I’m often asked how my previous Engineering career fits with being such a Holistic Chiropractor…
You’d think it would lead me to view the body as a mechanism, but the opposite is true.
Engineering provided a comprehensive understanding of physics, machine design and a deep desire to solve problems at their most foundational level. Despite all the medical text books describing the body in bits and pieces, Engineering gave me a helpful insight…
I already knew humans aren’t built like a wristwatch. We’re actually more like the weather.
Living systems are generally characterized as complex and self-organising. They are defined as being open, interacting with their environment and maintained by flows of energy, information, and matter.
You’re not a machine that breaks down and needs fixing – you’re a living, system constantly adapting to your environment; overcoming challenges then restoring balance at a higher level of complexity.
More than just a collection of body parts, you’re an intelligent, responsive network of signals, cells and tissues that rebuilds itself.
YOU are a “Complex Self Organising System”
Every second your body is scanning your surroundings, regulating your temperature, digesting food, healing wounds, and making micro-adjustments to keep you advancing through life. All without you thinking about it. This is called self-organisation.
Your whole self is more than the sum of its parts – this holistic understanding is key for health, and life.
Self-organising systems have remarkable qualities that make life’s extraordinary moments possible. They can transform chaos into order, creating elegant new patterns from seeming randomness. When given sufficient energy, they’re incredibly resilient, quickly recovering from disruptions and emerging stronger than before. They adapt with a surprising non-linearity – a subtle input can trigger a profound transformation.
Your nervous system is the central coordinator and communicator of your self-organising ability.
Self Organising Systems also learn and evolve. For example, a healthy brain constantly rewires itself, strengthening connections you use, letting go of those you don’t, reshaping how you think, feel, and act. This process fuels creativity, innovation and even the emergence of higher levels of consciousness. This is how small positive actions like a kind word, might allow for new perspectives that can ripple through humanity, amplifying into meaningful global change.
It’s a reminder that, as an intelligent, adaptive system built for evolution, you possess far more potential than you may imagine.
Nature never intended for you to merely survive, but to thrive, by evolving to ever higher levels.
Think about how your body heals a cut. You don’t consciously do it. Your system just knows how. But it doesn’t simply react to the world, it also interprets it. Every breath, heartbeat, posture shift, loving emotion and sudden epiphany is part of the elegant balancing act your nervous system performs second by second. It’s constantly adjusting, updating, and evolving. Even when you sleep.
…And we could live happily ever after, except for one small challenge.
In today’s high-speed world of unnatural stressors, it’s easy for your natural system to become overwhelmed. When this happens, stress becomes stuck in the body — we call this Physically Retained Stress — and it creates obstructions that diminish your body’s natural ability to adapt and self-correct.
At Foundation Neurostructural Chiropractic, our job isn’t to “fix” you, or force your body into a different shape.
When you understand the body is a complex self organising system, you realise that no one really needs to be fixed. You just need to be reconnected to the natural wisdom that already exists.
Our focus is reawakening your natural ability to self organise and let you experience your capacity to calmly regulate, heal and thrive.
With Love,
Andrew Maher.
NeuroStructural Chiropractor.