Dear Friends,

Happy September!  The season is turning; I’m noticing leaves and rain starting to fall. Both of my children are back in school.  Even if you don’t have big transitions in your personal life in the fall, the natural rhythm of our days changes with fewer daylight hours. This year feels especially dark to me as we look forward to the upcoming election. Regardless of individual political views, I sense a growing collective feeling of isolation and fear, a loss of connection to self and others, with the political unrest.

I have no answers to propose for the big questions facing us in the election. But I do have something to offer that I hope could offer us growth, warmth and community, a little respite from the darkness. I will be offering an in-person 6-week holistic health class called SHINE on Wednesday nights, September 25-October 30. I hesitate to call it a class because I’m hoping that as we gather each week it will become a community more than a class.

Here’s what I think: Learn and follow the principles of good nutrition most of the time. Aim for about 80%. Don’t measure this precisely. And when your delicious bag of candy that makes you feel strong and a little rebellious is sitting next to you on a hot summer day, eat some of it and enjoy every crunch. Support your friends and family to make healthy choices, tell them about Popeye and spinach and that healthy snack you just found at your favorite store. When someone tries to micromanage your basically healthy choices, blow them off and understand that better is better, it doesn’t have to be perfect to be healthy.

Why is a chiropractor talking about mental health? Because you can’t separate mental health from physical health. I’m a specialist in musculoskeletal (MSK) medicine. That means on the most basic level I help people with movement problems and pain. But what we experience as body pain is not solely about joint dysfunction, nerve impingement or tight muscles/fascia - that is outdated reductionist thinking. Modern pain science tells us that pain is always both physical and emotional (did you know that emotions are physical?).

Your brain is your control center for everything, but it needs information from your body to do a good job. Information flows in through specialized nerves in muscles, tendons and joints and helps your brain know where you are in space and how you are moving. As a result, your brain can send instructions to your body to both start and control movement. This is called neuromotor control. Why does this matter? If your brain doesn't get regular input from your body—primarily provided by movement—then you are increasingly vulnerable to poorly coordinated control of your body when you decide to move. And that can cause many day-to-day injuries. For example, a tiny shift in how quickly a muscle is activated to protect a joint during activity could be the difference between a painful lower back episode and going normally about your day.

This post will focus on how you move (or don’t move) your body during daily activities. Daily tasks often require sustained postures or repetitive motions. Soft tissue imbalances can develop in your body in response, and your body starts to move differently as a result. This is not usually a painful or obvious process because your brain adapts to the changes in the soft tissues and the lack of movement and you just keep going (don’t get me going on the brain, what a miracle…). But then the weekend comes, and you decide to use your body differently by landscaping your yard/going rowing/holding your grandchild/cooking a big meal/sleeping in an unfamiliar bed. You have a soft tissue imbalance and a brain that has not been practicing movement, and sometimes that leads to an injury.

I noticed the other day that Oprah’s annual list of her favorite things was released for the holidays. I try not to read her list because it makes me want things that I don’t need (I mean need is kind of a relative term when it comes to cashmere and chocolate, but…). I digress, but the idea of her list made me think that it’s a great time of year to share all sorts of things, and what if I shared a list of some of my favorite wellness tools, ideas and hacks from this year?