By Dr. Diane Babalas
What would you think if I told you that stress — that tension creating aching in your shoulders, shallow breathing, headaches, stomach aches, irritability and anxiety — also holds the key to your personal growth, healing, and evolution?
There is no doubt that stress is at the root of countless diseases and chronic conditions. Statistics abound with the number of doctors visits and dollars spent on stress-related conditions. However, our relationship with stress is not so black and white. Some stressors, like exercise, make us stronger and more resilient. Every time we challenge ourselves to learn something new, like an instrument or a language or a sport, we are creating some stress as we build new pathways. Humans are the only creatures that actually seek out stress because we need it to stimulate and spark our infinite desire to grow.
“Humans are the only creatures that actually seek out stress because we need it to stimulate and spark our infinite desire to grow. ”
To understand the difference between those stresses that seem to harm us and those that help us, we will take a short detour into the world of physics. Consider how everything around us is essentially a vibration. All the sounds you hear now are essentially sound waves, everything you can see is a light wave. Every chemical substance has a signature frequency. Even our emotions and thoughts are vibratory in nature. You are a unique arrangement of frequencies and vibrations.
Every time you have an experience, it looks something like this: the bundle of frequencies that is uniquely YOU encounters a new frequency (experience). If you integrate this new vibration, it becomes a part of you, it adds to the music that you are, and you have grown in some way. If, when you encounter a new experience (frequency) you do not integrate it, that frequency become like a dissonance that is stored in your system. We know it’s there because we feel the effects. Storing this dissonance creates tension in our muscles, stiffness in our joints, alters our mood and chemistry. This is how stress accumulates in the body.
“You are a unique arrangement of frequencies and vibrations. ”
Unintegrated experiences and vibrations accumulate, and the more “stuff” we are storing, the harder it is for our body to work optimally. This tension short circuits our internal communication systems making it difficult to heal and setting up the environment for disease.
The most effective and profound healing methods I know essentially help our systems to become so present to what is happening within us that we finally begin to integrate some of the huge experiences/frequencies that have been wreaking havoc for ages.
Healing comes from the same root word as wholeness. When we integrate those parts of ourselves that have been separate, we heal. We gain more ourselves and we evolve. It’s by going into our tensions — not avoiding and masking them that healing happens. Yes, it can be counterintuitive to soften into pain and fear, but everyday I witness the profound shifts that happen physically, emotionally and spiritually when we learn to let go and trust the wisdom of life that flows through our bodies.
“It’s by going into our tensions — not avoiding and masking them that healing happens. ”
In my chiropractic practice I see tightness in the body as crystallized waves of experiences and through touch I help the system remember that everything is a wave, a flow. We can get another chance to integrate and learn from those stored frequencies. When we do this we become freer, healthier and more whole.
Traditional chiropractic says that the sources of stress are traumas (physical and emotional), toxins, and thoughts. Going back to physics for a moment, think about the force or energy of any given experience. If we get in a car accident, the force of the car being hit has moving or kinetic energy. This is the frequency we have to integrate. If we don’t integrate it, that moving force gets stuck in the body and becomes static potential energy. It is a frequency which is stuck but has the potential to move and flow because we have within us an intelligent, powerful vitality that wants to flow. The same process occurs even if the event was emotional or chemically overwhelming. Like the passing of a loved one or an onslaught of highly processed foods, the bodymind system has to integrate these waves of information. When it does, we become wiser, stronger and more compassionate beings. When the system struggles to integrate these experiences, we get stuck, symptoms appear but the potential, the possibility for healing and wholeness is always there.
However we find our path to connection, when we can become fully present in ourselves, that which has become hard in us can soften and ease and we take a step forward in our growth. Literally, it is in the integration of our greatest challenges that we become the best versions of ourselves.
Diane Babalas has been serving the Ann Arbor community at Gateway Chiropractic since 2000. Her practice of Bio-Geometric Integration(BGI) is a unique chiropractic approach that gently and profoundly works with the sacred geometry of the body for health, healing and personal growth. www.gatewaychiropracticbgi.com
We practice for these times, for times like this in the world. We go to our mat, under our shawl, sit on our cushion, to find peace amid the rubble of grief, rage, and fear. We attend to our practice precisely so that when the tides of emotion are strong, so is our practice. We return again and again to our breath, to our body and mind in the moment, returning to ourselves. Our ancestors developed these practices because they knew—they knew that we could be swept off our feet by our emotions, our ability to choose wisely blinded by the redness of rage or the waters of our grief