You know what is interesting to me? I’ve found that writing a blog every day is kind of easy. Sure it takes time and effort and thought, but among that, it somehow becomes a habit. Something that gets done daily, regardless of whatever else is going on, and the writing space becomes a sanctuary all of its very own. Fingers click away on the black keys, and somehow wisps of ideas and words dance and weave together and organise themselves into something coherent. Sometimes they even become something half beautiful.

You know what is even more interesting to me? Writing a blog sporadically is extremely difficult. It becomes a task that should get done, might get done, will get done later. And later might be in the next hour or the next year. Until ideas become paralysed by insecurity (will it be good enough?) and indecision (should I even post that?). So it seems that Blanche d’Alpuget was onto something when she said, “Your muse shows up when you show up.”

So I’m wondering, what else in life is like that? Some things, most things, all things? What would happen if we didn’t have any structure or demands on our time and our minds? Would we get anything done at all if we had to make a decision about each and every thing in our day? Would we get decision fatigue and have to have a good lie down to the rest of our lives? Where would our muses go?

Today I’m looking at my habits. The good, the bad and the ugly resourceful, the less useful and those who can beat it, and wondering if I actually make any choices at all in my day, or if i just zoom along, habit to habit until I close my eyes for the night.

Perhaps the blog needs a resurrection.

***Erases the Facebook App from phone, for the fifth time today***

How about you? Are you habit powered, or do you mindfully choose your life?

…From The Ashers

Always with us

When we first met you you were sprightly and jumpy and full of a cheeky, playful energy, that just couldn’t be stilled. We descended on your home like a noisy, chittering storm of crickets, and you just smiled and smiled. You took it in your stride as we took over your couch and your floor with our bums and our beds, and still you just grinned and wagged your strange little curled tail.

Stanley ruling The Pit

You were named after The Stanley Cup, a trophy based on a gentleman’s agreement between the two professional ice hockey organisations, and you personified that spirit: a regal gent, a pug among pugs.

Remember your Henry the VIII costume, with the turkey leg? We do.

We would stumble home after an evening of refreshments, and you’d be up waiting for us, twerking that tail for all you were worth. You’d sit with us as we sang and laughed into the small hours, making fun of your grin and your snuffling snores.

Twins

Eventually giggles would make way to groans, and we would fall into slumber, and that’s when you would come alive, taking every.single.toy out of your basket, placing them carefully in piles, and then back to the basket again, and then again, your clickety-clack toenails marking out the placement pattern for hours on end. We wanted to be cross with you, and make a fuss over our lost sleep, but you were too funny to grump at.

You had a way of bringing out a sweeter side in people, Stanley.

When we next met you, your muzzle had gone grey and some of your fur had been loved off, but you captured Liam and Coco’s hearts in a beat. With your tongue hanging out and your failing eyesight, they wanted to cuddle and love you to bits. They wiped your nose and scratched your belly, and you taught them what it is like to love a pet.

When we left, they waved to you as we reversed down the drive, and they said they’d be back in the summer to see you do a “Stanley Float” in the pool.

They won’t get to do that now.

Today when I told them about the peaceful end of your days, they stared at me with big eyes, two brown, two blue, but both with the same shocked pupils, not wanting to believe me, waiting for the punchline.

Unfortunately there was only a punch in the belly.

I saw Liam swallow and then swallow again, then he popped on his helmet and scootered up and down the path for a while, preferring to be in his own thoughts.

Coco’s eyes grew as wide as finger-bowls, then the tears started dripping and dripping as she let her emotions fall onto the pavers at her feet, forming a tiny rivulet between the weeds.

I was surprised at the emotion, but not of the depth.

You had a way with people Stanley. You opened them up and made careful etches on their hearts, Lord Stanley III.

Thanks for all the laughs, and for the joy and softening you brought to people I love.

You’ll be missed S.Gup.

Vale Stanley

…From The Ashers

For a few years now, I have been rallying people who are clever with their hands to sew some love into Softies for Mirabel. Gorgeous Pip Lincolne of Meet Me At Mikes first made me aware of this initiative, and I was taken.

Last  year, one of my big-hearted practice members encouraged the sewing teacher at her school to get the kids to make some softies as part of their assessment. I imagine the project may have been met with initial trepidation: would the kids sew then donate the toys? Would they sew them well enough to be given to these young children? Would the Mirabel kids even want the toys?

Well they did and they did and then they did.

Softies for Mirabel is now it its tenth year, and if you have any sewing nous, then I encourage you to join. Or if you are sartiorially challenged like me, then perhaps you can become the food and bevvy biatch, keeping your crafty friends fed and watered, and then have the priv of posting the toys down to Mirabel.

But that is not what this blog is about.

This blog is about Flopsy.

Because, you see, as the children have become part of the Sofites for Mirabel drive, Mirabel has made softies of them.

Since becoming patrons for the kids who are often without, these Sunshine Coast teens have somehow changed. They now no longer care about keeping the efforts of their labour for themselves: they donate them freely and with all of their hears. They now no longer whinge about sewing class, saying things like, “When are we ever going to use this?” or “I can’t believe you have to get the thread onto the bobbin yourself”* They now run to class, expectant and enthusiastic about knowing precisely where they will use this: to heal the hearts of those who need it most.

This week my big-hearted friend delivered a bag of Easter softies, and before I sent them off, I had a look at the creations. Usually there are some with punter’s eyes** and uneven ears. Limbs askew and mouths agape. I got ready to have a laugh at the messy, imperfect cuteness of them all.

I dug in to the bag of cuddles, and out came Flopsy.

Flopsy

Can you see her?

REALLY see her?

She’s like a young Velveteen Rabbit, with wonky eyes and fur loved half off, except she is possibly even more wonderous. She has been made with pure love. The sign reads:

HI. My name is Flopsy. I’m here to bring you happiness and love. In my apron pocket there is a spell for happiness. I was made with TLC by Sasha. I love you forever. Flopsy

And yes, inside her pouch there is a spell.

Get a handful of bad memories and a pinch of sadness. Mix it together with some love and boil it. Lots of love.

Oh my heart. That spell. It really is the answer.

I don’t know if Mirabel will be able to pass Flopsy on with her label intact. I don’t even know if Flopsy will go to a child who can read. But in this age of disrespectful ‘youths’ and online drama and drug use and horror, the simple joy of Flopsy gives me hope.

Flopsy tells me that it will all be okay.

For if there exists a teenager who can conceive and then create a bunny such as her, if there exists a kid who cares enough to go far beyond the desire for a good grade in sewing to bring joy to another, if there exists a young person who can share such beauty with purity and love, then I know that we are all going to be okay.

Thanks Flopsy.

The world is safe in your paws, and the magic of your apron.

*Maybe that was me

**One each way

…From The Ashers

A brave kid in her Brave shirt

Some people measure time by the seasons, others by the phases of the moon. Some tick off numbered squares on a glossy calendar from The Courier Mail, or on the flick of an iPhone screen. I measure it by the cycle of the anaemic vampire child.

The new blood brings a thrilling energy of high-pitched hysterical laughter and cartwheels into somersaults into squealing Whip Nae Nae dance-offs. Those fresh red cells stretch the length of our days, where I can ignore the trauma of the tick tick tick, and we can listen to the rhythm of our bodies of when we wish to eat, sleep or sing, rather than clock watching to avoid fun stepping off its narrow tightrope into the abyss of hyper-fatigue.

The middle blood is just that. It’s the average that most people take for granted and that I sometimes crave like chocolate. It’s the time when the kid is like all the other kids, in the ups and downs of life and living. It’s made up of moments that are mundane and magical, boring and beautiful, and nothing means any more or any less than what it is in the moment. If she scrapes her knee skateboarding, I don’t rush to stop the bleeding like a loon, imagining that each lost drop is dragging us, minute by minute, closer to a transfusion. If she cries over an overcooked egg that just isn’t dippy enough, I know it’s because she is being bratty, not that she just can’t cope with one.more.thing.

Then the middle makes way for the end, and the weights start to settle on my shoulders. I study changes in the cadence of her breath like a crow at the beach-bins waiting for a stray prawn shell. I stare at the whites of her eyes being stained yellow with the bilirubin, drop by drop. I look for the underlying pallor in her cheeks, as gold replaces pink. I pull down her eyelids and watch, as the red fades like Nan’s curtains, whilst the oxygen skitters away to more important parts of her body.

The end part knows his stay is brief but impactful, so he makes his mark on the furrow of my brow, the skin of my face, the shadows in my collarbones and the pigment of my hair. He sucks away my vivacity as I try to wrest it back, night by night by night. He tries to leave as big an imprint as he can, perhaps to provide balance or understanding or compassion or expansion (which is what I say on my lighter days), or perhaps he’s just a prick.

Eventually the eventual happens and we start the process of transfusing. I make calls and wait for replies. We get blood taken to be tested and matched and mixed for her veins. We wait for a bed and then we wait for a successful puncture and we wait for the delivery of the donated ruby red cells. Then we watch and watch and watch like the 2am bourbon-fuelled blokes at the Rolling Rock, looking for any perceptible signs of things awry, ready and waiting to pounce.

After a time there is no need for pouncing. No more checking. No more waiting.

The blood flows and flows until the bags are deflated and her body is plump with the excess fluid, and the pressing on my shoulders and my mind grows wings or dissolves or something, and I won’t give Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency another thought for at least a month.

As the doors of the hospital puff shut behind us, we step into the fecund, humid air of freedom and Sunshine Coast sugarcane, leaving our baggage behind.

And we start our whirling dance of life. Like dervishes.

With abandonment. And redemption.

DONE

…From The Ashers

If you would like to help a kid like Coco, and a Mum like me, please consider giving the gift of blood.

Call http://www.donateblood.com.au on 131495 to book an appointment.

Thanks!

I started going to the chiro when I was about 19 years of age, following a year or so of complete bollocks, which consisted of scrappy diagnosis, pain medication and unnecessary interventions, and eventually lead to a stomach ulcer, worsening back pain and muscle weakness, and plans for some fun times ahead in the orthopaedic surgery ward.

So when the specialist said, “Whatever you do, don’t ever go to a chiropractor,” I immediately went to google and typed in: What is a chiropractor went to the Med Library at Melbourne Uni and flicked through the cards in the A-K section looking for “chiropractic” then searched the shelves for the one and only book: The Case Against Chiropractic. It was pure, hideous vitriol, and I loved every word. I’d never seen one profession unleash on another profession like that, and I was intrigued. My interest piqued to peaking point. Imagine asking a carpenter what they think of plumbers, and having the chippy then froth and spit and come over all rabid, as they extoll the evils of plumbing? It was like that car crash that you know you shouldn’t-mustn’t-won’t look at, and then do, first with a shifty side-eye, and then once you’ve looked, you really look, staring in horror, almost crashing into the car in front.

So it was with a mix of nervous excitement (what the evil geniuses around here call nervicitement) that I flicked through the Yellow Pages to find Dr. Gerard Christian, Chiropractor. I would like to say that I had a flash of prescience in choosing his name from the list, but to be honest, I chose the man who would change the path of my life forever because I liked the sound of his name.

The next few days are marked indelibly in my mind, perhaps because something wonderful was unfolding: not only healing of the body, but a salve to the mind, where I realised, possibly for the first time in my life, I was in the right place. Mostly though, it was because that slick, fast talking, energetic young fella challenged me in a way that I didn’t anticipate.

I went to him because I had intractable lower back pain that was slightly modulated by the wonder of the new drugs on the block: the non steroidal anti-inflammatories, but never fully went away. I went to him with hope of some short-term relief, to stave of the inevitable operation, and to find out why some GP in the 1970s hated chiropractors so much he’d penned and published an entire diatribe on someone else’s job.

When I asked Gerard about it, he exclaimed, “Philosophy,” as he ran out the door to his next person. (The dude was always running.)

I kind of knew what philosophy was, I was at uni after all: philosophy was something the stoner art students talked about at Naughton’s Hotel as they sipped Sherry, or whatever posturing, pretentious thing they were drinking, whilst getting in the way of my excellent dance moves (Who doesn’t love a half-cut 19 year old dancing in high waisted jeans, a bodysuit and with a spiral perm flicking and fluffing to Betty Boo just chewin’ the goo*?).

Philosophy. I asked around. Some of the Arts students were studying it, but they didn’t really know why. The Law students pretended they knew all about it, and proceeded to tell me why it wasn’t as important as Torts (Tauts? I still don’t know). The Engineering fellas (of whom I received the most animated attention when I sidled up next to them at the bar) had no idea. They said it sounded like a waste of time, and would I like a pot of Guiness, as philosophy might well be found buried in the creamy froth.

The next time Gerard burst into the room to check my spine, between the breathe in-breathe out- adjust- roll onto your left- roll onto your right, I asked him what he meant when he said the difference was about philosophy. He said something that sounded like the race-caller at Flemington over the final strait. I didn’t catch it all, but I heard: Ayn Rand, slogans, grab-bag of notions snatched at random, well-reasoned, well-thought out philosophy.

It was fast, but it was enough.

The hook.

And I was caught.

I found Ayn Rand. And then Leonard Peikoff. They were hard work those two, but worth it in the end. And then came all of the others: BJ Palmer, Stevenson, Joe Strauss, Reggie Gold (bless), Sigafoose and on and on and on. A lifetime of reasoning and thought, there alone. Those fellas led me to others: Dawkins, Descartes, Hume, Plato, Wertheim, Damasio, Einstein. Each one tramping a little of the underbrush, to help me open up a new path. A different way forward.

And now, as we step forward into 2016, the year that people of astrological persuasion say is a year of endings, I look forward to the new beginnings that will follow straight after. I imagine cycles being completed and new ideas frothing forward, as the philosophy that Gerard spoke of becomes part of our vernacular. I get all nervicited as I imagine the reverberations throughout the world, as what is now my profession steps forward, pisiforms blazing, creating optimum function for anyone who wants it.

Just imagine what will happen.

Imagine the glow, as every child in our world shines with the bright light that is their birthright.

Imagine the potential. Imagine what they will do.

It’s Crazy.

Crazy in a good way.

Philosophy? Yes please.

*If those are not the correct lyrics, then don’t.even.tell.me, I don’t want to know. My dancing matches those words, and those alone.

…From The Ashers

Popcorn.

It’s tasty, isn’t it? In fact, I would probably have to say that no movie experience is complete without it. That strange salty-sweet smell sends messages jumping and hustling right along the first cranial nerve to hit the olfactory bulb with a thump, and in less than a heartbeat you find yourself back in that Art Deco cinema of slightly-musty red velvet seats, crackling film reels and the tap tap tapping of the floorboards from the usher and his torch, as he shows latecomers to their seats.

Popcorn.

At our house we don’t buy it from the cinema any more, for even though the smell of it is still able to connect us with memories of stolen jaffa-flavoured kisses, and the magical worlds other than our familiar suburban streets, popcorn just ain’t what it used to be. So these days, we pop at home.  And we find it embarrassingly thrilling. I’m not sure if it’s the slight danger of that hot, smoking oil, or the anticipation as we watch and wait for that first spinning kernel to build up steam (it’s the moisture content inside that causes internal steam to build and build, causing that little seed embryo to bust out of the pericarp) getting so hot and bothered, and uncomfortable, until it bursts forth in a rush of heat and transformation. Or maybe it’s a bit of both. Then of course we have the satisfying ting ting ting on the lid of the saucepan, as the rest of the kernels follow the leader and join the wave of change. For those hard, virtually impenetrable seeds, times really are a changin’.

A bit like life, and music, really.

You knew I couldn’t let an opportunity go by without Bob having a say, didn’t you?

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
Your old road is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

What kind of response do those words elicit in you? Do you rub your hands together, thinking of the opportunities that change could bring, or do you shift to a more protective posture: cervical flexion, sacrum in counternutation, waiting for the onslaught? Do you relish or perish?

I would venture to say that at this very moment in time there is more change in the world and in our profession than I have seen in my twenty years of practice. Changes to legislation and leadership, to terminology and techniques. We can see these changes from an outside-in perspective, as stressors if you will, and attempt to thicken our collective epidermes in an effort to stave off the storm unscathed and most likely unchanged, safe within our kernels, or we can see the turning up of the heat as an opportunity to jiggle around with energy and verve, and…transform.

Psychologists McEwan et al tell us that stress is often labelled as either “good” or “bad” as a result of prior programming, and perhaps that might be true of us in chiropractic. Our chiropractic history books are lousy with examples of Chiropractors vilified and even gaoled for their practicing of their craft, so it may be that we as a profession have been inculcated to view stress negatively.

When in fact the opposite can be true. In her book The Upside Of Stress health psychologist Kathy McGonnigal tells us that is the very perception of stress that determines what the effect will be. She tells us that it is how we think about the stress, that is of paramount importance. It turns out, that if we decide that the increased heart and respiratory rate that we may experience when we are anxious as deleterious, then it will be likely to cause us damage. However, if we choose to view the stress response as helpful or even necessary in order to face a new challenge, then although we still may notice precisely the same increases, they will occur without the same blood vessel constriction, producing a response that is not only not at all harmful, but one that physiologically, looks just like courage.

And then we find that our Innate Intelligence just keeps on giving. For not only does this type of positively interpreted stress make us more courageous, it stimulates our pituitary gland to secrete oxytocin. You’ve gotta love that. Literally. As of course this huggy hormone is our cuddle chemical, the neuropeptide that creates trust, empathy, compassion and caring. It motivates us to seek support and surround ourselves with people who care about us.

In fact, I like to think of oxytocin as the little chemical that orchestrated the building of communities, as I imagine that our Neolithic ancestors, returning from a long day of chasing down protein would settle down by the fire, positively surging with oxy, (and possibly other chemicals that might not bear mentioning in this forum) with a desire to make joyous and meaningful connections with other humans.

In the context of our profession, it would seem that this type of favourable stress may well be the very thing we require to do as Joseph Strauss once proposed: to be refined by fire. To utilise the effects of stressors to enable us to act with the knowledge that we can trust ourselves to handle challenges, whilst realising that we don’t have to face them alone. To define and refine the rules of who we are right now, and how we want to play this game in the future.

In the practice setting, we may find that positively interpreted stress gives us greater access to our hearts, and hence allows us to be more compassionate, and caring, and able to find meaning in our connections with others. In the words of social researcher Brene Brown, the ability to establish human connections may very well be “the reason we are here”.

Irrespective of this, we do know that challenge aimed at a level significant enough to induce stress results in increased strength and resilience. Of our ideas, our values and beliefs, our communities, our level of protection, and ultimately, our politics.

So just as the parents who come to us report that their children reach new levels of development following the apparent stress of a fever, and just as the pupa requires the struggle of emergence from the chrysalis to give those delicate wings the strength to take flight, so too must we absorb the heat and the energy and the seeming adversity to allow us to transform our experience and pop to the next level. Delicious. Just like popcorn.

And so, only one question remains: what flavour of popcorn will you be?

…From The Ashers