I recently had the honor of speaking to a group of middle schoolers during a church retreat. When talking with the leaders about what they may want to hear about, they overwhelmingly agreed that bullying was the topic of choice.
I shared my own experiences with bullying when I was young. Kids can be callus and for me it all began with my name. It was very easy to replace the “a” in my last name with an “e” and I became Brian Nerdy. That progressed into physical altercations.
To handle this, my parents had me take karate lessons. Once confident, I dropped one of those bullies to the ground and stomped his face. That stopped the bullying towards me. But it didn’t stop the bullying….
As I grew, I created a pecking order in my mind. Big fish eat the small fish type of chain. I picked on younger, smaller kids to regain lost self-esteem. That really didn’t help because I just felt guilty.
In fact, it wasn’t until college that I really began to change. Springfield College is a humanities school and as such we were required to take a one credit religion course. Given my Catholic upbringing, I took New Testament. I went in thinking it was an “easy A” and while I did ace the class, reading what I had heard about my whole life gave me new perspective on how to apply it to my life.
The spiritual battle mattered now. The fight inside to become a better person was on. I read more of the Bible in that one semester than ever in my life. And that’s when I truly began to change. I saw how “giving it up to God” was a better way and I became a different person. I began helping people rather than hindering them. I took on a mentality of service. Rather than continuing the cycle of aggression, I began helping those who weren’t ready to help themselves.
When a message is true, we inherently know it is true. You’ll keep hearing it and applying it differently in your life. When a message is true, you’ll consistently seek it out intentionally. It grounds you and gives you internal, spiritual strength. Strength to change. Strength to realize, it isn’t you but God working through you.
Such is the way in Chiropractic. You have an internal, innate intelligence. It is connected to, a piece of, the greater universal cosmos, God, Spirit. It keeps us in existence. In the body, it heals us. It has all it needs. You, have all you need.
PS. Bullying is wrong in any and all forms. We often think of it as school age children on the playground. But it becomes peer-pressure in middle/high school. Peer-pressure is another form of bullying. Peer-pressure often carries onto adulthood if we don’t mature. In a couple of weeks, I’ll give you another example.
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