The founding of the Lydian Center was for years a dream I didn’t know I had.
My first interest in the intersection of brain integration, healing and education came at age eight when I flunked out of 3rd grade. A delay in visual development had made it impossible for me to learn to read. I was a very bright child who loved learning and going to school, but as the tasks at school became more vision dependent, school became a set-up for failure. As I struggled in the public educational system of the 1960s, my confidence eroding with each bad report card, a fortuitous visit to a forward thinking optometrist saved my life. The kindly old doctor gave me exercises and recommended a cessation of all near work. He was confident that given a few stress-free years the eyes and the brain would figure out the mechanics of reading and I would develop binocular vision.
So, my parents gathered the courage to take the very unusual step (in 1969) of taking me out of school entirely. At that time, there were almost no resources for families with children with disabilities, and no home schooling movement. The next two years were heaven! I did no reading at all, playing out of doors in rural Massachusetts, leading the busy life of a curious child. The gamble paid off – at age ten I spontaneously began to read. The educational problem was actually confusion in the visual system that time and specific vision exercises eventually corrected. Though I am forever grateful to my parents for removing me from a failing situation, I am left wondering how much more quickly I would have progressed if I had had more than time, mother nature and a few eye exercises to help me.
For nearly 20 years I have followed the work of kinesiologists and behavioral optometrists, wondering what factors led to my sudden ability to read. More recently I have discovered the amazing work of Charles Krebs, Ph.D. and his truly innovative brain integration techniques. His work stands on the shoulders of early chiropractic kinesiologists, and American, European and Australian energy kinesiologists in a technique he calls LEAP.
With my intense interest in the intersection of health and education, as a Doctor of Chiropractic at Lydian Chiropractic, I have worked to find ways to assist the body to heal and, ultimately, to learn. Axial Stability Method, our low-force chiropractic technique, has proved to be a remarkably effective tool to help the central nervous system integrate and improve in efficiency. By stabilizing the structural system, many behavioral problems and learning “disabilities” simply disappear, along with the expected improvements in pain and gross and fine motor dysfunction. Healing of the structural system and subsequent reorganization of the central nervous system is learning in its most powerful sense.
When putting together the Lydian Center team, I was interested in assembling a group of independent health care practitioners who share my interest in this fundamental assumption that brain integration, in all its aspects, is the door to learning and therefore healing. No one intervention can heal everyone, but Lydian Center practitioners are developing a common language to talk to one another about where health and education find their most profound intersection. Housed under one roof, we share the understanding that a truly holistic approach to health, development and change requires communication across disciplines. We meet regularly to explore how our specialties can complement one another, and take joy in learning from one another, developing new techniques to empower ourselves and our clients to reach our fullest potential.
Dr. Lydia Knutson, D.C.