Was Jesus Subluxated?
This time of year I tend to think about Jesus a lot. Hopefully that’s the case for all of us! He is the reason for the season, as we all know. But beyond the manger and the cross I like to imagine Jesus’ life. Not just what we are told from the Bible but I like to imagine the stuff in between. What was He like, what hobbies did He enjoy, what was His favorite food. But as a chiropractor, I wonder about His health! Did He ever get sick? Stub His toe? Break an arm falling out of a fig tree? Was He subluxated? As a human we have to assume that He had to deal with the physical difficulties of our world but as God on Earth with a world-changing mission, was He protected from such things? Let’s think about it.
If you have a spine in our modern world you have been subluxated. Research says that 87% of newborns are subluxated. And if it doesn’t start at birth, the years of falling on your butt and off of furniture while learning to walk, run, and climb will certainly have done the job. Subluxation is any misalignment of the spine causing interference to the nervous system and they are caused by STRESS. There are 3 different types of stress: physical, chemical, and emotional.
Physical stress is straightforward. The stress of the medically assisted birthing process, car accidents, your sleeping position, playing sports, poor posture, or sitting for multiple hours. It’s clear how physical interactions with our world can misalign our spines.
Emotional stress also makes a lot of sense. When you are feeling overwhelmed, depressed, angry, sad, what is your posture like? Standing tall, chin up, shoulders back looking like superman with an awesome spine? Nope. More like hunched over, head forward, shoulders rounded over. Your emotions can dictate the alignment of your spine. Not to mention, when you are dealing with emotional stress, your nervous system gets stuck in the sympathetic state of fight or flight which in turn changes your muscle tone, blood flow, and breathing patterns which all change the shape of your spine!
Then there is chemical stress. Imagine putting your spine in a barrel of acid. What will happen to the bones, ligaments, discs, and muscles? Not good. What if it’s just a tiny little bit of acid? Overtime, the bones wear down, the ligaments and muscles lose their elasticity, the discs waste away to nothing. That’s exactly what happens to your spine when there are outside chemicals on the inside. Your body turns acidic and devoid of essential nutrients. Your joints and soft tissues slowly waste away. If your spine begins to waste away it begins to interfere with the nerve system. Boom! Subluxated. All because of the Diet Coke you can’t seem to give up.
But more important than how subluxation occurs is what it does. When there is interference to the nervous system it can absolutely cause pain. And that’s where most people’s minds go when we think about a misaligned spine. But only 6% of our nervous system feels pain. So there can be all sorts of interference to the other 94% of your nerves and you’d never know it if you were waiting to feel it. The fact is that your nervous system controls every aspect of your life. It controls your health. It controls how you experience the world around you. How you think, what you see, hear, taste, smell, your emotions, your sleep and energy. Your nervous system controls every aspect of life! At NGFC our driving goal is to help people experience God to the fullest. We do that by helping you remove as much interference from the nervous system as humanly possible so that you can experience all of the good things that God has in store for you. When you are subluxated your experience of life and God are diminished. When you are subluxation free that’s when you get to experience life and experience it abundantly!
But back to our question, was Jesus Subluxated? Did He deal with physical stress? It’s hard to imagine sleeping in the back of a boat in the middle of a storm and not waking up with a kink in your neck! Chemical stress? Luckily there was no Monsanto back then with their poisonous pesticides in His food. All of His fish was wild caught. And His wine was heavenly! So I think He’s good with chemical stress. What about emotional stress? The bible says that He felt strong emotions to the point of weeping at times and sweating blood. And if He was human at all I’m sure He became frustrated with His disciples and the people He came to save with all their doubts and questions.
To me it is clear that many of the causes of subluxation were present in Jesus’ life but in His Godliness, did they interfere with His life, His experience, His connection to God? For me that will be the first question I ask when I get there. But what I know is that throughout His entire life Jesus did everything He could to experience more of God. He studied the scriptures and laws, He sought after and served the broken, lost, and hurting, He took time to fast, pray, and meditate. Everything He did, He did in order to experience more of God. Now here in our modern world our efforts should be for the same end. Though our struggle may differ slightly from Jesus’, the goal is the same. Remove everything that interferes with our ability to experience God to the fullest.
I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!
Dr. Marc
