:: Network Chiropractic ::

You deserve more from your nerves!

An interview with Devorah Feinbloom, DC and Kim Luzzi,

DC:

How is Network chiropractic different from other chiropractic?

DF: Most forms of chiropractic focus on what we call a structural adjustment - aligning the vertebrae which surround the spinal cord - while Network adjusts tension on the spinal cord, the nerve tissue that begins at the brain and runs down the spine. Network chiropractors all begin their training at conventional chiropractic school, where we learn about how physical traumas like car accidents or sports injuries can affect the alignment of the spine. But we never learned how mental or emotional stress affects the spine. When you have an emotional trauma you can’t deal with - say watching your parents get divorced when you are five years old - you stuff it into the spinal cord, which is the back of your brain. This emotional blockage creates tension in the spinal cord. When the spinal cord is healthy, it has a certain resiliency and flexibility. When it gets stretched and twisted, it shuts down the brain’s ability to observe itself. The first stage of healing is to become aware that you are suffering. Until we become aware of something, we cannot change it.

KL: All forms of chiropractic support the inborn wisdom of the body and believe that the awesome intelligence that made your body also knows how to heal it. This innate intelligence travels along your nerves. Your brain sends information down your spinal cord and out through your spinal nerves to coordinate every organ, tissue and cell in your body. If there is any nerve interference along this pathway your body cannot express 100% health; most chiropractors detect and remove this interference by adjusting the vertebrae. Network chiropractors adjust the spinal cord, believing that when there is mental, emotional or physical stress stored in the spinal cord, it’s like pulling a rubber band and twisting it at both ends. This tension creates nerve interference, which we release by very gently touching the places where the spinal cord attaches to the bone. We are trained in adjusting the bones back into place, but we find we often don’t need to. When the stress on the spinal cord is released, the bones often come back into alignment naturally.

So is Network better than conventional chiropractic?

DF: It’s different. Let me say from the outset that absolute miracles happen every day in most all chiropractors offices. People who have never been to a chiropractor think that they only fix back pain or neck pain. Actually we are nervous system specialists, not back doctors. Every organ and tissue of our body is affected by the nerves that come off the spinal cord through spaces between the vertebrae. When the spine is out of alignment, the resulting pressure on a nerve can cause tremendous pain or lack of function elsewhere in the body. The first story of chiropractic is just such a miracle: in 1895 D.D. Palmer, a brilliant thinker who read medical textbooks on his own, palpated the spine of a man who had been deaf ever since an injury to his spine. He found a vertebra out of place in the man’s neck where the nerves travelled to the ears, delivered the first chiropractic adjustment, and the rest is history - the man’s hearing came back after 17 years of deafness. I have seen people who were cross-eyed, or “blue babies” (suffering from lack of oxygen after a difficult delivery) whose condition went way after just one adjustment. I went to a chiropractor because I had menstrual cramps. What made me a believer is not that my cramps went away but that my hayfever did too - even though I had never told my chiropractor I had hayfever.

KL: In my own case, I went to chiropractic school because of a friend who was unable to get pregnant for six years. After a series of chiropractic adjustments, she got pregnant in a month, because the adjustment affected the nerves that go to the ovaries and uterus.

So you get a solid grounding in physical adjustments in chiropractic school, then Network adds an emotional and spiritual dimension?

DF: The Network technique originated as a way to “network” the different existing chiropractic techniques in a way to help the nervous system relax and release subconscious mental and emotional stress before a structural adjustment was made to the bones. The founder of Network, Dr. Donald Epstein, discovered that some adjustments helped more with the structure of the spine while others addressed the emotions, helping patients recall incidents and feelings from the past which had been lost or buried in their bodymind.

KL: The memories and blocked emotions stored in the nerve tissue create tension, like a taut guitar string, which is why people say “I’m all strung out” or “I’m at the end of my rope.” They see the world from that type of tension. When it’s released and the memories and emotions come up, then their lives really start to change because they are not coming from a place of tension any more. Your range of experience is based on the flexibility of your nervous system. If your nerves have a fixed amount of tension, you’ll have a fixed view of reality.

DF: Our natural state is joyous. When we find ourselves stuck in repetitive, compulsive emotions like depression, frustration, or anger, it means something is blocked somewhere along our spinal cord. Deepak Chopra, MD says that the body regenerates itself cell by cell, over and over, so every 5 years you have a whole new body—a new liver, knee, stomach, and so forth. The central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) is the only system that does not regenerate itself. If the nervous system is giving the same information to your knee based on a car accident 20 years ago, even though the body keeps replacing the cells, it will keep producing cells with the same disease or problem. We need to clear out that old information in order to grow and change. If the nervous system is tense, so are we.

You find that releasing the tension on the nerve tissue in the spine can release emotional blockages?

DF: Yes, because the blockages represent emotions or situations which people could not handle at the time, either because they were too young to understand or they were under too much stress to cope. When we adjust the spine and release the tension on the nerve tissue, the memory of the event might come back to conscious awareness. (Other times it’s just released through the breath. We can actually hear people’s breathing change as they release deep emotion.) What we find is that even though an emotion that comes up might be painful, people can handle it, because it’s authentic.

KL: When the tension of stored emotional stress is released, people often express it by laughing or crying. For example, after one patient’s second adjustment she went home and was laughing for two hours and her roommates said, “What did that chiropractor do to you?” Her body released all the tension so she could experience joy. I have another patient who knows she needs to get adjusted when she gets opinionated and judgmental. She says if she goes too long without an adjustment, she has to go back and do the cleanup work from all the bad decisions she’s made! Healing is not necessarily an alleviation of symptoms, it’s about becoming whole.

Do you get adjustments yourselves?

DF: Yes, and I find that Network gives me an awareness of my self, separate from my body and mind, like being in the “witness state.” When I had sciatica, I was able to make the distinction that my body was in pain, not me. I became self-reflective, the observer. When I get adjusted I feel very spiritual, I feel my mind become completely still, and I feel much more attuned with my heart.

KL: Getting adjusted helps me to stay connected to the innate intelligence which instructs me how to eat, how to be in relationship, how to serve and live in harmony.

Is there a scientific basis for this?

DF: Yes, and it is described in The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert, Ph.D., a brain biochemist at the National Institutes of Health who gives talks with Donald Epstein. In her book she describes how emotions become frozen in the nervous system below the cortex (the conscious part of the brain). A Network adjustment metaphorically melts the emotions to bring the old trauma up to consciousness. It clears the pathway for something the brain was unable to observe.

KL: Candace Pert also says that every emotion has a chemical messenger associated with it. Even white blood cells traveling to a site of infection carry the molecules of emotion with them. According to Pert, love and pain, or love and hate or fear, cannot attach to the same receptor site on our cells. The configuration of the receptor site—which is based on the tension on the nerves—dictates which molecule can bind to it.

DF: Each cell in your body has from 3 to 9 nerves that “talk” to it. In the Network model, nerves get stretched, like you’re holding a child’s hand and you’re in a hurry and you’re tugging on the child’s hand, that’s what happens in your cells when you are under stress. By putting tension on the cell, you change what molecules can lock into it. We usually think about love and hate being in the mind or heart, not throughout the whole body.

KL: In every cell there is a brain. Every part of your body is a holographic reflection of the whole. These are healing concepts which are shared with many holistic modalities, not just Network.

DF: For example, I have seen clients with problems in C3 (the third vertebra in the neck). The nerves from that area go to the sinuses; it’s also an area where we tend to hold fear. As that area in their cervical spine clears up, as they release their fears, their allergies tend to go away and their breath opens up in their nose.

Do you find that people mostly come with a physical problem, like pain in their lower back, and then they discover the emotional and spiritual component? Or do people come specifically to support their emotional healing and spiritual journey?

DF: Both. Recently I’ve had 10 people who were in car crashes. Then again, Network is practiced around the world - mostly the US, Europe and Australia - and as it becomes better known, people are referred for the mind-body dimensions of this work. And even if people have heard about the spiritual dimension, pain is usually the trigger which motivates them to come in. We have a myth in this society that pain is bad, that it means something is wrong. Pain is a real opportunity for healing. Sometimes it’s the only way your soul or higher self can call out to you and get your attention.

KL: Pain is an opportunity for transformation. You can either hit the snooze button or wake up! People may come in with pain, and then you try to explain to them, this technique is really effective for pain but don’t shortchange yourself, you may want to be open to changes in all areas of your life. Studies have shown that many people under Network care experience profound changes in all areas of their life: in their work, relationships, and service to the world, plus they have fewer physical symptoms. Pain often brings them in, but then they find the real reason they are there is for deeper levels of transformation. They make connections between how their system is healing and how their environment affects their nervous system. When parts of them start waking up and they see the connection between their body, mind and spirit, it’s a real eye opener. What always amazes me is that you touch me so gently, like with one fingertip that I can barely feel, and then these powerful waves of energy start traveling up and down my spine and bringing everything into alignment.

DF: It always shocks people what profound changes happen from such a light touch. The light touch is like tuning a guitar; it gives the proper vibration for good harmony. Information travels in waves so when we “tune” the spinal cord we can experience our own inner rhythm.

KL: In Network we help the body learn how to self-adjust. Sometimes people hear all this cracking going on the night after an adjustment because their spine is learning to self-adjust. Then the body learns how to handle the stress from daily life. One of my mentors used to say, “You get to the point where you can eat stress for breakfast and digest it as personal growth for lunch.” Or as D.D. Palmer used to say, you should be able to get hit in the butt with a 2x4 and use it for self-correction. Network chiropractors are just facilitators for people to do their own healing. Emotions are supposed to travel though us, like ripples radiating from a pebble thrown in a pond. When the nervous system is stuck and rigid, you lose the ability to bounce back from stressful situations. As people get adjusted, they report less stress and greater ease in many areas of their life because there is no tension for their struggles to stick to. Their bodies are learning a strategy for dissipating tension.

Why do you have several people getting adjusted in the same room at the same time?

DF: As one person’s spine releases, it actually helps release the spines of other people in the room. It’s based on the principle of entrainment, like different clocks with pendulums that start to swing together. I know that if I am having a hard time clearing a particular spot on one person’s spine, and then I go work on someone else who can clear it easily, I’ll notice the first person take a really deep breath or start coughing or show other signs of releasing.

KL: It’s the phenomenon which researchers have found the most astonishing about Network. They watch Donald Epstein adjust someone and then point to the person on the next table; the second person’s spine is visibly unwinding and he is not even touching them. It’s community healing, and it shows how we are all connected on a very deep level.

Can you tell us a story to illustrate what a typical patient’s journey might be like?

KL: When I practiced in California, I had a truck driver show up at my door who said, “I don’t believe in chiropractic at all, I’m the biggest cynic, but I don’t know where else to turn.” He was doubled over in pain, plus he was on antidepressants, high blood pressure medication, had been unable to work for months and therefore unable to see his family. This was a guy who lived on coffee and doughnuts. After two adjustments his pain was 90% better. After three weeks he went to see his doctor, who said, “What have you done?” The man was completely pain free, his blood pressure had lowered, his depression had lifted, and he was able to get off his medication. He got his job back and was able to see his family again. He changed his diet and started drinking bottled water, without any urging from me. By the end of his treatment he was saying things like, “When I walk down the street, I feel so connected with everyone. I watch documentaries on PBS and I feel so moved, I start crying.” To learn more about the innate intelligence of the body, people can visit www.innateintelligence.com or read Donald Epstein’s The Twelve Stages of Healing or his new Healing Myths, Healing Magic. They are available for sale at East-West Health Seevices through Innate Intelligence in Boulder, CO at (303) 678-8086.

Dr. Kim Luzzi practices at East-West Health Services in Cambridge, (617) 547-1082.