“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:36 (ESV)
There are reasons why, in my opinion, treatments like chiropracty are sub-optimal as stand-alone treatments. That is because in most cases, especially with long-standing issues/problems, the body has adapted to the problem. The body and its muscular and skeletal structures have adapted to the problem such that the body now actually prefers the problem. Once corrected, the body will return to its “deformity,” if you will, without systematic reworking of the entire body systems. Without massage therapy, PT, and specific exercises to support the chiropractic adjustments, the body will return to its deformity because it has learned to prefer it.
So it is with the heart, the mind and the soul. Our psyches, hearts and desires adjust to our distortions learn to “prefer” them. We learn to adapt, growing comfortable in our erroneous thinking or anxious feelings or wandering heart … and our “adaptive self” becomes a place or comfort, security and protection. We no longer know who we are or would be without our contortion — e.g., without our anxiety, our OCD, our longings, our shadow-self, or whatever. We get to a place where we don’t know who we would be apart from this distorted way of thinking or being. Changing our perspective is simply not enough because other parts of our hearts and minds have adapted to “prefer” the deformity as well.
Strange as it seems, we begin to prefer the way things are because that is what we know. Especially when we have known it for a long time.
To loosen the ties that bind, we need to be able to let go of who we know ourselves to be and to be willing to become someone new. Just as, in the physical realm, in order to change our physical stature … in order, for example, to no longer see the hunchback in the mirror … our whole body needs to learn to hold itself differently. So too our hearts and minds need to learn to make many adjustments in order to see and to be differently. It is a process, not an event. It is a systemic, interrelated, ongoing process.
But it can be done. There is One who can make all things new. (Rev. 21:5). There is One who can supply all the grace and strength we need. (2 Cor. 12:9, Phil. 4:19) And He wants to — He wants us to be set free! (Isaiah 58:6). But we need to be willing and ready to see ourselves differently … to hold ourselves differently … to live & move & have our being differently than we now do.
We have to be ready and willing to let go of the old (no matter how familiar) and work towards the new.
Are you ready?
