The Rug From Hell

Many of you will recognize this image as the rug in my Westborough office. Let me point out to you the bunched up areas which are not only unsightly, but really irritate me when I have to walk over them, trip over them or fiddle with them with my feet. I have tried flattening them out with heavy objects, moving all the furniture and re-laying the rug, adjusting corners … nothing works.

I tell you this because this is not just true of a rug as any rug-layer professional will tell you, but it is true of paint, drywall cement, paving and even pebbles in your shoe. All are irritating and not the way they are designed to be, but most importantly there are many compensations that have to be made.

There is nothing more difficult than compensating and adjusting various things to allow for a mistake or a misalignment earlier in the process. This is the key factor affecting your health as well and I want to stress this to you because it makes all the difference. This actually represents a key difference between conventional medicine and natural medicine … it’s viewing the body as systems vs. layers. As the body goes through each day, it makes minute adjustments, resolves irritating issues and generally attempts to keep the body function balanced. But if something is missed or is not able to be fully resolved, then the “layer” of the next day is simply laid down over it. So a small misshapen area occurs which may not be much at first, but after months of layering is creating a substantial impediment to your health and balance.

It’s not just a bunched up area of your rug, it is creating a common trip zone, wearing down the pile of the rug over time from being bunched up and making you roll your eyes every time you see it. In the body it is the development of symptoms and compensations, avoidances and weaknesses. Without realizing that there are these places in the layers of our bodies we would simply fall into the trap of assuming that the symptoms in a particular system are isolated to that system. In fact, that system is the result of something laid down in the past that has forced that system to alter its normal function, creating symptoms.

I may not have a solution yet for my rug, but I find solutions for the layered issues of the body every day in my practice. That is the difference between an inanimate object and our living cells.