How to Deal with Stress and Instability | Nervous System Support

When Instability Strikes

This week’s email is once again inspired by our personal lives. Sometimes life is going really well and then—bam—the universe hits you with a dose of instability. That just happened to us.

Sarah hurt her knee playing soccer yesterday morning. It was her first game back with her team since having Rumi, and her knee hyperextended with multiple pops. She can’t walk or bear weight yet, but we’re treating it aggressively and are hopeful she’ll be back on her feet soon. This is why I’ll be closing this afternoon and opening on Saturday.

Too much instability triggers the stress response, and you might notice your body start to react in unpleasant ways: your shoulders rise, muscles tighten, and your breathing becomes short and shallow. Awareness of these sensations is the key to moving back toward stability. It’s important to bring your body back to a sense of stability before trying to use your mind to figure things out.

Here are a few things to do when instability strikes:

  • Notice your spine.
  • Lengthen your exhale.
  • Ask: What higher order is trying to emerge?
  • Organize the next smallest step.

Don’t try to stabilize everything—just focus on stabilizing yourself. Only then will you have the energy to reorganize.

In the epienergetics model, instability is not something to be feared or avoided. Instead, it’s a pathway to a new, higher level of stability. In this way, instability can be an upgrade disguised as an inconvenience. I’m curious to see how our lives evolve for the better after this period of instability.

How to Regulate Your Nervous System Through Presence

How Network Spinal Chiropractic Supports Energy and Focus

Being aware of where you focus is a great way to help support your energetic state. When you focus on something, you are giving it energy. When you give things energy, they tend to stick around or grow. This is why it’s great to see/focus on the plus side or gift in things when possible. This is much easier to do when you have enough energy. When you are lacking energy, its easier to see the negative or downside of things.

While seeing the good or bad side of things is influenced heavily by your energetic state, you can also choose where you focus. You can choose to focus on the good, love or gratitude even when you don’t have the energy for that to be your default. We can all choose these things even when things are not going well or we feel like crap. Doing so can help raise our energy which can help turn things around.

Network helps you have more energy and more energy efficiency so that your default setting leans toward the good side of things. That said, sometimes you still have to make the choice of where you focus. Just like focusing on the good can help raise your energy, focusing on the bad or on what’s going wrong can lower your energy.

Almost no wrong movements

As far as what you do on the entrainment table, there is almost no wrong. This is true as long as you are listening to your body. Movements, stretching and/or repositioning your body are an important part of Network. Let’s look at moving your legs as an example. Your nervous system might have you move your legs for many different reasons. You might need to move the muscles, pump the lymph, stimulate nerves, move energy or even use your legs as a lever to adjust your pelvis. Sometimes you might just find yourself bending your knees or ankles automatically, and sometimes you might get an urge to do so consciously. The body can use muscles anywhere in your body for the above reasons including using your arms to affect your neck. 

The only time we will ask you to stop a movement, or positional change is when it is driving defense or reenforcing old habits instead of growth. Not stopping these movements or positional changes could have you energetically spinning your wheels or even draining energy.

Spread the mayo analogy for Network Spinal

I’ve been having some fun recently with a sandwich analogy to describe part of Network care. It can apply to any food where it’s better to have to have a condiment or topping spread out rather than all bunched up. It goes like this

Have you ever had a sandwich where the mayo or mustard was all in one spot and not spread out? If you have, you know that this is not the ideal set up for taste, and there is also a high likelihood of a mess when you get the bite with all of the mayo/mustard. Its far better to have your condiment of choice evenly spread out.

The same is true for energy in your body. People often lay down on the table with too much energy in one part of their body and too little energy in other parts of their bodies, Here is an example.

If you have a large unexpected emotional stress, you might present with an excessive amount of energy in your emotional system. This could lead to tight muscles and tendons as well as a lack of energy in other systems such as your mental, bioenergetic or awaken systems.

The same example can be applied to physical and mental stresses as well. If your body is forced to adapt to a large stress or smaller amounts of stress over time,, it can end up storing too much energy in the system that the stress was experienced in. If this happens, another part or system will respond by having lower energy. This can lead to breakdown of both the system with too much energy and the system or part with too little energy.

In this example, one goal of an entrainment would be to help the body process the extra emotional energy in order to spread the mayo or energy back throughout the whole body, This makes for a healthier body just like spreading the mayo makes for a tastier sandwich.

Turn your head- why?

Have you ever turned your head the wrong way when we ask you to turn left or right?This happens pretty often, and it’s not a big deal at all. Just turn your head the other way when we say to turn your head. 

Turning your head is part of our phase pattern analysis in Network Spinal. Tapping your feet is a quick and easy way to ask you to turn to that side. This also makes things simpler since you just turn your head to the side we tap. If we tap both feet, we are asking you to turn to the middle. We might also ask you to tuck your chin or even lift your head up as part of this analysis. Please only turn your head through pain free motion. Stop turning your head if it hurts and be sure pay attention how this might change during your entrainment. 

When certain phases are present, uneven legs will even when you turn your head. Sometimes this happens quickly and sometimes it takes a few seconds depending on what part of the phase is showing up. Please keep your head turned until we either ask you to turn to the other side or back to the middle.

The phase that deals with legs that even when you turn your head is called phase 2. It deals with how your upper or lower neck act as primary points of critical tension . These primary points then affect the rest of your body. Energetically, this phase deals with trust when there is enough energy and fear when energy is lacking. 

Celebrate small wins!

Something important in Network care, and in life, is to celebrate the small wins. These are the ones that will add up over time to create sustainable change. We are in the habit of wanting the home run every time, myself included. Some small wins that inspired this weeks newsletter were someone having a small but noticeable improvement in their neck pain and tightness after their first visit and someone who has trouble sleeping having noises agate them a bit less. Both of these are reasons to celebrate, and no one is going to celebrate for you- you get to do it. The added bonus is that anytime you have less of something, you open room for more of something else. In these examples, I encouraged them to celebrate both less of the bad but also what they have more of. Less pain and more mobility. Less agitation and more peace.

I hope you find lots of reasons to celebrate this week.

Contribution vs blame

I am listening to an audio book called “Difficult Conversations”- How to discuss what matters most. It’s a bit dry, but it makes some great points that relate to life and Network care. One point that stuck so far was to acknowledge how we and others contribute to a situation rather than blaming anyone including ourselves. This is one of the key gifts/components of Discover care. In Discover, we become aware of how we are contributing to our problems or situation. Once we are aware how we contribute, we can begin to make changes. As a quick recap, Seasons of Wellbeing is a model Donny Epistein created for human healing and growth. Discover is all about the problem, Transform is about the solution, Awaken is about finding the gift in the wound and the ultimate perfection of life, and Integrate is where we mix the seasons for the best experience. Discover care and integrate is where we start the journey of Network care. It’s done face down and the contacts are relatively quick and light. You can read more about this is previous blog posts https://nextlevelchirodallas.com/the-season-of-discover-into-the-season-of-transform/

In Network, these light contacts help to process stored stress and to take your Nervous System out of fight, flight, or freeze. As stored stress is released, the body can unwind and our thinking and feelings shift from survival based to growth based. This lets us have increased connection to our bodies and intuitions so that we can notice where we are contributing to our problems or pains.

Expectations

Expectations reduce the joy in life-Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

This is such a great life quote that I was reminded of last week. I believe it can also apply to Network Spinal entrainments. What it means to me as far as entrainments go is that it’s important to be open to your experience on the table. Try to not have expectations as to what will happen or what your body needs. Our bodies are made with perfect intelligence, and when they are working properly, they know just what they need and when they need it. Network entrainments help reconnect your body to its own innate intelligence, and this intelligence uses the energy liberated during your entrainments to help your body unwind, grow, heal and evolve.

Limiting your expectations can help you have new awarenesses, help you enjoy your entrainments more and to get more out go your care

Where do you play in life?

Where in your life do you play? Play or being playful adds energy to your life and to what you are doing. 

Play is crucial for childhood development, and it’s also important for adult development and health. Play helps to activate the neocorectx or new/ human brain (including the frontal lobe which is activated in Network). It also reduces stress hormones and promotes neural flexibility and growth. 

You might hear me making sound effects while entraining. This is one of the ways I stay playful at work. It does nothing for the actual entrainment, but it’s fun for me and adds free energy to our interaction. I also play at home with our kiddos (A LOT) and I am playful at jujitsu.

Play can be different for everyone, but in general it involves letting go of being serious even for a few moments. Andrew Huberman has this to say about play”…how it changes our feelings, thoughts and actions and indeed, how it can rewire our brain to function better in all contexts.” You can watch his podcast about play here https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/using-play-to-rewire-and-improve-your-brain