Episode 174: Your Body Keeps Score: How Your Life Experiences Are Stored In Your Tissues with Dr. Shea Osuna
If you’ve ever struggled with chronic aches and pain, this episode is for you. Joining me for a two-part mini-series is Dr. Shea Osuna. Dr. Shea is a chiropractor, based in Lafayette, Colorado, who specializes in a technique called Network Spinal.
This gentle approach is based on the foundation that we’re vibrating cells, looking at what’s the tone, tension, shape, and position of your spine and nervous system, and how it self-regulates itself from tension.
Dr. Shea up levels this technique with transformational coaching to provide her clients a soul-finding experience.
Episode Highlights:
Busting myths on chiropractic medicine
What is the Network Spinach technique
How your posture directly impacts your perception of reality and the world
How your body keeps the score and stores your life experiences in your tissues
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:
“When I am assessing the body, I’m not just assessing what bones are fixated. What I’m actually doing is stepping back to have a full conversation with my patients about their history of trauma, physical, emotional, chemical toxins, and then I take a step back and I look at the entire spine and posture.
How do they present themselves? Did they come in with their heart guarded and their head coming forward or their tailbone tucked? Do they look rotated? What’s happening in their system, and why? What’s the story behind it? What in this person’s life is making them hunched over and tail-tucked and kind of hiding from life?
What I’m curious about, rather than just like the bone out of place and how to get it back, is how can I support this person’s system to unravel this in their body and unravel the story in their life.”
Read the Transcript:
Naomi Nakamura: Hello there and welcome back to the Live FAB Life podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura, and joining me in this episode is Dr. Shea Osuna. Dr. Shea is a pre-natal chiropractor with a focus on Network Spinal transformation 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 traumas and stressors bog them down.
She believes that when we no longer feel the need to carry around so much baggage, we are free to live life how we have always dreamed of living, to be resilient to what life throws at us and to truly thrive. After feeling lost and defeated from personal experiences with intense anxiety for years, Dr. Shea found a technique called Network Spinal that helped her find more ease in her body and change her relationship to anxiety.
Since then, she's dedicated herself to this powerful approach. She's spent the past five years practicing in my back yard in the Bay area, but has recently landed in Lafayette, Colorado, where she has an in-person practice, but she also offers online transformational coaching. So when Dr. Shea and I started planning out what topics we were going to discuss in this episode, I quickly realized that we were going to need more than one episode to cover everything, because there's so much good stuff that we cover.
So this episode is actually the first of a two part series. So here in part one, you will hear Dr. Shea break down some of the myths around chiropractic medicine. You'll hear her discuss how your posture and the shape of your spine directly impacts your perception of reality and how you view the world, and you will hear how your body keeps score and how your life experiences are stored in your tissues.
Now, as a side note, I met Dr. Shea through her husband, Bryan Osuna, founder of COMMITTED HP, who joined me back in Episode 157, Tips for Movement and Fitness Anywhere, so if you haven't listened to Episode 157 yet be sure you also do so. So with that, let's get to the show. Hi Dr. Shea. Welcome to the show.
Shea Osuna: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Naomi Nakamura: I am really excited to have this conversation with you. We had your husband on. I think it was in episode 157, and he kind of mentioned what you do, and I was like, "Oh, I would love to have her on." So I'm glad we're making this happen.
Shea Osuna: Yeah, me too.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. So for those who aren't familiar with you, can you introduce yourself and share with us what it is that you do?
Shea Osuna: Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, my name's Dr. Shea Osuna, and I am a chiropractor, but I really started to dive into being curious about patterns in the nervous system. And so for those of you who don't know a lot about chiropractic, it's actually not just like a back doctor, but it's actually working with the nervous system directly, and our intention when we adjust or when we work with people is to affect the way that the nervous system self-regulates tension and stress.
And obviously some people have been to more of a traditional chiropractor, where they're looking at the bones that are fixated and trying to push them back into place using some sort of light force, but I started to be kind of curious about why do people start to come in week after week with the exact same pattern in their system and nothing is changing? And most people needed that adjustment every single week to keep themselves from having symptoms.
And some people can say obviously we want to add in exercise. We want to decrease inflammation and all of that, but for me I was really curious. I really want people's lives to change. I want them to feel motivated to change their diet. I want them to want to up-level their life. I want them to choose to exercise, right? Like I wanted them to make the decisions and feel empowered versus being someone's savior or being their hero, or someone that they were reliant on.
And so I dove into this technique called Network Spinal, which is a low force technique ... we'll deem it under that ... and it's actually called a tonal technique. And the reason it's called a tonal technique is because it's based on the foundation that we are vibrating cells, and so it really looks at what is the tone, the tension, the shape and the position of your nervous system of your spine and how it basically self-regulates itself from tension or does not.
And so I was really, really curious about this and found this technique and that's been I guess the baseline of where I began my journey as a healer, and it's only the beginning because I've now taken that technique and up-leveled it even more into a level of transformational coaching and soul-finding searching connecting type of work. And so that's kind of been my journey through that. And we can dive in more of course.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. [inaudible 00:05:41] You keep using that word, curious, because now I'm very curious and like you I've been working as a health coach for like five years now, and it's the same thing. People come to you because they want you to tell them what to do, but the change really doesn't happen until they feel empowered and not compelled to do something.
I have personally been seeing a chiropractor for over a decade, and I started to because I was doing a lot of endurance events and I kept getting injured, and I don't know who recommended that I start I seeing a chiropractor, so I did, and I get the feeling it's more of a traditional type, but as I shared with people that I see my chiropractor like every two or three weeks literally for like eleven years now, I'm always surprised at the response I get from some people about, "Oh, it's just going to break your bones."
And some of these people are medical professionals, and they're like, "Well, I need to talk to one of the doctors at the hospital to find out if it's even really legit, because I'm skeptical about this kind of treatment," and really? So what are some of the myths that you've encountered and how do you respond to them?
Shea Osuna: Yeah. I'm actually really glad we're talking about this. Like there's part of me that's like, "Ugh," but it's really a thing and it's true.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. People are like, "I don't want them to snap my neck." It actually feels really good, to be honest.
Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I mean it totally does, and yeah. So here's a couple things. The first thing is that believe it or not, chiropractic has pretty much been under attack for years and years and years. If you look back ... I think it's between the '50s and '70s, I think it was in the '70s, chiropractic was basically attacked by the American Medical Association because they were telling us that we were practicing without medical license, because people were showing that they could treat certain things.
And at the time, chiropractors didn't have any rule that they couldn't say that they could treat a certain thing or they were getting results with certain ailments, and so the medical profession basically attacked the chiropractic profession saying that they were practicing without a medical license. We weren't allowed to do all of these things. And sadly ever since, there's been a very big gap between the western medical model and traditional chiropractic model.
And it's really sad, because I find that there's really room for all of us, and I find that it's really hard to have these conversations with medical providers because that's the world they came from, right? And we come from this other world and everyone's ego's in the way, and no one wants to be open to conversation. So there's really where it kind of all started. And so some of the myths that are out there ... and medical professionals definitely do it ... and I'll have to say, my fellow chiropractors don't do a great job always of using the right terminology and educating in the ways.
I think it's stepping up, but so many chiropractors use the word pop and crack and all these things, and most people don't even know what's actually making the sound. When we take something like that, say, snapping the neck, right, what a chiropractor is actually doing is they're feeling ... this is a structural adjustment. This isn't even what I do, but a structural adjustment, they're going to feel your neck.
Some of them are going to muscle test you. Some of them are going to do range of motion. They're going to do all sorts of different things to test your neurology, to test whether there is neurological dysfunction because of this fixation in your neck. Fixation or subluxation, which is in-between the bones of the spine, the vertebra, and when there's a fixation there, there could be decreased nerve flow to that area, or increased, too much, nerve flow to that area.
So it's kind of like a cell phone. They use the cell phone terminology, like if someone was getting less frequency into the phone, you wouldn't hear them, right? You'd get that ... You hear parts of the message. And that's kind of the idea of chiropractic, is that organ or that tissue where the subluxation is is getting a mixed message. It's maybe not getting the whole message. And that's where we see dysfunction and [inaudible 00:10:01] have it.
So that's what they're looking for, and then what they do is they contact the bone and they just bring your neck to a slight [inaudible 00:10:11] of tension to where it kind of takes the muscle and the guarding out of it so that you can't fight and then they just put a gentle force in the direction that the bone needs to go to help it open, and help it realign and help the nerve flow and the blood flow back to the area.
So it's actually really gentle. For those people who are really scared, even I have to wiggle my toes when I get my neck structurally adjusted, and I am a chiropractor, and I will say that as a trained chiropractor, it actually takes quite a bit of force and quite a bit of intention to hurt someone, honestly.
Naomi Nakamura: I'm laughing because I've been getting adjustments every two to three weeks for 11 years, and I actually find it relieves a lot of tension in my body after an adjustment, but to your point, when I'm lying in the chair and my chiropractor laughs, because he's like, "Okay, you know what's coming." And I mentally have to shut my eyes and tell myself, "Relax. Relax." I literally just repeat those words and then he adjusts, but it's really not a big deal at all, and there's no pain, and I never felt I'm in danger of being hurt.
Shea Osuna: I have to say, it has to be your intention to hurt someone, and as a chiropractor and as a health care practitioner, probably didn't go into that profession to hurt people, right? You want to help them. That's your intention. So I think that's one of the biggest things to break down. And also the cracking and popping that you hear, number one, you don't have to hear that for a bone to be adjusted. A lot of times, I'll go, wait. That was great. I felt the bone move back into place or release, and there was no sound.
The crack or the pop is usually just air releasing from the joint, just like if you were to crack your knuckles. Doesn't mean you adjusted your hand, but there's air in the joint and it just kind of comes out. So it's not bones rubbing together. It's not any of that scary stuff. And just to say, if it's something that people are really afraid of, there's over a hundred techniques of chiropractic, and that's the beauty of this work is that if someone has full spinal fusion, you can still get chiropractic care.
You have really bad osteoporosis, you can still get gentle chiropractic care, because the idea is let's self-regulate the nervous system. Let's regulate the nervous system so that ... and we can go into this more about why that's important, but for everyone it's really important, and you can find your modality if you find your technique that really resonates with you.
Naomi Nakamura: I do want to go into that, but you mentioned a little while ago that you don't practice that specific technique. So can you describe your technique and how it differs from maybe traditional chiropractic techniques?
Shea Osuna: Absolutely. So like I said, when I am assessing the body, I'm not just assessing what bones are fixated, the direct subluxation. I'm looking at them. I'm taking note of them. What I'm actually doing is I'm stepping back. I have a full conversation in the initial exam with my patients about pretty much their entire life. We talk history of trauma, physical, emotional, chemical toxins, and then I take a step back and I look at the entire spine, and I look at their posture.
How do they present themselves? People can't see me hunching, but I'll hunch for you. Did they come in with their heart guarded and their head coming forward or their tailbone tucked? Do they look rotated? What's happening in their system, and why? What's the story behind it? And so I ask those questions that are like what in this person's life is making them hunched over and tail-tucked and kind of hiding from life? Like what is the story, right? What's the pattern?
And so that's what I am curious about, rather than just like the bone out of place and how to get it back, but how can I actually support this person's system to unravel this in their body and unravel the story in their life so they can up-level. And so I think the easiest way to explain this is traditional chiropractic is under the model of restorative, and my type of chiropractic is under the hub of reorganizational, so we're really helping the system learn strategies to reorganize to higher level and take them past the injury or the ailment or whatever it was and up-level them to beyond it, rather than before it. Does that make sense?
Naomi Nakamura: It does. So physically, are your techniques different, and the actual bodywork that you do?
Shea Osuna: Yup. So the technique is different, so that's kind of how I start, is just looking at the system, and then when I get that information, I have another little physical system of analysis and my question is where in the spine is their tension patterns? Alf Breigs calls it adverse mechanical cord tension. So it means that there's mechanical cord tension in the spine, either twisting, like wringing a towel or a bending side to side or forward and back, and it's tension there. So that nerve flow and that blood flow that we talked about is decreased, right?
So now, with my technique, I find an area usually on the pelvis or the neck, because that's where your parasympathetic nerves live, parasympathetic nerves being that rest and digest part of the nervous system versus sympathetic, which is what we all [inaudible 00:15:20] fight or flight, right? So I make a contact on one of those two places, and what I mean by a contact is a very gentle ... it's like the pads of my fingers.
I hold there and I make a very quick gentle contact into a spot on the spine that I found clinically, kind of ... So we could go on and on about that part, but I don't have to teach people the technique. So I find the area that I need to go to and I make a very gentle contact, and what happens is the spine all of a sudden starts to send information into your prefrontal cortex, subconscious mind and back down, and it kind of asks the question ... We'll make it more real and interactive. Like am I still in this state of protection or defense? Can I unravel what's there, or do I still need it to protect myself?
Most of the time the threat's not there anymore and people start to unravel. They start to breathe more deeply. We look for a respiratory wave to go all the way up their spine and into their head, and you'll watch their connective tissue start to move, their muscles start to move, and they just start to release tension in their nervous system, on their own, with just a very gentle, quick touch. And so that's how the very beginning starts.
As people progress in care, we do go a little bit deeper. We hold contacts a little bit longer. They change position from lying face down to on their side or on their back, but again it's all really gentle, low force tonal techniques, working with the frequency of the body. So an example being like that tailbone tucked position that I talked about, the frequency ... what they've actually found by hooking up and watching a frequency of the nervous system, it sounds like this ...
I don't want to live in a nervous system that sounds like that, right? So what we do is we put that light contact force in as basically a way to go ... And the cells and the system start to entrain and reset to that lower frequency, which is a healing frequency. So it's pretty amazing.
Naomi Nakamura: I can see how powerful this is, because when you talk about the nerves of the parasympathetic system being in the neck, speaking from personal experience, I have had the most challenging time finding a pillow to comfortably sleep on. I literally took all my pillows one time into my chiropractor's office and was like, "Help me. I can't get a good night's sleep."
And she basically looked at all of them and she said, well the problem is because of my size, the space from my neck is really small, so even all of these neck supporting pillows, they're not my size. And we worked out a situation that helps me. But that being an issue, and so that's affecting your parasympathetic system, your fight and flight, that's affecting your sleep.
And affecting your nervous system, it really is going to have an impact on all areas of your life and how you function every day, not just in the motions that you go through, but in the decisions that you make and the choices that you make, and the way you communicate and the way ... your relationships to other people. So I think this is a really good example of truly a mind-body connection.
Shea Osuna: You are hitting it right on the head, and this is why I chose this level of work, is your nervous system is taking in about ... I think it's something like 13 or 30 trillion bits of information ... Don't quote me on the number, but it's trillions of bits ... they call it bits ... per minute, or per second and-
Naomi Nakamura: Can we just take a step back a little bit and for the sake of the listeners explain what the nervous system is.
Shea Osuna: Thank you. So the nervous system is our brain, our spinal cord, all of the nerves that come out to our organs, every single tissue we have. So our central nervous system is our brain and our spinal cord and our peripheral nervous system comes out to all of our tissues, our extremities, meaning our arms and legs and our organs. And the nervous system regulates everything. Every single thing that we do. We cannot function without our nervous system.
We cannot breathe. We cannot talk. We cannot interact with the world. And it not only tells our system what to do, but it interacts with the world so that our perception of the world can tell our nervous system how to respond. So it is basically the powerhouse of our entire body and our entire life, because the way that our nervous system works, it's kind of like a computer system that learns.
So based on our experiences of our life and of the world, we know how to respond and how to act. That's why trauma patterns happen, or everyone's been in a relationship and then they're in a new one and all of a sudden they're getting triggered by the same stuff they were in the past relationship even though it's a brand new one. It's your nervous system.
Naomi Nakamura: So interesting.
Shea Osuna: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and that nervous system takes in all those bits of information every second of the day.
Naomi Nakamura: So when we're talking about different topics we can discuss here ... and by the way, this is actually going to be a two part, because you gave me a list of so many topics. I'm like we need to talk about all of them. I don't think we can cover it all in one episode so we're having you back for a second episode, but one of the topics you put forth was how your posture and your spine directly impact your perception and your reality of the world, and I think that's kind of what you're leading to. So can you speak more into that?
Shea Osuna: Yes, absolutely. I know you have to slow me down, because I'll just give you all of it.
Naomi Nakamura: No, I'm eating it all up.
Shea Osuna: So yeah, this is such an easy thing for people to grasp, and I kind of touched on it when we talked about that one posture. But I love it, because this is the way I educate my patients. This is the way I educate people in the community, that the way that our spine is positioned can really dictate how we see the world, and because of these trillions of bit of information per second, we only take in a very small amount of those consciously.
And what we end up doing is we take it into the conscious mind, and we start to organize it into ways that make sense to us, and we compare very quickly. This is all ... A lot of it's subconscious. We compare very quickly to our past experiences to categorize safe, not safe, like what's happening. And so an easy way show people this is that the way that our posture is shows how we see reality.
Think about it as let's just put on like goggles, okay? Like reality goggles, and I'll explain it ... You can see me, but basically let's take that person with the tucked tail, hunched over, head's forward, heart is closed, shoulders are rounded forward.
Naomi Nakamura: Kind of like how I sit every day at my desk, and probably how most people who are office works are sitting at our desk, leaning forward, looking into our screens.
Shea Osuna: Right? Yes. You and everyone else, and even people who didn't used to because now they're all at home on Zoom, right?
Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.
Shea Osuna: And so this is a big pattern. And so if you think about someone like that, you tell me, what is your energetic state when you're hunched over, when you tuck your tail, your head's forward, your shoulders are rounded forward, like ...
Naomi Nakamura: Much higher. And it's not energizing.
Shea Osuna: Yeah. It's not energizing. So if you take that pattern ... And so it's one thing to just sit like that, but some people walk around like that all day too. Their systems are locked in that position. And so when I see that, what I think ... what that represents in my work is when a tailbone is tucked, you think about an animal with its tail between its legs. Protection mode. Closing off the shoulders-
Naomi Nakamura: Unsure, as well.
Shea Osuna: ... rounding the shoulders. Yes, unsure if the world is safe, where they fit into it. I'm in protective mode just in case something happens, so high alert. Vigilance. Shoulders are rounded forward. They're protecting their front, they're protecting their organs, their heart. Head comes forward because they're disconnected from their soul and in their intuition and into their heart, and they're using their mind to try to navigate, right?
And when their head comes forward, a lot of emotional tension in their lower neck, of resentment, of anger, of sadness, of disappointment, all is really found here. So when we liberate that, people start to release those emotions in their body. So you have that final pattern, you see the world from that lens. Now you're at work and your boss calls you up and says "Hey, can you meet me in my office in 10 minutes?"
From this point, from that position, what is your mind going to think? "Oh my gosh, I'm getting fired. My boss hates me. I can't do anything right," or "It's their fault." It's going to be these really negative [crosstalk 00:23:47].
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, and you automatically go on alert because you're bracing yourself in anticipation that something negative's about to happen, and you're almost in like survival mode. Shea Osuna: Exactly. So this is how your posture shapes your reality, or the reality that you see, right? Your perception of the experience. Now let's take the person next to you at your desk who sits like this, all tall, free breathing. I forgot that. People in those final postures of tucked, you don't breathe well. So now this other person's shoulders are rolled back.
They're breathing, they're awake. They're sitting on a bounce ball, which I'm sitting on right now, and they're moving their hips and they're connected to their body. They're feeling energy in their body. Now their boss calls them and says "Hey, can you meet me in my office in 10 minutes?"
What's that person going to think? "Oh, maybe they really liked my project that I submitted. Maybe I'm getting a raise, you know?"
Naomi Nakamura: Or a promotion or [crosstalk 00:24:46]. Right.
Shea Osuna: Or a promotion. Something, right? So the way that they perceive that phone call-
Naomi Nakamura: The same situation.
Shea Osuna: Same exact situation, completely different. And how are they going to go into the office? They're going to go in tall and excited and [crosstalk 00:25:00]-
Naomi Nakamura: Confident.
Shea Osuna: ... and confident to their boss, where the other person's going to come in slouched and like, "Oh man, what's going to happen next?" right? And their boss is going to see that and go, "Wow. I was going to give this person a raise, but now I'm not," right? Or the person who's open, like, "Wow, you actually really deserve this promotion. Look at the energy you're bringing in to me and into our work."
And so that's just a really small example of that, and sadly it's a little bit more complicated than just ... Well, this isn't true. It is very simple of changing your posture. You can change your posture and change your energy instantaneously. That's what power postures are for, right? People always say before you go into a big meeting, open your arms up. Sit up tall. Sit in that power position.
So there is that, but there is also the part that our experiences of our life start to store in our body.
Naomi Nakamura: I'm so interested in hearing about this.
Shea Osuna: Yes. Based on our traumas, our experiences, our nervous system is taught to shrink or to expand, to be authentic or to not, and so based on if we feel seen, safe and supported at home as children. And this has been a really big topic with one of my coaching clients recently. We had to sit and really break this down, because she felt guilty that her childhood wasn't hard, right? She wasn't physically abused, she wasn't screamed at, and yet she has this really strong trauma response.
And we really had to break down that it doesn't have to be something that society deems this huge deal to impact your nervous system and to cause a response that you don't understand. And I really want to push that for people, because there's this fighting off of like well, people are starving somewhere and it does not numb the experience that you had, or talk it down or anything like that.
So based on your nervous system when you were a child, did you feel safe, seen and supported? And that is the three things that we needed when we were children, and seen also means seen in our authenticity. Were we received as our authentic selves? And if we were not, we're taught to repress that.
Naomi Nakamura: And so you have these adults who don't know who their authentic selves are.
Shea Osuna: Yes. Because it wasn't seen as and they weren't supported as children, [crosstalk 00:27:24]-
Naomi Nakamura: Right, exactly. Yeah.
Shea Osuna: ... really hard. So there's that piece, and so seen is one of the big things. Emotional range is also another one. We live in a world ... I'm raising a 15-month-old boy, and I walk around and I see kids being shushed all the time. I see parents embarrassed by their kid having a tantrum. And don't get me wrong, I am too sometimes, you know? We just went camping and my husband and I were like, "Ugh. He's going to cry in the tent. These poor people next to us."
Like worrying about other people and what they're going to think of us as parents, but the whole thing is that we weren't really taught as children how to regulate our emotions in a healthy way. So we repressed them, and now we're raising children, and either you had an angry parent who lashed out or a passive parent who pushed it all down, and so either you learned that or the opposite, and you never were really taught how to regulate your own emotion.
And so I just read this beautiful quote. I was teaching a class last night, and it basically said emotions in flow do not cause pain. Emotions that are stagnant cause pain.
Naomi Nakamura: It's so interesting, because I'm doing human design work now, and-
Shea Osuna: [crosstalk 00:28:38].
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, and there's a center in the body, the emotional center, and some of the shadow work of that is believing that negative feelings are bad or trying to suppress negative feelings because you perceive them to be bad. But they're just emotion, and for some people it's completely ... I mean it's healthy for everyone to feel all these emotions, but for some people it's part of their DNA. Like literally.
Shea Osuna: It's hard.
Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shea Osuna: Yeah. Yes. And that's also something to really take into consideration. It's like your makeup, where were the stars aligned, what's your astrology chart look like, your human design, how was your upbringing? All of these ... What's your gender, or what you were raised as? Being a woman versus a man in culture is way different with what we were taught on how to feel our emotions.
So it's basically energy in motion. That's how you can break down emotion.
Naomi Nakamura: That's exactly how I describe emotion, is that it's energy in motion.
Shea Osuna: That's all it is. And so we label it and make it scary as bad or good. But when you break down the sensation in your body, excitement actually feels the same as fear. And when you break it down, when you stop the story and you actually sit with the emotion in your belly or in your chest, wherever you feel fear, or when you're excited, the sensation's almost exactly the same.
Naomi Nakamura: Like your belly's doing flip flops or butterflies in your belly? You get it when you're excited and you feel it when you're anticipating or you're fearing something.
Shea Osuna: Exactly. And so it's the sensation in the body that they found through a lot of somatic psychology work, is that what most people are really afraid of, especially people with trauma. And so that's how we kind of get started. And so the point of this being is that when there's energy stored in your nervous system in the form of unfelt emotions, then we store patterns in our nervous system.
Thoughts, trauma and toxins are what cause nervous system interference, what cause us to not be able to regulate stress well, and cause holding patterns that affect our reality in our system. So those are the three things, and if we can start to help people regulate by taking that tension out of their system, help them remove those chemical, physical and emotional traumas from their life and make them more resilient, they can heal and as stressors come in they're not carrying this baggage of the past with them.
They're dealing with them head on as they come in a more present fashion. So that's the goal.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, and you're teaching them, really, life skills that are empowering that they can then continue to use in their lives as they continually ... as things come to them, they're equipped to manage situations to deal with them in the healthiest way that's appropriate for them.
Shea Osuna: Exactly. That's the goal, is you're authentic, right? Like your authentic way of doing it, because mine is not your way, no one's is, and so that's what I really love about doing the work that I do, is that we're looking at the person in front of us and helping them decide what feels best to them, what's sustainable for them, what's manageable in their environment that they're in in their life? How can we take small steps and make this possible for you to decide, right?
Instead of having some guru tell you this is how you need to do it, it's like let's help you find your own way.
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, and I love that because ... and I do this in my own work ... is I really have an extensive ... well, for my health question part, a really extensive health history, because in order for me to help someone as they are now, I need to understand what led up to them becoming or in this situation that they are now. And this is also where there is never going to be a one size fits all answer that's appropriate for everyone.
So if you're trying to like manage your health by just following Instagram accounts, great. That helps, but if you're looking for true healing, if you just really want that, it takes a lot more. It's really deep work.
Shea Osuna: It is. It's a really wonderful point, and I was just on a walk with a dear friend of mine who lives surprisingly in my neighborhood. We kind of finally connected and she's medicine woman, amazing healer, does a lot of soul work, and we were just talking about this. Basically even us doing the work, we still need to reach out to people to hold us accountable.
Naomi Nakamura: Oh absolutely.
Shea Osuna: I see my own person, I see my own person for the work I do, and I see somebody else who does more like somatic therapy with me and mental and really helps me up-level, and I invest that in my life even though I have all the knowledge, I reach out because I know that working with someone is going to help me up-level in my own life [crosstalk 00:33:19].
Naomi Nakamura: I think that's the sign of a healthy healer, is when they recognize that they need the same support that they provide to others.
Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I think it's a red flag sometimes when the people aren't doing the work that are doing the work with you, right? Like they need to be doing their own work and up-leveling and being curious about what's more for themselves so that they can show up in that capacity. And so when a practitioner starts to get really narrow-minded or fixed in their way of practicing, it's something to question, I think personally.
Naomi Nakamura: I 100% with you. So I know we're going to continue on in a follow-up episode, but I'm really curious and I'm really bummed because you lived in my area and you don't anymore, so is your work limited to in-person work, or are there ways for people to work with you virtually?
Shea Osuna: The physical work that I do of Network Spinal needs to be in-person, and the really great thing is is because actually having a baby and pandemic really pushed me to ask that question, of I really want to still continue to work with people and so I started to create online practice, taking everything I know from Network Spinal and a sister technique that I learned called Somatic Respiratory Integration, which is a movement breathing affirmations pattern that affects the nervous system, 12 stages, and I've kind of morphed it into my own, honestly.
And of course you do, right? You have to bring the art in. And so what I ended up creating is a 12 week dive in immersive, where basically I take all the things that I know how to self-regulate the nervous system without being one-on-one with someone, I teach them the tools, the resources.
Obviously I'm not a therapist, but we do have a lot of conversation, and what I do is I help them hear the stories and then we find it in the body, and then we acknowledge in the body and I help them learn how to feel the emotion there, the sensation there. And not just to release it, but what if it comes back? Let's take anxiety. I work with a lot of anxiety patients. Er, I'll call them clients as coaching, because I don't work under my license with this.
But I work with a lot of anxiety and I had it myself, so it's something close to my heart. I still experience it. But it's not really about getting rid of it forever, it's about changing your relationship to it. And so that's what I help people do in my coaching, is change their relationship to stress and all these things that cause us so much friction in our lives that we continually try to move away from, and I help them use the pain, use the anxiety, use the discomfort, mental and emotional and physical discomfort, as a gift, as a fuel, as a messenger, to help them find what needs to change in their life.
And so that's what my coaching looks like. We do a lot of visualizations. We do a lot of somatic work. We talk. We really dive in. It is some of the deepest work I've ever done.
Naomi Nakamura: I can imagine.
Shea Osuna: It's amazing. It's humbling. It's fun. And so yeah, that's my online offering now, because I want to be able to help more people. I wanted to be able to navigate this whole pandemic and how to support people. And so yeah, it's exciting. I'm working on doing a little bit of group coaching to help bring down price, but I'm also pretty reasonable. I'm not going to be one of those coaches that's like, "Oh, you want to work with me for 12 weeks. $50,000."
Naomi Nakamura: Oh my gosh.
Shea Osuna: I want it to be in people's grasp, right? Like I want to change people's lives.
Naomi Nakamura: You want to be in people's grasp, but at the same time ... And I really want folks to understand this, because this is deep work, and you want to make it affordable for people, but also in my experience when something is really, really cheap, it attracts people who aren't ready for the work.
Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I'm really glad you said that.
Naomi Nakamura: And it doesn't help the client, and it doesn't help the healer. And so understand that there is a value in the work that you're getting, and so it's ... I have made these investments for myself, and it's some of the best investments that I make, because what you get out of it, you really can't put a dollar value on it.
Shea Osuna: Oh, absolutely. I'm really glad you said that, because ... And I'll be super honest, if there's any practitioners out there, I think that's part of the hard part of being a healer, is charging, because you want to help everyone. And this has been my own journey too of what feels congruent and in alignment and worth it for me to be able to show up, because I want to be paid enough to feel like I can fully show up and ween out the people who aren't ready.
Naomi Nakamura: Exactly, because it is nothing worse for everyone involved when you have someone you're working with who's not ready for it yet.
Shea Osuna: Yup. It never ends well.
Naomi Nakamura: It never ends well, and I too ... I try to be affordable for people, but at the same time, you really don't want people who aren't in the right mindset for the work that you do.
Shea Osuna: Absolutely.
Naomi Nakamura: But what I love about what you're doing is that ... Especially this year there's been so much science versus wellness and holistic and it's this battle, but if you really understand the work that it is, it is all connected, because when you talk about woo-woo work, that really is about your mental health and again, your brain and your nervous system. So this is not some made up stuff, and-
Shea Osuna: It's science.
Naomi Nakamura: It's not fluff. It is all science, and I think when you really take a step back and understand basic anatomy, which let's be honest, most people don't even understand how our human bodies function, but when you start to understand how all the different systems in the body function together and how they impact each other, there really is no gap between holistic and what we call science or western medicine, because it's really just your perspective and you've got to reframe how you look at your body, at your health, and how the human body functions.
Shea Osuna: Agreed.
Naomi Nakamura: I don't know. With the training that I've done, that was really the main point that was hammered home, so I don't feel like they need to make this choice between am I following science or am I following holistic health, because to me, it's the same thing if you understand how the human body actually works.
Shea Osuna: Absolutely. I mean I am a chiropractor. I was board certified. I had to take all this exams that allowed the science to be good. Like believe me, the science is there, and I'm going to push it even farther to say how has following western medicine and ... And for some people you might say it's been great, and I honor you. Like this is not back and forth argument of what's better, right? But for those of you who are asking ... who want more, who maybe want a different way than maybe just medication, how is it working for you?
And are you even remotely open to just ask yourself the question, even if it's a placebo, even if it's a miracle that can't be explained but it changed your life, are you open to it? Right? Like do we always have to have science to hide behind when your life changed and your pain went away, and you built this business that satisfies you financially and your soul and like do we have to prove it if it worked, right? Like can't we be open to some things that maybe we can't explain?
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah.
Shea Osuna: And I think that's what really needs to change in our culture too, because so many other cultures pray to gods that ... and go do rain dances and do things that we can't prove with science that they work, and they make us happy, and they make us connected. That, I think, is one of the biggest, biggest pieces for me, and what also came up when you were talking was ... around the money thing especially, when you look at how much your life changes from this, the investment, like you said, is priceless, because most of my people go on to quitting their corporate jobs that they don't like and building their own businesses and becoming extremely successful to the point where what they paid me is nothing.
Naomi Nakamura: Right, because if you think about like ... Right. So just using that one ... That's only one scenario. When you go back to what you said about how someone is ... their physical body is their shoulders are hunched over, their shoulders are up in their neck, like they have all of ... That's their posture, and it can come from being in a situation that just doesn't bring you fulfillment, and doesn't even bring you joy.
So when you talk about people leaving or making career changes, it's because they're suddenly doing something that they find joy in and fulfillment.
Shea Osuna: They're [inaudible 00:41:58].
Naomi Nakamura: And yes, they're liberated and it's energizing to them. And that's not to say those type of changes are for everyone, but that's just one example of the impact that this kind of work can have.
Shea Osuna: Yeah. I always say that the people who find me are seekers. They want more.
Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shea Osuna: Like I said, I have no judgment for anyone who just wants to feel out of pain and good and go on with their life and keep things the way they are, and they look for little tweaks here and there, and that's wonderful. The point of it is are you satisfied with your life? Are you finding joy in your day-to-day? And if you're not, then it's time to look for more. If little tweaks like a cool little exercise routine brings you joy, or a little change in your diet, and that's all you need, absolutely.
But there's some people on this planet, me included, that cannot stop digging deeper, and if that's you, this is the type of work that is there for you, and it's novel and it's beautiful and you feel more connected to your soul and your purpose and I merge the science, of course, and I use the science, but the idea is to get deeper into the truth of who you are. At the core of your soul, why are you here? And that's, I think, what we're all seeking, right?
Naomi Nakamura: Yeah, I think this is probably one of the biggest lessons I learned last year. It's really seeing the need-to have-tos, and releasing the shoulds.
Shea Osuna: Yes.
Naomi Nakamura: And as simple as that sounds ... And some people will be like, "You're getting all woo-woo again," but if you really think about it, that's really what it comes down to.
Shea Osuna: Oh, it's real. It's not even woo-woo. It's science. Like I tell people all the time, I'm like, "You are shoulding all over yourself right now." And where are the shoulds coming from? Cultural conditioning of how we're supposed to show up, and that's part of the misalignments in the pelvis that I see a lot, is cultural conditioning, and feeling the way that you're living based on how culture's telling you versus what feels authentic and natural to you, and that shows up in pelvis, and it's amazing when it's liberated.
Those are the people who go leave their jobs. It's kind of a joke. Not to scare anyone away, but I've had probably 10 patients leave their jobs because of being under care. It's like unbelievable.
Naomi Nakamura: Well on that note, we'll end here, and we'll have you back next week for a follow-up episode. And we have a bunch of more topics that I can't wait to get into, but in the meantime, how can people connect with you?
Shea Osuna: Yeah, so simply if you just want to find some really fun information, The Well Healing Center is my physical practice in Lafayette, Colorado. You can follow it on Instagram if you want, or also you can email me personally at dr, doctor, D-R, Shea, S-H-E-A, Lindsay, L-I-N-D-S-A-Y, @gmail.com if you just want more information, support. If you want to find a practitioner in your area, I'd be happy to. So those are a couple ways that we can connect.
You can even find me on The Well Healing Center Instagram and just private message me if you want, and I'd be happy to just connect you with the right people or give you some guidance. So I'm here.
Naomi Nakamura: And I will link to all of those in the show notes. So thank you so much, and we'll see you back next week.
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!
Connect with Naomi on: Instagram
| Pinterest
