Your body's reaction to postural imbalance
When your head “isn’t on straight,” due to an atlas misalignment, you are viewing the world in a manner that is slightly askew. Physically we feel you are normal, but to your amazingly sensitive brain it is as if we are living our life on the side of a hill. It is common knowledge that you were not designed to live your life on the side of a hill, as was a mountain goat, but rather you were built for flat ground with a balanced center of gravity. So how does your innately intelligent body deal with life on a hill? Well fankly, it doesn’t.
Your brain will automatically react by attempting to move your body, more specifically your pelvis, underneath itself to support this new abnormal form of body balance. In order to achieve this altered posture, your brain will send signals to certain muscle groups commanding them to contract, pulling the rest of your body off center. This will result in one hip becoming higher which ultimately leads to one leg becoming shorter. It is now true that your eyes are now horizontally level, due to the brilliance of your brain, but this is not a posture that is conducive to healthy, normal living. This is called the righting reflex.
Imagine perfectly balancing a 12lb bowling ball on the end of thin, straight stick. Now imagine if a gust of wind were to come and push that bowling ball as small as ¾” off it’s perfect balance. The bowling ball will ultimately tip and fall off the stick unless you, who are holding the stick, react quickly in order to bring that bowling ball back to its perfect balance. Now imagine the human head, which also weighs an average of 12 lbs being loosely balanced at the top of your spine, which behaves in a manner similar to the stick mentioned before. Being even ¾” of an inch off it’s perfect balance has the potential to cause a catastrophic cascade of effects on the body unless that “bowling ball” is brought back to a perfect, and normal center of gravity. Overall the righting reflex is a neurological reaction to an unbalanced body.
