Laws of Nature

When I stop and look at our world it makes me think God must have an incredible sense of humor!  All of the twists and turns that He used when created the world just make me smile.  If you watch any nature show these days, its mind blowing to see all of the details He built in and all of the things that baffle science.  Take the bumblebee for example.  With their tiny wings and their large bodies, “science” says that they should not be able to fly yet they travel hundreds of miles by wing everyday.  Or the ant that can lift thousands of times its own bodyweight, the cuttlefish that can change colors and shape shift to hide from predators.  So much of our world completely breaks what science says can’t be done.   But while there are plenty of things we cant comprehend through the lens of science, God created our world with some very real principles.  Those principles are the Laws of Nature and once we understand those laws and live according to them our lives will go exceedingly well! 

One of the most well known of the Laws of Nature is gravity.  Now the fact that something is a law means that it cannot be broken.  It is set in stone and cannot be altered and if it is broken even once then it cannot by definition be a law.  When the apple leaves the tree branch, it will ALWAYS fall down, never float up!  That’s the law of gravity.  If you ignore the law of gravity your life will be worse off!   But if you live in accordance with it, your life will go exceedingly well.  It makes sense.  When you live your life according to how God created the world, things tend to go much better for you! 

Gravity is pretty simple but there are other laws that are less well known.  One of my favorites is the Law of Health, which essentially says that all health and all healing come from within.  There is no drug, no surgery, no diet, no supplement, no adjustment that will heal you.  It is ALWAYS the body that does the healing.  It takes the things that you give it, good or bad, and it utilizes those things but ultimately it is always the body that heals.  Put simply, “health comes from within”.  Once you recognize this fact and live in accordance to it, your life will go exceedingly well!

In my experience, we all want our lives to go well.  We all want to wake up with energy, be pain free, and have a great day with as little stress as possible!  We all want good things in our lives.  Good relationships, good finances, good health, good everything!  Luckily God made a law for good things.  That law is that all good things in life require time, effort, and consistency and once again if we can understand that fact and live our lives according to it, things will go exceedingly well!

When I was going through school, I read every personal growth book I could find.  I was searching for that one thing that would unlock the door to success and happiness in life.  What I realized after 100 books or so (I’m a slow learner!) was that there are no shortcuts.  There isn’t a perfect 9 step process for a better life.  There isn’t any get rich quick scheme.  There is no pill or diet that will shed the weight for you or make you healthy.  Now, we all want to get our desired outcomes faster which is why companies and marketing agencies have discovered that if they promise you a better life with zero effort on your part, their product will sell like hotcakes!  Things like diet pills or surgeries that make you lose weight.  Sure you might shed pounds overnight but it is at the expense of your health.  Winning the lottery to get rich!  The vast majority of lottery winners are broke and miserable just a few years later.  Drugs and vaccines to make you healthy, ignoring how God created your body!  They all come with terrible, often deadly side effects.  There is no quick, easy way to the good life God has intended for you.  Everything that is good and wholesome requires time, effort, and consistency.

Time:  We are like children in the way we want what we want and we want it NOW!  In our world of free 2 day shipping and high speed everything; we demand that we get everything we want immediately.  But good things take time.  The saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day means that it took time!  You cannot get healthy or pain free overnight.  You cannot create an incredible marriage in a weekend.  You cant pay off debt with your next paycheck.  Life is a journey and hopefully a long one!  All along that journey you are planting seeds.  That seed first grows roots, and then it sprouts and continues climbing and growing.  Even a tall tree isn’t done; it is only after years of spreading limbs and digging deep into the soil that the fruit finally comes!  Such is life.  All good things take time and thank God that they do because over time, you mature and learn.  The things that I thought I wanted when I was 20 years old are completely different than today.  Thank goodness I had time to learn along the way!

Effort:  Effort means work!  This one is one of the harder ones because our brains are wired to drive us towards as little effort as possible.  That made a lot of sense when more effort meant more energy spent and energy meant we’d have to hunt more or gather more food.  But in our world of abundance we have the freedom to put effort into the things that matter to us.  An easy way to think of it, if you care about something, you have to work on it.  You care about your children, right?  That means you have to put in effort to make sure they are well behaved and healthy.  You can’t just ignore them and hope it all just falls into place!  If you care about your finances you have to put in the effort of creating a budget and a plan to save.  If you care about your marriage you have to work on the hard stuff!  If you care about your health you have to work on it; eating well, exercising, getting adjusted.  Now effort doesn’t just apply to good things, it applies to the bad as well.  If you don’t put in the work ahead of time to ensure things go well, you will have to put in the work after everything falls apart and at that point the work is much harder.  The work of repairing is much harder than the work of preventing.  It’s easier to work on a good relationship than fix a broken one.  It’s easier to maintain your health than working to reverse disease and pain.  Good things take effort.

Consistency:  Rome wasn’t built in a day which means it took time, but it also took consistency!  They didn’t work really hard one week, then take the rest of the month off.  Everyday they worked towards their grand vision of what civilization could be.  Good things take consistent effort everyday!  So often I hear about people who did crash diets.  Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!  And those people really did lose a lot of weight, but what happens after the 30 days?  They go back to what they did before and the weight comes right back.  One of my favorites is those who come get adjusted regularly until their pain goes away then I don’t see them for a month or two, and they come limping back in with even more pain!  All good things take consistency.  That often means making lifestyle and identity changes.  If you want long lasting good results you have to change the fundamental things you do in life.  Become the person who does ________.  I am the person who saves 10% of every paycheck.  I am the person who works out every morning.  I don’t eat sugar or grains.  I go to church every Sunday.  Your goals should not be end results, they should be daily efforts.  Instead of setting a goal to lose 30 pounds, set a goal to have a smoothie and a salad every day.  I guarantee that with that consistency you will lose way more than 30 pounds.  So, whatever good thing you are working towards, work towards it every day! 

There are so many good things that God has planned for our lives and while our world is full of awesome surprises and wonders, He created life with laws that we can depend on.  The best parts of life come when live in alignment with how He created us.  So, while its not always fun to wait on time, put in work and effort, and be consistent with the things we do, we can rest assured that when we do, there will always be good things to come. 

If you are ready to start your health journey and live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, or Palmer Lake area give us a shout! 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy, Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Are You Free

This time of year it is important to look at your life and be thankful for the freedoms you have been given.  Most of us did nothing to earn that freedom yet we are more free in this day and age than ever!  The men who founded our country knew how important those hard earned freedoms were and tried to establish laws to protect them but they also warned that if we were not vigilant and defend those freedoms we would swiftly lose them.  So I ask you, what would you do to protect your freedom?

I love to read about history and how the people of old lived.  When compared to modern life, the people of even 100 years ago had it rough.  Living in times where sewage riddled the streets, clean water was a luxury of the rich, nutritious food was impossible to find, and a bad growing season meant millions starved.  In those environments disease ran rampant due to a severe lack of health and harsh medical treatments like purifying the blood with poisonous mercury, surgeries without anesthesia, and bloodletting practices surprisingly performed up until WWII.  Thank goodness around the turn of the 20^th century cities became cleaner, clean water became available, and for the first time people realized that the foods you put in your body either make you healthier or sicker.  This lead to a drastic drop in viral and bacterial disease all because people were healthier and their bodies could fight an infection.  This in turn provided even more freedoms!

I am baffled at how free we are these days.  Not just the freedoms given by our constitution but the freedoms that modern life provides.  We have more free time than any other time in history.  It often doesn’t feel like it because of how we choose to live, but you don’t have to wake up at 3 AM to feed the livestock, milk the goats, collect the eggs, churn the butter, THEN go to work for 12 hours.  Our appliances do all the hard work.  Groceries can show up at your door any time of day.  You don’t have to leave your couch to buy clothes or toilet paper if you don’t want.  But what do we do with our free time?  We fill it with mindless junk!  We turn on the TV, jump on our phones, and turn off our brains.  I always wonder where we’d be as a race if Aristotle had an iPhone or Edison had Netflix.  Instead of using our powerful, creative minds to enjoy and improve our lives and world, we waste our time and brainpower watching the opinions of the talking heads on whatever box you have in front of you.  

Beyond free time, one of the best freedoms we have is the power of choice.  You are free to choose anything!  You can choose where your kids go to school, where you work, what you drive, where to live, what to do with your time, who to marry, you can even choose what gender to be these days!  Even if it doesn’t feel like it, everything you have in life as an adult is your choice.  Even your health!

When I was going through school one of my most mind opening moments was when I realized how powerful the human body is.  It is unfathomable how complicated the human body is.  Humans have studied the body for thousands of years and we have barely scratched the surface.  But knowing how ignorant we are God gave us a gift.  He designed the body to run itself!   You don’t need to tell your heart to beat, or your lungs to breathe, or your gut to digest, or even your immune system to fight germs.  God put an intelligence inside of us that governs it all for you!  But the problem comes when we live a life outside of how we were designed.  We put manmade garbage in instead of God made food.  We live sedentary lives, barely moving or breathing.  We put toxic chemicals in, and stress out our minds and nervous systems! So instead of giving your body what it needs, we give it exactly what it doesn’t need.  Again, thank God, He gave us that intelligence because every time you make a bad choice, you put the garbage in, your body gets to work.  Your body fights for you trying to keep you alive and healthy!  But it is a losing fight.  If you deprive any living thing of what it needs it will slow die.  Think about a flower.  If a flower is in rich soil, has good sunlight, and the right amount of water that lil guy will bloom and be beautiful!  But, if you hide it from the sun, deplete its soil, and give it only half the water it needs, it will wither and die.  The same is true for you and your family.  Deprive your body of what it needs, and it will still live, but it will never bloom beautifully, it will slowly wither away.  That withering in humans is called disease.  Diseases and all their many medical signs and symptoms are nothing more than the body slowly losing the fight for health, all because it never got what it needed.  Here in lies freedom.

My favorite aspect of living a healthy life is the freedom it provides!  Once you understand that your body is designed for health, that it is fighting FOR you ALWAYS, and that it has certain requirements to fight properly, then you no longer need to live life in fear of sickness, pain, or disease!  You can CHOOSE to give your body the things it needs, support your body as it fights for you and maybe for the first time experience energy, health, and wholeness the way we were all designed!  To me health freedom means that I get to choose what to put into my body, and my choices directly impact my health for the good or bad, but when you choose the good you can begin to live life on your terms. 

So, whatever decisions you face this week, choose that which is life GIVING and avoid that which is life taking.  And understand this, if you choose poorly for long enough, one day you will no longer be able to choose.  So choose well!

If your ready to take reclaim your health freedom and live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area give us a call today!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy, Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Save the Turtles

I often walk around the park that is next to our office.  There’s a small pond in the park.  I have no clue how they got there but there is a bunch of crawfish in the pond.  But over the past couple weeks I’ve noticed over a dozen crawfish leaving the water and trying to walk away from the pond!  If you don’t know much about crawfish, they don’t do well on land and the only reason they ever leave the water is if their current home is unsuitable for them (lack of food or oxygen, or the environment is too dangerous) and they go in search of a new place to live.  So, knowing there is no other place for them to go, I’ve been putting the little guys back in the pond because otherwise they would die!

The crawfish reminded me a lot of my mission to save the turtles when I was younger.  If you don’t know, Dr. Lauren and I grew up in Florida.  In Florida there are lots of turtles.  There’s land turtles, fresh water turtles, sea turtles.  They are everywhere!  But the problem with turtles is that they often get themselves into trouble.  It should be no surprise that they are very slow and are not great at jumping!  That’s not a big deal when they are in their natural habitat out in the woods or in a lake.  It’s when they come into our human world that trouble ensues.  Regularly in Florida you’ll see a turtle that has found himself in the middle of a busy road, impossibly stuck trying to climb a curb, or even a water turtle miles from any water.  It was always my mission to save the helpless little guys (even the alligator snapping turtles) because they didn’t know how to help themselves!  I am proud to say that I have saved hundreds of turtles in my time!

Animals, turtles and crawfish included, don’t have the ability to have conscious, rational thoughts.  They are guided by instinct and instinct alone.  They have an inborn intelligence that keeps them from danger, tells them where the best source of food is, where to find a good mate, etc.  Animals are great at surviving and even thriving.  That is until humans get involved.  Humans and the world we have created have interfered with the natural inborn intelligence that tells a turtle to move elsewhere in search of food, or a crawfish to leave the pond because there isn’t enough oxygen in the water.  The animal’s instinct remains the same, but because we have destroyed their natural environment they are often lead into an even worse situation!  So when a turtle is found in the middle of a highway, or a crawfish is on a hopeless journey that he won’t survive, it becomes our responsibility to save the little guys! 

The crazy thing is that we humans have that same intelligence within us that keeps us alive and well.  It’s not so much an instinct but our body’s ability to adapt and heal.  And thank goodness! Could you imagine trying to coordinate 70,000,000,000,000 cells every moment of every day for your entire life??  It’s hard for us to even pat our heads and rub our stomachs at the same time! Try digesting, breathing, pumping your blood, detoxifying, fighting germs all at the same time.  And that’s just the simple stuff, not to mention things like cellular respiration, or DNA replication.   Given the way God designed us, all we have to do is give our body the bare essentials that it needs and your body takes care of the rest!  But, the problem comes when us humans interfere.

As a race we have learned a lot.  We’ve done some pretty incredible things, and research has brought to light many wonderful theories, but we are still woeful ignorant to how our world and our bodies actually work.  We have barely begun to scratch the surface.  But in our arrogance we think that we know better than the incredible intelligence that God put inside of each of us, that is able to turn 2 cells into a 70 trillion cell living human who can heal cuts, mend broken bones, fight germs and diseases.  We have interfered with our inborn intelligence. We have filled our world and our bodies with toxic chemicals, junk foods, lack of natural motion and oxygen, stressed ourselves out to the max, and neglected our spines and nervous systems!  With all these things interfering with our body’s intelligence and ability to heal, we are no better off than the turtle hiding in his shell in the middle of the road.  We are lost, waiting for the impending disease, drugs, and surgeries that inevitably await us UNLESS something changes. 

What if instead of filling our body with junk food, we ate healthy meats, fats, and veggies?  What if instead of sitting all day we got up and moved constantly?  What if we filled our lungs with fresh air, removed the toxins, and learned healthy ways to manage our stress?  What if we prioritized our spines and nervous systems because we knew they were the source of life and health? What if we removed the interferences and trusted the intelligence that God put inside of us?  We would become the happy turtle living out in the wild, moving about freely, surviving and thriving just the way God intended us to. 

Here at NGFC, the solutions for sickness, pain, and disease are clear.  Give your body the things it needs and it will heal.  But that is not clear to most people.  I’ve asked thousands of people over the years if they would rather be healthy or sick.  The answer is ALWAYS the same.  We all want to be healthy!  But the fact remains that 5/6 people will die from either heart disease or cancer.  Over 80% of our country has a chronic disease and that includes children.  1/33 children today have autism.  We are sick even though we WANT to be healthy.  The problem is that most people think that the only solution they have is drugs or surgery, but no one wants more drugs or surgeries because we know those are not solutions!  They are merely cover-ups.  That is why my mission has changed from helping turtles to helping people.  Everyone needs and deserves to know HOW to be healthy!  But I cant reach our entire community alone.  So the next time you see a turtle, a crawfish, or a person that is lost, it is your responsibility to help them. 

My question to you then is this, who do you know?  Who are you close with that is far from health and how can you help them learn about health?

If you or someone you know here in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area are ready to get started on your health journey we are here to help! Schedule a consultation today or give us a call for more info!

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy, Ste 124

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Where is Your Focus

We all have a lot going on in our lives. Places to be, things to do, people to see. It seems like everything, and everyone is demanding our attention! Your child tugging at your shirt trying to show you something, your friends wanting to hang out, your car needs new oil, the bills need to be paid, everything requires a piece of you. The things of our world are set up to be the loudest, seemingly most important thing at that moment. Just scrolling through social media it’s clear that people are trying to grab your attention by any means necessary! So it becomes essential to predetermine what it is that you are going to focus on in your life, because whatever you focus on, grows!

Your subconscious is a powerful tool. It is working for you constantly whether you know it or not. I like to think of it as a search engine. It is constantly searching for whatever you ask it to. And it is VERY good at it. One easy example is your name. In a sea of thousands of people, with loud noise coming from every direction, you don’t hear much, just the constant clamor. But if someone even whispers your name, BAM! Your brain picks it up out of the 10,000 voices, all because your subconscious has been trained to search for your name! Another easy example is a new car. Let’s say you see a new car that you really like. You say to yourself (and your subconscious hears) “wow, I like that car”. Next thing you know, you see that car everywhere! It’s not that everyone around you actually bought that car, it’s your subconscious searching for what you told it to!

Now, your search engine doesn’t stop at names and cars, it seeks to make everything you say true. If you say, “today is going to be a terrible day”, all day long your brain is going to give you proof that it really is a terrible day! It could’ve been the best day ever but all you saw was the bad because that’s what you told your mind to search for! The opposite is true as well. Even in the face of the worst day ever, your brain will show you all the good if only you ask. Simply by focusing on the things that you want out of life instead of the things you DONT want, your brain will make it true.

So, what are you focused on? Intentionally focusing is a new concept to many. Like I said before, the whole world is trying to steal your focus so most of us simply wander through life being pulled and pushed by others into what they think we should focus on. So, stop for just a moment and ask yourself what do you really want out of life? I’m not talking about more stuff, what truly matters to you in life? What would bring you more peace, joy, and wholeness?

Maybe you’ve noticed in the office that we have a new monthly Victory Board. That little board has changed the office for us. Since the very beginning, all we’ve ever wanted at NGFC was to help people get their lives back and start living healthier more whole lives. But as chiropractors and health professionals nearly everyone who comes in is dealing with pain and sickness! And slowly, pain and sickness became our focus. It seemed like the whole office was full of people who were telling us about how they hurt or how they were sick even though that wasn’t true at all! It was just what we were focused on. But when we hung the Victory Board, we did so with the intention of celebrating the good things that were happening right in front of us. So, we started listening and searching for nothing but the good. We shifted our focus. These days it feels like the entire office is full of people who are experiencing miracles in their lives! All because we changed our focus.

So, whatever is going on in your life, I urge you to make a shift. Focus on what matters. Focus on the good things, the abundance you have in your life and watch as your life becomes full of joy! I believe Paul said it best, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

If you live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake area and are ready to reduce your pain, restore your health, and reclaim your life give us a call and let us help you on your health journey!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy

Colorado Springs, CO 80921

 

Be Still and Know

 

Have you ever wondered what people did before TV or radio? How did they not lose their minds from boredom?? Better yet, what did people do before electricity and lights? It’s hard to even conceive of living that way given our current society! We live in a world in which our minds are constantly distracted. We go from distraction to distraction without ever pausing to reflect and process. Here in lies the problem. We require stillness!

When was the last time you sat and did nothing? I’m not talking about vegging out in front of the TV for hours or mindlessly scrolling through social media. I’m talking about sitting and doing NOTHING. Setting your mind free of distractions allowing it to wander and reflect. To some who have been around long enough this idea isn’t completely foreign but to the younger generations many have been distracted for their entire lives! Many children these days grow up staring at screens day in and day out. There is a reason every religion on earth talks about quiet prayer or meditation. It’s because we all need stillness to be the best, most whole versions of ourselves.

We are living in the most informed time in history. Any information (right or wrong) is available to us at our fingertips. We can search any question and get an answer. But we need not search for it because we are constantly being bombarded with information every moment. From your TV, phone, and radio to billboards and marketing galore we are being told what to think and who we are constantly, and that way of living has turned us into people who are no longer able to think for ourselves but instead blindly follow along with the mainstream thoughts of the moment. It’s time to take back control of our thoughts and our minds and the first step is to do nothing.

I believe that God lives in our stillness. So often we pray for answers or solutions in life but then we rush off to find them in a book, a podcast, or a Facebook post from some famous pastor. Imagine asking a teacher a question then instead of listening for the reply we jumped on google for the answer. Even if the teacher did respond we’d be too distracted to hear. Now don’t get me wrong, God works in all sorts of ways, but we can always find Him in our still moments. This is evident in how He designed our minds to work. Pauses and breaks from input are required for proper mental health and processing. For memories to go from short term to long term requires input breaks. To truly learn something requires time to reflect. To fully understand ourselves and the world we live in, time to sit and ponder is absolutely necessary. You might be aware, but desperation and anxiety are skyrocketing in our world today largely because we never stop! It’s always go go go, jumping from distraction to distraction. When we live that way, of course we feel stressed an anxious!

It’s an easy thing to want to be still, it’s another thing to do it and that takes practice and effort! The easiest first step is to be still while you are driving. When you’re alone in your car turn off the radio. It’ll feel weird and awkward at first but soon you’ll start noticing the world around you. You’ll think deep thoughts and reflect on your day. The fact that you’re still doing something (driving) makes it a much easier transition.

The second step is to take a walk or a jog again with no music. Even better than driving you’re moving your body (and there’s no other people zooming around in their cars). Let your mind wander but also try to notice the things you see and hear.

The third step is to sit and notice. I love sitting with my eyes closed and using my other senses. Notice every sound that you can hear. Then notice everything you smell or everything you feel, even the weight of your clothes or the different temperatures you feel. Our world is so much more beautiful than just the things we can see. Try to quiet your thoughts and just sense the world.

From there you can go deep into the world of meditation and prayer but for most of us just turning off the TV or radio or putting down the cell phone for 15 minutes is a good first step. As you get better and better at it, you’ll be able to use stillness as a way to find answers or to process and understand the world we live in for ourselves or even just to find peace in your crazy life. So do your mind some good. Take time today to simply be still and know.

If you live in the Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake areas and you are ready to start your health journey, give us a call and let us help you and your family! 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Northgate Family Chiropractic

12245 Voyager Pkwy

Colorado Springs, CO 80921