Just about all pain associated with the bones and joints have an element of dislocation involved. A fall you had in childhood could start showing its effect much later in life. Chiropractors routinely find that correcting little dislocations can bring pain relief you otherwise thought impossible. But we have tiny tiny little bones and fine little nerves even chiropractors can’t get at.
Muscles develop around bones and then flesh around those and so it turns out our shape, our movement and as we go along so much more about us develops over the foundation of how our bones are aligned together.
The general idea is that muscles and tendons keep the bones in shape. Exercises to work certain muscles are used to correct crooked posture and the like.
I have found those to be useful but not quite enough. You see, to understand how to align the bones, we need to understand how they got out of alignment in the first place.
Shocks, falls, injury, accidents, these are some things that can push bones out of place. Repetitive stress, carrying heavy loads the wrong way etc. too. But the body is designed to recover from these. What makes the body not able to recover from these?
They call it aging. I have found it to be ‘loss of awareness’. Trauma I find, whether sudden physical shock, or emotional shock causes more of it than any other cause.
Previous generations of humans spoke about their bones and bodies so much more than we do these days. People therefore identified and associated with their bones and were aware of the life force in the bones. Many experienced their bones as a sense organ, to predict things, to really feel the weather and the environment, to sense vibration, to sense changes and shifts that were otherwise too minute to notice.
To truly keep our bones in place, we need to redevelop awareness of our bones, feel connected up physically. There are lots of ways to be aware of your bones. The simplest way is to use them. Here are:
4 forgotten but simple ways to keep the bones healthy and aligned
Chewing, Jumping, Aiming, Developing Instinct
Chewing bones,
as ironic as it might be, is how humans and animals alike for many generations kept their bones healthy. When a baby is teething, the baby chews on anything he or she can chew on to trigger off the tooth and bone building processes.
Chewing puts pressure on the teeth, triggering off signals to the rest of the skeletal system. When we put pressure on our bones, the cells there call for more nutrients and that’s how bone cells develop and reproduce and make strong healthy bones. The aspect of ‘aging’ where the face seems to shrink is mostly caused by the person not chewing as often as required to maintain the facial bone structure and the health of the muscle and nerves. You stop chewing enough, everything goes soft.
Chewing bones has apparently been designated something only modern dogs are allowed to do (and even they are given fake bones to chew). Nutrition in meat bones is excellent for bone, skin, hair and is something the body knows how to work with. It’s such a pity such a normal healthy thing to do as chewing bones has become something people don’t do anymore.
I chew bones. When I was breast-feeding my son, I got so calcium deficient at one point, I could feel the bone in my ankles leach as I fed him. The usual bone building supplements like Dandelion kept me going, but I turned around a corner when on instinct I started munching on chicken and duck bones. It made such a big drastic difference to my life and gave the baby his full nutrition for bone building as well. Other meat bones are nutritious in their own way too. Bone broth is well known, but there’s something you get only when you chew the bone.
There are several natural chewing gum options. Pine, spruce, birch, fir resin is a common ingredient and it’s just resin from a tree. You can chew on it for hours. You could chew on anything – seeds. Just chew enough to feel like you’ve had a good chew, feel like the jaw has exercised.
Sometimes hunger that just won’t go away, is not hunger to eat, but the need to chew. It’s the bones saying they want to develop so do the thing that triggers bone development.
Jumping
is whole skeleton realignment in a second. It puts pressure on nearly all the bones at once and stimulates bone development and healing right through – everything from circulation to skin health improves.
An athletics coach in school would jump 5 times before he came down the stands to the field to start the session. He had perfectly aligned bones and looked like he was in his thirties, when he was about to retire.
You have to try jumping to experience it’s benefits. Just jump lightly to start with 10-20 times before you sit down, then again when you get up, and then through the day. If you can get a trampoline you’ll find it a wonderful investment.
Aiming
I once asked my great great grandad and teacher John Waltham what actually caused sexual problems in men who are otherwise healthy. His answer surprised me to bits. He said, ‘Bad aim.” When I’d finished laughing he explained that life is about points. Point A, point B, point C. When a person loses the difference between point A and point B and every point runs into the other, it means the brain is tired and with it the whole body runs amuck. You don’t what’s going where, what’s doing what, what you’re doing here when you want to, have to, be there. He’d found himself ‘losing his aim’ in life on several occasions and gotten back to health by doing ‘body aiming’ exercises.
I asked him what these body aiming exercises were. He said, there are several aiming points of the body. So to improve body aiming we find ways to aim at things with points of our body. For example:
To improve head aiming, place a cushion on the bed in front of you. Get on your knees in front of the cushion and then use your head to push that cushion across the bed. The hair is going to be a mess, I know. But the neck and shoulders will thank you for it.
For butt aiming, you get on your knees, put your head down and draw circles with your butt in the air. You have no idea how powerful this exercise is until you try it regularly.
In general you choose a point of your body, then draw a circle with it. If it feels good, you can draw a horizontal line from point A to point B and then back. Then a vertical line. Then across and criss cross. You get the picture.
Wherever you feel like you need some energy moving, find a way to aim with the point or protrusion of that area and draw circles. It could be difficult in the beginning but keep going until you’re in touch with every corner of your body.
These are the little things that can make big changes in a person’s life.
Develop physical instinct
Games where we have to use our physical instinct are great for this. But if you don’t have the time to follow a sport, walking backwards and walking with your eyes closed are easy but powerful ways to do this.
These break us out of ‘mental walking’ where our awareness is concentrated in the brain, while it ought to be spread about more fairly.
Our skin, our bones, our energy field has as much ability to sense ‘here’s a wall coming up’ as our eyes.
The ultimate way to keep our bones and bodies healthy for a long long time is to use them not just physically but also as sensory intelligence. This whole body intelligence is essential to maintain hormonal balance, recover from mental fatigue and even shock.
Start with one or two minutes of walking backward followed by closing your eyes and walking forward for about the length of a room. Go carefully, turn around when you reach the wall and keep going. Increase it to 15 minutes slowly.