noelleprice (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} noelleprice) wrote,@ 2006-12-25 10:42:00 |
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Chiropracty 101: spiritual subluxations
I've been seeing a whole lot of my local chiropractor's office since I managed to tweak my back in an ugly way a couple months ago. This is a new thing for me... I've always had a low-grade fear of chiropractors. You know - the scary cracking thing, the apparent addictive quality, the disconcerting evangelistic zeal of its true believers. I've become more of a convert since my course of treatment has so far not only gotten me out of a pretty unpleasant crisis, but also rendered me able to stand in one place for up to an hour without pain. I haven't been able to stand still for more than 15 minutes without pain in at least five or six years.
At any rate, as I understand it, the basic theory behind chiropracty is that spinal alignment is really important to a person's overall health. And alignment doesn't just mean some idealized static state, but also implies the ability to easily slide in and out of place as necessary without locking up.
Okay - so it's going to seem like I'm jumping topics here, but bear with me. A few weeks ago, after a day off, I felt a little out of the loop at morning circle. Our volunteer coordinator Caitlin was offering up a Hail Mary for our executive director Nancy, as I later found out she had decided to do daily since Nancy's husband had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. He is relatively young and this was not foreseen. Nancy is a tireless and consistently positive worker for good whose plate is more than full of challenges on any given day, over and above the stresses common to pretty much everyone around here since Katrina. I was so sad for her.
And this got me thinking about the incredible range of intensely positive and negative emotions and experiences that gets thrown into the gumbo of life in our neighborhood. The raucous humor of our construction staff which is best kept behind closed doors, but has a bad habit of leaking out. The dislocation-inspired pathos of our unlikely brotherhood and intermittent mutual admiration society, together with the variety of personal reasons each of us has be be thankful for being where we are and doing what we're doing. The million tragedies still working their way out throughout this city, this state, this whole Gulf area. The unbelievable ways in which people have reached out to help eachother, and still do every day. Wall-raising ceremonies that mean a family is one step closer to having a real home again. The plague and pestilence of trying to fill some tiny part of a huge need for housing while understaffed, collectively under-housed ourselves, and struggling to establish internal organization, let alone chasing the quixotic dream of finding any external organization in the larger community and hoping to interact with it in a better-than-disastrous way. The joy of a volunteer learning how to do something new and finding themselves able to be so much more helpful than they thought. The angst of looking into the eyes of a volunteer you can't put to work, at least for the moment, when there aren't enough folks with skills to keep the unskilled workers productively engaged without risking almost certain disaster. The joy of watching the kind of people who come here meeting other like-minded goodhearted folks and returning home energized and feeling considerably less alone. The pain of knowing a single mother, who is by doctors' assessment well on her way to dying of cancer, is sharing a FEMA trailer with her four children while we struggle to get their house done in time for her to be able to share it with them, at least for a while.
There's a proverb about rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn. But when there's so much to take in, it's pretty easy to get entrenched in hopeless despondency on the one hand or myopic optimism on the other. So I guess what I've been thinking is that maybe proper emotional alignment is not that different from proper spinal alignment - a place of relative comfort and balance from which one can easily and genuinely move into the experience of various emotions, even intense ones, and back to center again. Easier said than done, I guess.
I think I'll think about this some more.
I've been seeing a whole lot of my local chiropractor's office since I managed to tweak my back in an ugly way a couple months ago. This is a new thing for me... I've always had a low-grade fear of chiropractors. You know - the scary cracking thing, the apparent addictive quality, the disconcerting evangelistic zeal of its true believers. I've become more of a convert since my course of treatment has so far not only gotten me out of a pretty unpleasant crisis, but also rendered me able to stand in one place for up to an hour without pain. I haven't been able to stand still for more than 15 minutes without pain in at least five or six years.
At any rate, as I understand it, the basic theory behind chiropracty is that spinal alignment is really important to a person's overall health. And alignment doesn't just mean some idealized static state, but also implies the ability to easily slide in and out of place as necessary without locking up.
Okay - so it's going to seem like I'm jumping topics here, but bear with me. A few weeks ago, after a day off, I felt a little out of the loop at morning circle. Our volunteer coordinator Caitlin was offering up a Hail Mary for our executive director Nancy, as I later found out she had decided to do daily since Nancy's husband had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. He is relatively young and this was not foreseen. Nancy is a tireless and consistently positive worker for good whose plate is more than full of challenges on any given day, over and above the stresses common to pretty much everyone around here since Katrina. I was so sad for her.
And this got me thinking about the incredible range of intensely positive and negative emotions and experiences that gets thrown into the gumbo of life in our neighborhood. The raucous humor of our construction staff which is best kept behind closed doors, but has a bad habit of leaking out. The dislocation-inspired pathos of our unlikely brotherhood and intermittent mutual admiration society, together with the variety of personal reasons each of us has be be thankful for being where we are and doing what we're doing. The million tragedies still working their way out throughout this city, this state, this whole Gulf area. The unbelievable ways in which people have reached out to help eachother, and still do every day. Wall-raising ceremonies that mean a family is one step closer to having a real home again. The plague and pestilence of trying to fill some tiny part of a huge need for housing while understaffed, collectively under-housed ourselves, and struggling to establish internal organization, let alone chasing the quixotic dream of finding any external organization in the larger community and hoping to interact with it in a better-than-disastrous way. The joy of a volunteer learning how to do something new and finding themselves able to be so much more helpful than they thought. The angst of looking into the eyes of a volunteer you can't put to work, at least for the moment, when there aren't enough folks with skills to keep the unskilled workers productively engaged without risking almost certain disaster. The joy of watching the kind of people who come here meeting other like-minded goodhearted folks and returning home energized and feeling considerably less alone. The pain of knowing a single mother, who is by doctors' assessment well on her way to dying of cancer, is sharing a FEMA trailer with her four children while we struggle to get their house done in time for her to be able to share it with them, at least for a while.
There's a proverb about rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn. But when there's so much to take in, it's pretty easy to get entrenched in hopeless despondency on the one hand or myopic optimism on the other. So I guess what I've been thinking is that maybe proper emotional alignment is not that different from proper spinal alignment - a place of relative comfort and balance from which one can easily and genuinely move into the experience of various emotions, even intense ones, and back to center again. Easier said than done, I guess.
I think I'll think about this some more.
