule that we follow or a routine. Dr. Joe Dispenza says that we have approximately 60,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day, and 95% of those are the same every day. He says that since our thoughts are the same, our daily experience will roughly be the same. I suppose that that’s where the expression “same old, same old” comes from.
Having the same life experience day in, day out is not a bad thing, especially when your life is going great! But when unexpected challenges or nagging problems come up, maybe something different is required to address them.
We also have an autopilot that governs the course of our lives. This autopilot is determined by our beliefs and how we see our life going. For example, when I was first studying to become a chiropractor, I was having an argument with my then wife, and during the argument I had a vision.
It was a vision of my future life. I saw myself living an unfulfilling life, working and eventually dying. This vision was accompanied by very strong emotions, ones which made me ask myself at that moment: “Is this how I want the rest of my life to be?”
As strongly as I felt those emotions and as clearly as I saw the vision of my future life, after the emotions passed, I went “back to sleep”. In that moment I chose LESS for myself.
It took me another 7 years or so to choose MORE. By that time the emotions had become even stronger, to the point that I could no longer suppress them. It got to where I felt I had no choice, I had to follow through. I had to choose a different way to go about my life and it was going to affect not just myself but people around me.
Me choosing MORE was going to fly in the face of other peoples’ expectations and my religious and social conditioning. I’d like to say that I found the courage or strength but that would not be true. I just could no longer bear the pain of not choosing MORE. It was going to hurt but not as much as if I was to try to suppress everything again.
I was faced with a choice: Do I stay on autopilot or do I choose something new, different, challenging, rewarding? I knew where one road led, back to my old life. And I didn’t know where the new road would lead but I just had to go. I didn’t want the life of the old road.
When we choose LESS, we are choosing what is familiar, safe, relatively certain and the nervous system can stay within it’s comfort zone. This can be stable and comfortable. The thing is, is that if we want something new, different, some variety, or something better, then we can’t choose LESS. Only in choosing MORE can we find more excitement and more fulfillment.
If we want to have more energy, more joy, more love and more gratitude, we have to choose MORE. When I eventually made my choice, I didn’t know what exactly my life would be like, I just knew that it wasn’t going to be the same.
They say timing is everything. Sometimes choosing LESS is the best thing that you can do. And sometimes it’s not. Or at least you’ll have to wait for another opportunity to come around, however long that takes.
Whether we choose MORE or LESS is rooted in the nervous system.
When the nervous system is flexible, clear and coherent, we’ll feel pain, emotions and other signals more intensely and quickly. A clear, flexible and coherent nervous system allows us to adapt more quickly. To change course when it is called for. It’s also harder to suppress those feelings and emotions because their natural function is to inform us and to make us choose something different for ourselves.
When the nervous system is in survival mode, it is harder for us to read our environment. It has to be right in front of our faces and sometimes that doesn’t even do it. Pain and other feelings have to become so strong in order to break through the noise.
At a lot of health care offices, practitioners are seeking to make something go away, to make their patients more comfortable and to restore them to the state they were in just before a symptom or condition arose. This is reasonable if you don’t want anything to change.
At the Happy Spine, we want you to get more out of your health and wellness investment. We want you to become MORE resilient. That way you can get off the not-so-merry-go-round of chasing symptoms. With our care, people consistently experience more energy flow, a wider range of body, emotional and energetic awareness, spontaneous realigning of their body, shifts in relationships and more of a sense of who they are and why they are here.
Put simply, they are better equipped for whatever road they choose to take.