Episode 175: Live Your Life Through A Healthy Nervous System with Dr. Shea Osuna
We’re back for the second installment of a two-part mini-series with Dr. Shea Osuna (Tune into Part 1 in Episode 174)!
In this episode, Dr. Shea shares:
What the nervous system is and why a healthy nervous system is important
What it means to live your life through your nervous system
Four things that interfere with a healthy nervous system
How chiropractic care + transformational coaching can support your nervous system through interferences
Listen to the Episode:
Mentioned in the Episode:
Connect with Dr. Shea Lindsay Osuna:
Dr. Shea’s Practice: The Well Healing Center website
Connect with Dr. Shea on Instagram
Connect with Naomi:
Share the Episode:
“A healthy nervous system is adaptable, the structure of the spine is flexible, it’s pliable. There’s movement and connection there. If someone is locked in a hunched position and their nervous system is locked in that position, they’re not flexible and adaptable. When stressors come into a system that’s locked in this hunched-over position, it’s hard for them to adapt to stress. It sends them farther into fight or flight.”
Read the Transcript:
Naomi Nakamura: Hello, my friends and welcome back to another episode of The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura and today I am joined once again by Dr. Shea Osuna for part two of our two-part discussion on chiropractic medicine and the mind body connection.
If you haven't yet listened to part one in Episode 174, I highly recommend you do so, but here's a recap of Dr. Shea's Bio. Dr. Shea Osuna is a prenatal chiropractor with a focus on network spinal transformational healing who practices with a deep desire to be a facilitator for healing. Her intention with each person that she works with is to assist them in remembering the truth of who they are before trauma and stressors bog them down. She believes, that when we no longer feel the need to carry around so much baggage, when we feel free to live, how we've always dreamed of living, to be resilient in what life throws at us and to truly thrive.
After feeling lost and defeated from her personal experiences with intense anxiety for years, she found a technique called network spinal that helped her find more ease in her body and it changed her relationship with anxiety. Since then, Dr. Shea has dedicated herself to learning this powerful approach. She spent five years practicing in the Bay Area where I live, but she's since landed in Lafayette, Colorado where she has an in-person practice, but she also offers online transformational coaching. If you're not in Colorado, that's how you can work with her.
Now, as I mentioned in the last episode when Dr. Shea and I started planning out what topics we're going to talk about, I realized that there are so many great things to cover, there's no way we'd be able to do it in one episode, so this is part two. Like I said, if you haven't listened to part one, go back and listen to Episode 174. Today in Episode 175, you're going to hear us continue our conversation and we're going to discuss what is the nervous system and why a healthy nervous system is important. We're going to talk about what it means to live your life through a healthy nervous system and what are the different stressors that interfere with having a healthy nervous system. She shares with us how chiropractic care supports your nervous system through the interferences that come into play.
Then, we wrapped things up talking about how the nervous system connects with your mind and body and why transformational coaching complements her special flavor of chiropractic care. Again, listen to Episode 174 and then come back and listen to this one if you haven't already done so. With that, let's get to the show. Hi, Dr. Shea. Welcome back to the show.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Thank you. Thanks for having me back. This is really exciting.
Naomi Nakamura: I know. With those maybe perhaps haven't heard part one of your episode with us, can you give us an introduction and tell us who you are and what it is that you do?
Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, I am a chiropractor. I live in Louisville, Colorado. I practice in Lafayette. I do a technique called network spinal which is slightly different than your traditional chiropractic with very low force to start, so people are not getting the same forceful or we call it structural care as much, but the structure is changing. What we're looking at is just patterns of tension, how trauma is stored in the body and our experience through life and how those are holding patterns in our nervous system. We really work with the whole person to dive into shifting the stories, the traumas, the patterns and really helping them heal from the inside out. That's the work that I do.
I also do a lot of transformational coaching because it naturally comes up with the work I do. As people start to unravel, they start to ask a lot more questions about how to just live more in alignment with their life. That's where my expertise comes in.
Naomi Nakamura: We talked a lot about that in our first interview last week. To give folks a recap, you spoke to some of the myths that are out there about chiropractic medicine and you talked about how your posture can directly impact your perception or your reality or your outlook on life and then you talked about how the body keeps score of what you just said of all the trauma and the things that happen between your life, but like you just mentioned, a lot of this happens in your nervous system and that's what we're going to be talking about today. I know in the last episode, you briefly talked about what the nervous system is, but I'd love for you to start us out to set that table for what we're going to talk about today. What is a nervous system?
Dr. Shea Osuna: I think it's important to hit that home again, especially if you haven't heard the first one, but highly recommend you go back because the first episode really, I think, set the groundwork for getting through, like you said, some myths and some things and just really setting the tone for probably a conversation that's going to get a little bit more crazy, I think naturally. The nervous system consists of our brain, our spinal cord, all of the nerves that come out to all of our organs, our tissues. It is not only just an internal process, but it's how we process the world.
Trillions of bits of information are coming into our brain and then we're processing those. Then that is giving us information around how it is we need to respond or be in the world. Then also, the nervous system is giving us feedback from our organs back and forth, right? Given an example to help, say I am getting chased by a wild dog. I think this little bit more relatable than like a lion. A lot of people would be like, "I'd be running from a lion," but say there is a dog that doesn't look safe ...
Naomi Nakamura: Friendly.
Dr. Shea Osuna: ... friendly chasing you, that is going to be information coming into your nervous system saying, "You're in fight or flight. You need to run." What is that going to tell your body? Stop digestion. Stop all of the other cleanup that you're doing and to rest, to digest. Narrow your focus. Your peripheral vision goes down. You get into tunnel vision. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure goes up. You start to think for more of a primal brain.
Naomi Nakamura: Survival mode.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Survival mode, right? That is how the external comes into your nervous system. Now you have, "Okay, I'm safe. I'm relaxed." The brain is going to say, "Okay, this is a great time to digest and rest." Say your stomach is giving feedback about something you ate that bothered your stomach. Your nervous system is going to process that, come back down and say, "Okay, do we need to eliminate this quickly? Do I have food poisoning?" It's our internal and or external feedback loop basically of how do we perceive the world and what's happening internally and how do we live and operate. That's our nervous system, is such an intricate thing and it is like a computer system that learns, right? It's like really amazing technology.
Naomi Nakamura: It is and we talked about a little bit of this the last time, but the mind-body connection, because I feel like we still think about these things as two separate things and they're really not. They're just a one whole system all together.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, we are one being. Our soul, our mind, our body are all the same thing, but as humans, we like to compartmentalize and have black and whites and we love to say, "Oh, the symptom is right here, so it must be this thing, right?" or to say, "Oh, I'm having anxiety. It must be that one thing, right?" To have a certainty around a symptom or an experience is really important in the human condition. It creates safety and so that, I think, is a part of it, is separating those three things.
Naomi Nakamura: You talked about this, what does it mean to live your life through a healthy nervous system? What does that look like?
Dr. Shea Osuna: This is interesting. One of my favorite questions, actually, which is probably I wrote it down and we teach classes on this all the time for my practice. My business partner and I offer free workshops and free classes monthly. If anyone really likes what they're hearing, you're more than welcome. You can all share this stuff with you.
Naomi Nakamura: I'll add it to the show notes.
Dr. Shea Osuna: They can go on and see it and we would love to have anyone join because we do them virtually as well as in person, but what does it mean to live your life through healthy nervous system? Since the nervous system, like I explained, is gauging everything about your external environment and your internal environment, having a healthy nervous system seems pretty important, right?
Naomi Nakamura: I feel like this is one of these questions that feels so simple, but then if you stop and think about it, it's one of those things that you go, "I actually don't know."
Dr. Shea Osuna: "What does that actually mean?"
Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.
Dr. Shea Osuna: I totally agree. A healthy nervous system, what does a healthy nervous system look like? I think that's probably the best thing to break down first, right?
Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.
Dr. Shea Osuna: A healthy nervous system, it's adaptable. It's adaptable, which also means that the structure of the spine is flexible. It's pliable. There's movements there. There's connection there. We talked a lot about posture and how that shapes our reality last time. If somebody is locked in a hunched position and their nervous system is locked in that position. They're not flexible. They're not adaptable. When stressors come into a system that's locked in this hunched over position, it's really hard for them to adapt to stress. It sends them farther into fight or flight.
Naomi Nakamura: I was going to say you start that off with what physically does that look like. As you're speaking, I can clearly see how that can translate into someone's behavior and into their mindset when they're locked and inflexible.
Dr. Shea Osuna: I think it's important to talk about that part because you have to see the balance there or the opposite. And so yeah, when someone has their locked position and now we talked about the boss, right? Somebody who has a flexible spine and nervous system and the person who's locked in what their experience of having their boss asked them to come into their office for a meeting, right? One thing, they're getting sacked and they did something wrong. One thing, they're getting a raise or they're getting a promotion.
Naomi Nakamura: That's the exact same situation. It's the person's perception of it.
Dr. Shea Osuna: That's a healthy nervous system. That's the difference. Basically, a healthy nervous system can adapt stressors. The other really great piece of this is it can not only just adapt to stressors, it can grow and reorganize and change from stressors. I think that that's a really important piece because I just got off a coaching call with a client who is saying to me, "I just feel like I'm getting by right now. I'm just trying to get through." Does that sound like someone who is able to use the stress happening in their life to transform it into their gift or something better?
Naomi Nakamura: That sounds like survival mode. The situation with being chased by an angry dog just-
Dr. Shea Osuna: She's getting chased by life. She feels like life is against her. She just has to get through it. She has to put her head down and survive, right? Not a healthy nervous system at the moment. Where when we are being flexible and adaptable and we have that same feedback, we can go, "Okay, let me step back. Let me take a breath. What is this trying to tell me? What is this trying to show me? What is this trying to teach me?" I'm going to take a side note here. There are things in life that happened that are just hard and they suck, okay? A healthy adaptable nervous system, what it can do in those moments are things that we just can't help, loss of the loved one is a big one.
Naomi Nakamura: A pandemic.
Dr. Shea Osuna: A pandemic, right? These are things we cannot control and how a healthy nervous system adapts to those things is it allows us to just feel what needs to be felt. A healthy nervous system has energy and emotion, it's energy and emotion. When we can keep our system moving and our energy moving, when we feel grief come up, we can just feel the grief and we can give ourselves that permission. Where when we have a locked down nervous system or stuck in fight or flight, emotion is not something that is really ...
We don't want to be doing that when we're being chased by a bear. Naturally, our system suppresses emotion. It gets locked in our system. That is an important thing to say too, is when the things that we can't control happen. It's hard sometimes in the moment to step back, "What is this trying to teach me that I lost my grandmother or my child?" Sometimes the healthy nervous system is just like, "Wow, I just need to be and just grieve and that's okay."
Naomi Nakamura: Something that I talked about in Human Design, especially for those with an Emotional authority is that, again, exactly what you said, literally the exact words, emotion is energy in motion. It can actually be a negative thing to avoid emotions because you might perceive them as negative or bad or to suppress emotions and to just allow yourself to feel it, whether they be joy and happy or whether they be grief and really difficult. It's all energy and motion and is healthy to just allow yourself to experience those things.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It absolutely is. That is 100% the truth. One of the big things I teach my patients, my clients, everyone I work with and I live by myself is you cannot feel the full range of emotion without both sides. This is one of the things where I'm working with a client right now because she's on antidepressants. This again, I'm not a therapist, I don't take people off of them, just a little side note, I respect anyone's decision that needs to be on anything in the moment, their lifesaving when necessary, but it is also important to understand, and almost across the board, most people you talk to or have to take these medications will tell you this is that they're not able to feel the cap of joy and passion as they could before, even though the lows are not so much there.
That's a part of life is if we suppress anger and we suppress grief and we suppress sadness, we are also closed off to the cap of feeling joy and gratitude and abundance. You have to have both sides. You can't just pick one. I think that's the hard part too is we're taught in society that we're supposed to just be even with peaks of happiness. If we have lows, there's something wrong with us.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, that's the whole toxic positivity, right? It's like telling you that feeling bad is a bad thing and that's not true.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly. I do teach that and remind people a lot and especially as women, our hormones, think about it, our hormones run. They transition every eight days or so and then we're also on that 30-ish day cycle. We're very connected to each other to the rhythms of the moon, to the astrology which human design in astrology, that's why it rings so true. We have to really see that to our advantage to say, "Oh, we are cyclical beings. We're supposed to have this and we're supposed to have highs." When we can learn ...
Here, we come back to the question, a healthy nervous system. When we can create a healthy environment in our system and we can become flexible and adaptable, these waves are not so scary anymore because a locked nervous system wants that even keel, certainty, safety, "This is all I can handle." When it gets too high, it's too much. When it gets too low, it's too much, right?
Healthy nervous system, adaptable nervous system can ebb and flow and it can rebound from the lows. It can see the high is coming down and know that that's okay too. That's really the importance of a healthy nervous system, is to be able to ride those waves. The other pieces like, now we get into things that still maybe we can't control, but not so serious as the loss of a loved one, but let's say that you lost your job which is still not something that you can control, but it's still not life threatening or just something that you can't rebound from, right? You can really step back. A healthy nervous system will go, "Okay, that sucked in the moment," and still feel the fear, that's really important too. This doesn't mean positive-
Naomi Nakamura: And the uncertainty.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Right. This doesn't mean that chronic positivity of like, "I know it's going to be the best thing that's ever happened to me," you may get there, but first, it's okay to feel the fear and the grief and all of those rhythms like we're talking about, but then from that lens, we can step back, take ourselves out of it. A healthy nervous system will not blame or judge. It will just go, "Okay, that happened. Let me feel what I need to feel and now let me see what has this taught me or what door has this opened." You can bounce back, right? You can start to create this rhythm where you're truly knowing. I think the biggest difference of what we talked about earlier, the difference between, "Is the world against me or is the universe against me or for me?"
I always think that a nervous system locked in fight or flight, "The world and the universe, God," whoever it is, that spirit, whatever you call it, "is against me. I have to get through. I have to put my head down. I have to survive because everything from the external environment is against me," where a healthy adaptable nervous system is like, "No, I can work with all of this and it's for me," big difference.
Naomi Nakamura: What does interference look like physically? I think you also mentioned chemically as well. I'm really curious about what do those things look like.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, totally. Basically, the way that I look at the nervous system and the way that I care plans is I look at the body and then I look at the three-legged stool, I call it, chemical, physical and emotional, which I talked about last time. Those stressors or traumas or experiences can cause the interference. I think it's important to just come back to that for a second. Let's just talk about all three really quick, okay? Physical, let's just start simple. Physical interference looks like repetitive movements in one direction. Let's just give like an example of golfers who don't train both sides, right? If they're not doing the work, obviously high-end athletes, they have all the trainers do the thing, but weekend warriors, they go out and they're just doing one-sided stuff all the time. That's physical rotation in the system in one direction. A job, that's a repetitive thing. Slouching at your desk all day is a thing.
Naomi Nakamura: As I sit up and straighten my posture.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Totally. I'm lounging right now too. I know and I think about it all the time. Even just an acute trauma, an injury, those are all physical things that can change the nervous system. I will say holding your kid on one hip. [inaudible 00:19:14] talk to the mamas a little bit or holding them on your chest and around breastfeeding. I'm a breastfeeding mom, so that's a big one for me, right? I'm slouched in this position all the time.
Naomi Nakamura: Because you're not welcoming in adaptability. You're just going straight to the one position or the one side all the time.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly and it's repetitive. It's over and over the same side, muscles contract on that side. The nervous system tends to favor that side. The way that you get into your car or sit in your car while you're driving is a huge one.
Naomi Nakamura: That's probably how people get carpal tunnel and neck pain and back pain.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Ergonomical things.
Naomi Nakamura: All the typical things one might seek a chiropractor for.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Yes, that's all the physical. Yes, exactly. Then emotional, we talked about energy and motion. No matter how you slice it, people can argue that, even some people who think that when they hear the word that we're mostly energy is woo-woo. It's actually truth. We are only about 1% matter, 99% energy that organizes our matter to be able to be seen and to be who we are, right? When we are storing emotion, it creates blockages in the nervous system the same way the physical does. Let's look at the ribcage, our sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight nervous system, the chain of nerves runs right down the sides have our spines down our rib cage.
When people are locked in fight or flight, I do find their ribcages very inflexible. They might have a hunchback or just a super flat spine. It locks the physical body. It really does. It changes the way we breathe. It changes the way that we hold our body, the way we talk. It changes the musculature. Anxiety, I just did this talk, anxiety in the pelvic floor is unbelievable. It was actually higher than sexual trauma which is mind blowing to me, tension in the pelvic floor from just anxiety. Our emotions are stored in our physical body is what I'm trying to get at. When we do that and when we tighten certain areas, when we lock down certain areas, our nervous system becomes less flexible.
Also when we're in that state like I talked about with emotions, when we hold them in, we get less and less bandwidth to be able to tolerate emotions because we weren't taught how to process them as kids, so now a tiny bit of stress can throw your system out of whack. Where if you have a lot of bandwidth, you feel emotion, you're able to go a lot farther. That's how emotion soars in the physical body. Then like I said, the less adaptable we get, the more we learn to suppress them, the less wiggle room we have to the point where even happy emotions feel vulnerable and feel risky.
That is really profound because I have a lot of people who come to me, "I actually can't feel joy and happiness. I'm actually afraid. Maybe I don't deserve it or if I take myself out of fight or flight and allow myself to be happy for a moment, something bad is going to happen." They actually see fear and danger in happy emotions as well. That's how the emotion stores in the system. Now the chemical, there are certain chemicals and frequencies, radiations that can impact our nervous system, EMS being one of them. What happens when we're with Wi-Fi on our phones?
It actually interacts with the vibration and the frequency of our own nervous system and changes it to create anxiety. It changes our frequency and it messes with our heart frequency. That's why it can cause anxiety in people, it can cause a lot of other ailments, headaches, things like that. Other chemical-
Naomi Nakamura: That's really interesting, because for the past year, everyone's been in their home, working in their homes. I've been working in my home for nine years now, but this is something new for a lot of people. If they're not aware of that, even not being able to go outside and get a break from it, I can see that having a really big impact on people over the past 13, 14 months.
Dr. Shea Osuna: This is a very challenging controversial topic for me because I totally understand what the government was trying to do in protecting people because that's their job, but you also do have to be open to the conversation for what's happening to people's health because of this, the disconnect from family and from community, being indoors all the time, being so much more on Wi-Fi, not getting as much exercise and fresh air, naturally wearing masks. There are studies that have shown that it elicits a fear response. People don't breathe as deeply. It changes their anxiety response as well. There's a lot of things happening that are keeping people locked in fear just because of how we've had to adapt to this crisis.
Naomi Nakamura: If they weren't adaptable before, it's even tougher.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Yeah, it's really hard and I'm feeling so deeply for all these people, because yeah, it's a really hard thing because it's like, "Okay, one way, I felt necessary to respond in this way, but also, what is also being taken a toll?" There's no one that I've met so far that will argue with me that the level of mental health has declined substantially because of this pandemic, because of fear, because of disconnect. That is a big piece. Now we add that. On the positive though, people are not in these big office buildings as much. Guess what's in big office buildings? Dust, molds, all sorts of other cleaning products. They are actually being taken away from some of these other chemicals. Mold is a big one that affects the nervous system.
Naomi Nakamura: I actually just had a friend of mine a week ago tell me that she's been having all of these issues, that she just learned that she has mold in her body. That's something she's having to deal with right now.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It's pretty amazing. They're neurotoxins honestly. Aspartame that is in some of the sugar-free gums is a neurotoxin.
Naomi Nakamura: In diet drinks and-
Dr. Shea Osuna: Yup, in diet drinks. Plastics, phthalates, BPAs, those our nervous system irritants. They are hormone disruptors. All of these chemicals we're exposed to. Here's the other thing about a pandemic. Guess what they're trying to do? Disinfect everything. Everywhere you go, it's chemical disinfectants. It's a really big problem that's messing with our microbiome which also affects our nervous system. An unhealthy gut equals an unhealthy nervous system. People who have gluten sensitivities, a lot of their symptoms are neurological which is why they're not caught is because they looked at the nervous system when they should be looking to the gut.
There's a million different things, not to scare anyone because we're exposed to hundreds of toxins a day, but one part of my job is to help people remove what they can remove from their bodies, from their system and from their life, cleaning products, beauty products, things we have control over and then I teach them how to healthily detox their system from these things, a couple of supplements, a couple modalities such as sauna, rebounding or dry brushing and Epsom salt baths, things to help purge gently from the system to help their nervous system have a fighting chance because I can do all the work physically as a chiropractor and with my modality, but if people are exposed to mold or constantly putting on chemicals in their body, it can be a really hard thing to see the amount of change.
Naomi Nakamura: It's like you're doing all of this work, but then yet, if you haven't addressed those other things, you're undermining the work that you're doing. As a side note actually, I have my sauna space light on me right now. I keep it at my desk because I am in front of a computer screen a lot of the times and-
Dr. Shea Osuna: I love it.
Naomi Nakamura: I love it on my desk.
Dr. Shea Osuna: We actually just bought a panel for the house too, I'm really excited-
Naomi Nakamura: I'm jealous. If I had the space, I get the whole contraption. I just don't have the space for it.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It's life changing. We have an infrared sauna, a full-spectrum sauna now and it's really upleveled our health, our quality of life and just red light therapy in general is great for helping just decrease the overall stress. That's the other thing I want to mention too is I do a lot of functional medicine. I've put in quotes because I don't like the term medicine because I am not an MD, don't practice Western medicine, but I work with looking at the system as a whole and how to remove toxins and how to support the system, but one of the biggest things also is through all of this. The reason that my work is so successful is because we deal with stress.
If I only do functional stuff with people and I help them remove toxins and I help them detox their home, a lot of them don't see change because stress, emotional, psychological stress runs these pathways in our body that create deficiencies in certain vitamins because they are needed so much to fuel these adrenaline pathways and the stress pathways, that when you're not removing the way that people adapt to stress or changing the adaptability to stress, those things cannot. This is a very holistic integrated system that you do have to be aware and look at the whole system and have someone look at it with you to go, "Okay, what are the biggest problems here and how do we help you adapt and remove what can be removed?"
Naomi Nakamura: Let's go through that. The different things that people can do and let's start with, what are some of the chiropractic ways that you help people with these things that interfere with the function of their nervous system?
Dr. Shea Osuna: As a chiropractor, obviously I rely on my hands physically for me to take care of people. The first thing is I'm a chiropractor. Like I said, I am here as a resource to any of your listeners who want a referral. I have a huge network of people who do my own technique, women I trust, the people I trust, men I trust that I could find someone in their area. There's a lot of chiropractors that are in alignment with what I believe too, so it's nice to get a referral from someone who actually is talking and preaching and working the way that I am also talking about right now. That's the first thing.
I work on helping bring a respiratory wave into the spine and into the nervous system to help their whole system come out of fight or flight to help their body unravel the saran wrap or the first level of layer of defense in their system. I look at it as a garden. Let's go in the garden We just bought a house and there's a beautiful garden in the back. Let's just go look around. Let's go discover what's there. Then once we discover what's there, we are out fight or flight in the nervous system, we can start pulling weeds, we can start going, "Okay, this belief doesn't really serve me anymore. This physical thing doesn't serve me anymore. Let's start to reorganize the system."
Naomi Nakamura: When you're pulling the weeds, you got to get the root because if not, they just grow back.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly, so we get to the root of what's actually happening and the roots being the way we adapt to stress, the chemical, the physical, the emotional, all the stuff we just talked about. We pull those weeds, okay? Then we start to plant new vegetation and that's where we start to get more connected to our purpose, to the stories and belief systems that feel authentic and that do serve us. That's how I work personally through physical work, through talking through emotion, through integrating the body and breath and things like that, but what other people can do physically is breathwork is really, really powerful. Connecting with your breath is a really great way to take your system out of fight or flight on your own, to connect more deeply with your body, to feel where the breath goes easily and where it doesn't, what stuff-
Naomi Nakamura: I have to share about breathwork. It was right at the start of the pandemic, but the pandemic was not a catalyst for this conversation. I have been working with my functional medicine doctors for a long time because I've struggled with sleep pretty much my whole life, even through childhood. I was in a phase where I can't sleep well. I can fall asleep fine, but I get up in the middle of the night and I can't go back to sleep. It's always cute to me when people were like, "Oh, have you tried melatonin?" I took it for 10 years. I've done all those things. I need something and I was at the point where I realized that taking CBD oil and supplements all that, I needed something deeper that my reason for not being able to sleep, I really was looking at something deep internal to what is there that maybe I haven't addressed or resolved yet.
To your point about breathwork, my doctor, she's also an MD, recommended to me to try breathwork and to look into yoga nidra. It was at the start of the pandemic where everything's shut down, but she recommended a couple of studios to me that were offering virtual classes and that felt something really personal to me that I didn't feel comfortable going into a setting or situation where everyone was stranger. Actually, I reached out to a friend of mine who is a yoga teacher and had a couple of sessions. She taught me some yoga nidra techniques that ... Even last night, I was up at 2:00 and I go, "I'm not going to be able to fall back asleep again."
I went back to those breathing techniques that she taught me and I was able to go back to sleep again. Again, even in times where you think you might not be in fight or flight mode, just going back to breathwork can never really just calm your whole nervous system down.
Dr. Shea Osuna: What it does is it helps calm the system, it helps bring oxygen. When we're breathing more deeply, it naturally says, "Okay, we're not in a stressful state. We're safe. Let's relax." From that, we can sleep easier, we're able to feel our emotions. A lot of times when I'm feeling really buzzy, I've had a stress and I just lay down and do some breathwork, all of a sudden, that's why people just start crying. People will tell me all the time, "I was in the middle of my breathwork and I just started crying. I started feeling angry or whatever it was." It's because when we calm our system, we feel safe to feel, so that naturally comes up. It's a beautiful, multilevel positive thing for the body.
I could go on and on about oxygen and re-oxygening cells and pump in, how it's a pump for our lymphatic system and also I should talk about the vagus nerve. It helps to stimulate the vagus nerve which is our biggest parasympathetic nerve in our body, our rest and digest, it's connected to every organ we have basically. It's an amazing nerve and it goes through our diaphragm. When we do diaphragmatic breathing, it calms that down.
Naomi Nakamura: I have to tell you too, I actually got ... There's a skincare company, but they sell this vagus nerve product which is ... One is a pillow mist. It's just these really calming scents and the other one is an oil, but they tell you to put it on the back of your neck. I remember last, you said that a lot of parasympathetic is in the back of our neck and that's actually where they tell you to apply it. I apply it every night before I go to sleep. How much of an impact it has, I don't know, but it smells lovely. It's very relaxing to me. It's really just part of my bedtime ritual.
Dr. Shea Osuna: That's a lot of the same theory which is really great. Some other things that I recommend with the physical too, I could go all day, so we're just going to keep them simple, but let's go back to the vagus nerve. Things that also help with the vagus nerve is cold exposure, gargling, loud singing, breathwork. All these things help to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system. Those are really great ways to interrupt the patterns. My thing with my patients is, "How often can we interrupt the pattern? The pattern that we're trying to break, that your nervous system has been running in for however long, how often can we break that cycle so that you can repattern your nervous system to believe something new?"
Naomi Nakamura: I love that, interrupt the pattern.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Those are a lot of physical things, that gentle movement, like said yoga nidra is a great thing. I think what's really important too is unstructured movement, which for a long time until I met my husband, Brian, was ... "What do you mean by unstructured movements?" "Go to yoga class. Go for a run. Take this Pilates class." I was a Pilates instructor. All those are great, but unstructured movement, meaning roll around on the floor-
Naomi Nakamura: Play.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Play, be fun with your movement. Just put on some slow music and just move your hips, move them, bring breath into them, just start to ground, unfiltered, unstructured movements. If you're scared, if you're embarrassed, lock yourself in your room and do it there by yourself. It took me a long time to learn how to loosen up to do this kind of movement. Those are the things physically that I really think are super powerful for people to just repattern without having someone else facilitate for them.
Naomi Nakamura: I will say this, as we've talked over the past two episodes, especially when you talk about adaptability, I used to be someone who did a lot of endurance training. I did a lot of running for marathons and half marathons. It was very rigid and structured and it would add so much stress to me if I'd miss a day of my schedule that my coach gave me or if I didn't hit the targets that he set for me. It actually got to a point where it's counterproductive, where at one time before where I was able to find joy in running, it became something that was joyless for me and I was constantly injured.
I really stepped back for about the past, almost five years now, and I really haven't been doing anything structured, but when you talk about not being adaptable and having something happen, well, I actually injured myself earlier this year and talk about forcing you to slow down and as you break the pattern and try something new, because yoga was the only thing that felt safe to do, I'm doing that. Now, it feels a little bit foolish not to do it when just 10 or 20 minutes a day is really all you need, but what's resulted from that for me is realizing that just 10, 20, 30 and sometimes 45 minutes, which is for me now, that's a long workout, whereas before that 45 minutes was ... Well, that's less than five miles or that's only five miles.
Now having that less structured about what am I going to do today for my workout, it really depends on what I feel doing when I wake up in the morning and just being adaptable to what my body feels where some day it is a hit workout, someday it is a strength training workout, someday I started taking these dance workouts, which for me, that is play because I don't dance.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It's so fun.
Naomi Nakamura: I actually feel lighter physically and also in just to my overall mentality, but also with just doing yoga every day. I don't do anything crazy or too strenuous, but I also feel physically it's opened myself up so much more, especially in my core area. It's really made me aware of tension that I had no idea I was holding in different parts of my body.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It's so funny. As you're talking about this, I can relate so deeply. I keep saying I was because I'm not structured the same way you were just talking about, but I am a runner and I have been since I was about 12 years old. I relate to that so much. Before I started having kids, I was at the peak and I was trail racing. I have a certain weight that if I'm not that weight, it doesn't feel as effortless. I just was so hard on myself about the weight. If your run felt crappy, everything sucks. You feel like, "I'm terrible. I suck at this." It's because you had one bad run and it's more detrimental to your psyche and to your body than it is good. I'm in the same place you are right now. I do yoga every day. It feels amazing. Our run is scheduled. I have to schedule everything because I have a 15-month-old. That day, I checked in with my body and I said, "Actually, I'm really tired. I don't think a run is going to serve me."
I did my run the next day and I had a great run and it was really fun, but it's like listening to what does my body need that day and giving yourself the permission for that. That's so powerful. I'm so, so glad to hear that that has been your journey.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, and it's also not to say that running is bad, but it's the same perspective about you said, you get called into your boss's office, what is your response to the situation going to be. For me, it's been the same thing because I went through this whole period about, "Running is terrible for you. No one should do it anymore," then I really realized that was just my response to it. I will still go out for a very short run every once in a while, but as long as I'm feeling joyful in the experience, that's a good thing for me.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Exactly. I totally agree. Running is my favorite and I'm starting to run again. This is a really relevant conversation for me right now. I wish I just had this conversation with my husband and saying, "I do have a little bit of fear that I'm going to drop back into where I was when I really want this to be an enjoyable experience," because running does light me up and it does fuel my soul and the thoughts and the creativity that come from it is the part I want to connect with, not necessarily, "I have to be this weight and I have to be doing this much." This is really actually very present for me right now. Yay.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, anything else to add for us before we wrap things up?
Dr. Shea Osuna: I'm trying to think. I want to give a well-rounded ... I think with the emotional part for people, I think with the breathwork and we touched on that, how when we just take our system out of fight or flight and give ourselves space, we are able to process and feel. I just really welcome people to allow themselves to have a little more space to feel. Anger is a hard one. I've actually do want to address anger because men have been taught that anger is dangerous and that they have to suppress that because they could hurt someone. Women have been taught to suppress anger because it's not ladylike or whatever.
I'm going to share a really personal story really quick. My husband and I lost our child two and a half years ago and our first child, our daughter. If anyone is familiar with grief, one of the stages is anger. I had to really learn how to process it because if I didn't, I knew enough to know that I would get sick. I could physically get sick. I knew so many women who ended up with cancers and all these different ailments after losing a child because they just didn't have the resources. I found that the best way for me personally, and Brian had to find his way because he would have broken the bed probably because he's a much stronger person than I am, but I had to come in the bedroom and start punching pillows and screaming into pillows and punching my bed and really getting it out of my system.
For men, I know for him, taking a hammer to a tire out somewhere and doing something to really allow your body to release those things. They are okay. We are primal creatures. These emotions are really normal and when they're suppressed is when we start to get sick. It might not look that crazy for you like a big two-year-old tantrum like mine did, but give yourself the permission to start to ask the question of, "Can I just give myself a little bit of space to start to be curious about what is stored in my body and what kind of emotions I do suppress?" and the ways to see that is how reactive you are. Do you react to things in your home with your family that are not really big deals because you just have a lot of stuff in there.
I think that's a good place to start, is just to be really curious and to give yourself the permission to be messy about it a little bit and to not really know what's happening. Most people that I talk to, when they're on this emotional journey, they go, "I literally feel like I'm two again. I'm trying to learn how to feel again and how to express and that's-
Naomi Nakamura: It's the beginner's mind.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It is and it's the truth because that's when it starts and we aren't really taught how to process our emotions healthily. It's the biggest you can give your kids is to learn how to process your own emotions, so that they see what it's like to do it in a healthy way. I think that's the big piece of the emotion. Then to touch on the chemical, really gentle things that are pretty safe for everyone, again disclaimer, not medical advice, make sure if this is a question for you, you talk to a practitioner, whether it's a holistic practitioner or your MD, whatever it is, do your own research, but Epsom salt baths are one of the best ways to help open the pores to pull out some toxins out of the system and relax, as hot as you can tolerate obviously. I have people who go in for five minutes. That's all they can tolerate and then they keep going.
Naomi Nakamura: I do it at least once a week.
Dr. Shea Osuna: It's great. You're working your way up to about 20 minutes is amazing, but again, I've had patients who don't sweat well, they don't detox. Well, the way that you know that is if you go out for a run or you go into a sauna and you're not really sweating very much, you're glistening, not enough. This is a way to train your body to sweat more and to detox and purge. People who have stagnant digestive systems, that's also a sign as well. Things like that. Magnesium, that's a really great way calm, is a great drink for people who have stagnant digestive systems who feel like they can't rest at night. Great thing to do.
Then just being as simple as possible, coming back to the basics. Look at all the chemicals. If you don't know what's in your beauty products, type in some of those words on the back and see what they say. Finding ways to detox what you put on your body and in your body, organic foods.
Naomi Nakamura: Cleaning products, oh, my gosh.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Cleaning products. I really, really love Branch Basics. They send you a starter kit with a concentrate and we spray everything in our bathroom.
Naomi Nakamura: I have those stuff too.
Dr. Shea Osuna: We do our laundry with it. It's amazing. There's really great ways that you can detox your home, what you're putting in your body.
Naomi Nakamura: I think one simple thing with that is just seeing if something has a fragrance in it, because if you see the word fragrance, that is a red light to you that this has things that should not be in there.
Dr. Shea Osuna: 100%, fragrance is a big one. What you can do for fragrance is add a drop of therapeutic grade essential oil instead. That's a really good way.
Naomi Nakamura: If you feel like you need fragrance, because that's not the point, where like, "I don't even need fragrance for things."
Dr. Shea Osuna: Absolutely, I feel the same way, but once in a while, on my lotion, I have a Body Butter. That's really clean. Sometimes it's nice to just have a little something. I rub it on my son with lavender oil sometimes and he calms down. I think the biggest thing that you can control is taking out the chemicals from your home as best you can, creating a sound environment for sleep with less toxins, organic sheets, organic bedding, less EMS in the room, unplug your WiFi at night. Those are all of the chemical things that I suggest people start with.
Naomi Nakamura: I made a big investment last year of getting my organic mattress. I love it, but I definitely had to save up a couple of years to make that investment.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Totally, but it is one of the best investments that you can give. They do say that at night is the biggest thing where we spend so much time on our pillows and our mattress. We are also in a very vulnerable state while we sleep because our body is supposed to be doing cleanup. The less toxins that we have to process at night, the more that we can do cleanup. It is one of the best, best things you can give your health.
Naomi Nakamura: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us and for getting so vulnerable with us. Where can people connect with you?
Dr. Shea Osuna: Like I said, I don't have really as much of a personal Instagram anymore, @thewellhealingcenter is my official page for my business. Then my website is thewellhealingcenter.com. If you go slash events, you can go and find all the free events that we do, so you can join them if you want to. I will also share, like I said, my personal email drshealindsay@gmail.com, which you can put in the notes. I'm free for people wanting to email me about referrals or questions, coaching, anything like that. Those are a few ways that you can find me.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate sharing your wisdom and your time with us.
Dr. Shea Osuna: Thank you for having me. It was really wonderful to be able to share.
Naomi Nakamura is a Health x Human Design coach who’s creating a healthier society through aligned energy.
She blends a bespoke mix of Functional Nutrition and Human Design to help others shift into alignment to leverage and correctly manage their energy to support their body, mind, and spirit.
She believes that when we embrace our authenticity and lean into our bio-individuality, we naturally live a life of freedom, empowerment, and optimal health.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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