The Lydian Center for Innovative Medicine :: Cambridge, Massachusetts :: About the Center

The founding of the Lydian Center was for years a dream I didn't know I had.

My first interest in the intersection of movement, healing and education came at age eight when I flunked out of 3rd grade. I had been diagnosed with a delay in visual development, and school was a set-up for failure. Though I was a very bright child who loved learning and going to school, reading was physically impossible because my eyes couldn't focus for near work. 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.

After my disastrous 3rd grade year, my parents gathered the courage to take the very unusual step (in 1969) of taking me out of school entirely. There was almost no resource then for families with children with disabilities, and no home schooling movement. For two years 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 needed specific movement exercises to correct. 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 educator Paul Dennison, Ph.D., and his groundbreaking work with learning disabilities and movement. In developing his educational system called Brain Gym®, he drew heavily on the work of behavioral optometrists and chiropractors. With my Brain Gym® background I am intensely interested in educational interventions. And as a Doctor of Chiropractic I find myself in the enviable position of being able to work directly with the nervous system – the seat of learning. As a chiropractor I consider my basic role to be stabilizing a person's structural system so that their central nervous system can operate with maximum efficiency. When this happens, many behavioral problems and learning "disabilities" simply disappear. Not all of them and not for everyone - but when the body stabilizes and heals from injury, the results can be nothing short of miraculous.

How does stabilizing the musculoskeletal system help a child to read? Why does the 4 year old who was afraid of little dogs become less fearful? Why does a child who rarely spoke before age 6, suddenly begin speaking in full sentences over night after finishing a series of chiropractic treatments? How is it that after 50 years of back pain an 80 year-old man is still able to heal? This is learning in its most powerful sense. It is reorganization of the central nervous system.

Over the years I have come to understand that healing, learning and change are influenced by the structural system, but also by cranial rhythm, the energy flow of the meridian system, electrical communication throughout the body, mind, spirit, and emotions – all housed in a corporeal structure that moves.

When putting together the Lydian Center team, I was interested in assembling a group of health care practitioners who share my interest in this fundamental assumption that movement is the door to learning and therefore healing. No one intervention can heal everyone, but at the Lydian Center we 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.