What is Chiropractic?

First and foremost, you must know that we see your body as intelligent. Wiser than any doctor on the planet! It has all the wisdom and information it needs to be well and freely express life. We see you as a whole being — unified in body, mind and spirit. There's no separation between physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual health. They're all qualities of the whole health.

Your health is reflected by the tone of the nervous system. The nervous system is composed of your brain, spinal cord, and all the nerves that send information to and from the brain. It is how the body functions as one whole system and stays in touch with itself. The nervous system coordinates and organizes all physical, mental, chemical and emotional processes of life.

Every experience, every moment of life, is teaching our nervous system how to continue living the best it possibly can. Life is the teacher, our nervous system is the eager student.

When we encounter an unfamiliar or novel experience we respond with stress. Stress is necessary for our nervous system to learn. Stress helps us engage strength and attention to handle new moments. When we hold onto stress, however, this is when it becomes harmful to our system.

We hold stress when we cannot process it and we experience continuous stress more than we experience resting, integrating and learning from life. This can be because the season of life we are in is overwhelming our capacity to adapt — taking on too much, going through a big change, being out of tune with the body's natural signals and rhythms, not prioritizing recovery or rest — or because we are in a chronic state of lowered stress capacity due to years of accumulated, unintegrated and unprocessed stress.

The former is when we are experiencing an acute injury or a mental strain due to a heavy work or school or life load; the latter is when we are experiencing the manifestations of long term mal-adaptive patterns and traumas. We may be dealing with the repercussions of living out of alignment with our nature as organic and spiritual beings.

Stress held in the system creates tension patterns known as subluxations. These are body-wide patterns that interfere with optimal communication between brain and body, distort the spine, and keep the system in a state of lowered health, adaptability, and functionality. Said another way, you express less life for the sake of staying safe and stable to cope with the impression that life is overwhelmingly stressful.

Many folks come to us to get help with pain — often pain that is lingering and doesn't seem to have a direct cause. This indicates to us that the system is struggling to adapt, compromising function, and prioritizing safety and stability over vitality, full movement, and freedom of expression. This is what it means to be subluxated.

Subluxations are not mistakes your body has made or a punishment for your poor health choices — they are intelligent adaptations created by the body so it can continue living life despite the experience of overwhelm, trauma, and being disconnected from your vital needs. They are evidence of grace and the body’s innate desire to keep living!

The adjustments at TONE honor the innate intelligence of the body and the subluxation tension patterns it expresses. Because the body wants to live and heal, we listen to the tension and tone of the system and what it’s attempting to process. We utilize a force to accelerate and assist in the process your body is already in.

Chiropractic does not fix you or heal you — you do that. When the innate intelligence of the body can be free from prioritizing survival and stability and return to prioritizing full expression and vitality, the body’s tension naturally reorganizes. Your responsibility is to tune inward and support your body in doing what it innately knows how to do. Heal, recover, and express life freely.