WHAT IS NETWORKSPINAL?
NetworkSpinal is unlike anything else out there.
It is a framework and philosophy for understanding how organic systems process energy and information. It is ultra-specific, elegant, measurable and reproducible.
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Your nervous system is just like the electrical wiring in a computer, connecting all the different parts to the central controlling chip to work as a whole conjoined system.
Your nervous system is made up of the special cells and tissues, forming your brain, spinal cord, and the nerves that branch from your spinal cord to all the cells and systems of your body.
Through vibrational and electrical signalling, your brain, spinal cord and nerves control and coordinate every single system and function of your body. From the way you think, to the way you move. The following two modes are crucial for how our bodies
THRIVE under pressure — or — BREAK DOWN from stress.Fight-or-Flight
When activated by short-term stress this mode appropriately directs energy and attention to external vigilance, defensive muscle activation and a release of stress hormones in order to respond & adapt. This is a healthy short-term response.
If engaged too-often for too-long, CHRONIC-stresscreates a constant state of HYPER-vigilance. This state of fight-or-flight fundamentally alters your body’s behaviour, changes the structure of your spine and shifts your perception of your body and of your life. Through CHRONIC-stress, your ability to heal, recover and grow is impaired.Rest-and-Repair
When your body feels safe and is able to disengage fight-or-flight, this mode redirects energy internally for healing, rest, repair and growth.
Your nervous system does this by communicating with these systems: respiratory (breath), hormonal (reproductive) and immune (detox & cellular repair). Your resistance to stress depends on how easily you can engage this mode. When the behaviours, structures and perceptions of our body remain altered from CHRONIC-stress, it can be difficult to engage this mode. -
NetworkSpinal can help reorganise old, inefficient and inauthentic neurological patterns of thinking and behaving. These are replaced by optimised, energy-efficient and sustainable strategies for human performance, physiological function and life enjoyment.
In its application as a chiropractic spinal-based healthcare system, we are able to assess your level of central nervous system adaptability, and facilitate greater somatic (body) awareness through enhanced brain-body communication.
In other words, NetworkSpinal is about optimising the humanOS (operating system).
“There can be no doubt that we are witnessing the birth of a powerful method of healing, grounded in rigorous scientific fact, that will become integral to future systems of healthcare.”
— Dr. Kim Jobst, Editor in Chief, Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine
NetworkSpinal chiropractors
hold at least 6 years of formal education
Including: a 5 year full time university double degree and at least one year postgraduate certification for NetworkSpinal to be fully qualified, as well as continuous professional development.
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Due to its complexity, NetworkSpinal can only be practiced by health professionals who meet the below requirements:
Completion of a 5 year full-time university degree as a Doctor of Chiropractic.
Participation in and maintaining ongoing certification for NetworkSpinal through it's governing body, EpiEnergetics.
Must hold a current AHPRA registration (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) or overseas equivalent.
If you are interested in NetworkSpinal as a career pathway, please contact us so we can direct you towards the best Australian education services.
NetworkSpinal is different from traditional chiropractic and other manual modalities
Instead of using a manual force or manipulation to realign the body, NetworkSpinal utilises light touch contacts along the spine to help your brain observe patterns of tension, defence and distortion. This process allows your body to begin adjusting itself.
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Performed only by qualified chiropractors, a NetworkSpinal care session is called an entrainment.
In physics, an entrainment refers to multiple parts of a dissonant system coming together and vibrating as one cohesive and dynamic network.
In practice, a NetworkSpinal entrainment uses specific depths of gentle touch at specific areas along the spine to optimise the ability for the nervous system to self-organise, self-regulate and self-heal.
Learn more about entrainments in “Common Questions”.
NetworkSpinal integrates somatic exercises
NetworkSpinal has been developed with somatic integration exercises which utilise touch, breath and conscious focus to reconnect to parts of ourselves that have been disconnected.
These practices are vital in helping a person connect with each stage of their healing journey with more ease & efficiency, and can be truely transformational.
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SomatoRespiratory Integration or “SRI” has been developed in tandem with NetworkSpinal as part of The 12 Stages of Healing framework & philosophy.
SRI exercises are body (somato) breath (respiratory) integration practices which use touch, breath, movement and conscious focus to connect with our experience.
This process also helps us to re-connect to parts of ourselves that have been disconnected due to chronic-stress or trauma.SRI is separate & distinct from breathwork. There are 12 specific SRI exercise for each of the 12 Stages, and are facilitated in 20 min 1-on-1 sessions within NetworkSpinal care, or as a standalone practice from home.
12 Stages of Consciousness
Although they were developed alongside NetworkSpinal, the 12 Stages are a universal human experience that exists even outside of NetworkSpinal care. It is an examination of the human condition, the unique rhythms of life and the consciousness through which we experience our world.NetworkSpinal allows us to analyse the way these stages present in your body & your life, and alongside powerful entrainments, facilitate SRI to bring connection to the stage we are in.
Somatic Awareness, Acknowledgment & Acceptance of the stage we are in brings greater connection with life’s experiences, and can dramatically transform & propel us to new heights.
Conversely, not acknowledging the stage of healing or consciousness playing out in our body and our life can keep us repeating the same old patterns and cycles of behaviour.
The 12 Stages are innate and fundamental to the human experience. “12 step” programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous use a similar framework to the 12 Stages of Healing and attain remarkable success.
Alcoholics Anonymous achieve this, as we do in NetworkSpinal, by taking people through an exploration of human consciousness, to seek more connection in their body and their life.
NetworkSpinal is holistic
& trauma-informed
It is a framework that allows us to assess stress patterns in a person’s nervous system and precisely examine their level of overwhelm at any given moment. This reveals more than just the physical state of someone's health, and tells us how they are participating with life on a mental, emotional, social and energetic level.
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Trauma fundamentally affects someone's nervous system and the way they experience, react to and engage with their world, often leaving long standing marks.
As part of our trauma informed framework, we will work with you to evaluate your PACE scores (Positive & Adverse Childhood Experiences) to see how your experiences have shaped the state of your nervous system and impacted the structures, behaviours and perceptions of your body and your life.
Click here to watch an PACE Score presentation.
Click here for more information about PACE Scores.NetworkSpinal can be a powerful way to help change the state of someone's nervous system.
When the brain and body are more connected and coherent, the nervous system exhibits greater levels of resilience, adaptability and energy efficiency. The armouring, protection and hyper-vigilance that trauma brings can begin to diffuse and become integrated into the system as a learning experience, changing a person's relationship to it.
What a person had previously experienced as a wound then has the potential to be experienced as a gift, often inspiring others around them along the way.
Please also read; “Common Questions > Can Children Receive Care?"
NetworkSpinal can be
life-changing
NetworkSpinal's unique assessment and delivery has shown to result in changes across multiple domains of someone's overall quality of life and life enjoyment. This is why many people choose to have NetworkSpinal as part of their life. Read more on our “Research” page.
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Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe how the nervous system learns, lays down new neural pathways and modifies existing connections.
Neuroplasticity occurs through repetition, like learning to ride a bike, adjust to a new routine, or adapt to a stressful environment, and becomes a fundamentally new way your body learns to operate.Because NetworkSpinal helps the nervous system’s ability to reorganise as needed, this care is inherently neuroplastic in nature.
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To deliver best results it is likely that your chiropractor will recommend a program of care to help create neuroplastic change in your body and your life, not just a temporary fix.
Just as we don't expect one exercise session to build muscle, or expect one night of sleep to keep us going for the week, or expect one day of healthy eating to sustain our vitality long term, we cannot expect one chiropractic session to turn our life around.
The NetworkSpinal entrainment sessions themselves are not an event, but rather a process towards long term health and vitality. Therefore, for those wishing to transform their lives, building repetition and momentum with multiple sessions is recommended and expected.
We are aware that sustainable change requires sustainable lifestyle integration, so we have built programs of care to account for this. Read more about these in the "Our Process" page.
Step 1: Complete!
Step 2
Step 3
COMMON QUESTIONS
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When you experience your body moving on the table, you are experiencing one of the wave phenomena that occur in NetworkSpinal care.
The wave is a way that the body unwinds any defensive, conditioned and inauthentic patterns of behaviour. The more refined and energy-efficient this signalling is, the better you can respond to your environment and express your authentic self.
This spinal wave is an involuntary and organic expression of the reorganisational ability of the nervous system in dissipating, reseting and recalibrating tension along the entire spine and connective tissue systems.
It is a strategy that develops over time and presents uniquely for each person.
This has been analysed since the 1990's by the STEM departments of multiple universities and is now recognised as the second only-known Central Pattern Generator (CPG) of the human body.
A CPG is the way your brain controls, activates and organises your sensorimotor strategies. This means the way you move your muscles, walk, run, behave, respond to your environment and express yourself.
When your brain activates all these responses, it does so in a way that is uniquely you. It is like your own signature or fingerprint. For example, the first known CPG is the human gait (walk), and technology today is capable of identifying an individual solely based on their gait. That's how individualised a CPG is.
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Yes. NetworkSpinal is gentle, non-invasive and perfectly safe for newborns, children, adults and seniors.
During childhood, the nervous system is incredibly adaptable and responsive to input as neurological patterns are being established through neuroplasticity. The brain lays down many neural pathways as a child interacts with their environment, and then consistently prunes off any pathways that are no longer used.
Excessive physical, chemical (including nutrient deficiencies) or emotional stress a child sustains will reinforce fight or flight pathways as learned neuro-behavioural patterns.
Click here to watch an ACE Score presentation.This is precisely why stress in these formative years has a lifelong impact on health expression, behaviour and illness rates.
NetworkSpinal can help regulate a child's nervous system through these crucial years of development.
Chiropractors are trained to assess developmental milestones in children and are often sought after by parents.
The results of the largest and most robust inquiry in Australia to date (found here) involving 21,874 submissions revealed:
98% of parents reported chiropractic helping their child.
99.7% of parents having positive experiences.
Zero cases of harm reported.
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As we are establishing greater awareness within your body, in the process of your nervous system finding areas of tension and unwinding those patterns, it can reconnect to certain experiences and sensations it had previously compartmentalised and disconnected from.
In these moments we can often re-experience an emotion or feeling we hadn't let ourselves fully experience at the time an event occurred. This is a natural phenomenon throughout the healing process called retracing. Retracing is expected, temporary and a good sign that energy is moving and connection is being made.
Emotion means “energy-in-motion”, and its purpose is to compel us to take action.
Research within this field was conducted by the renowned neuroscientist Candace B. Pert, a Nobel Prize nominee who’s book Molecules of Emotion explores the link between emotions and the mind-body connection.
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"The purpose of pain is to interrupt your life." - Dr. Donny Epstein (DC).
Pain is an intelligent response and an invitation for change. Unless the necessary changes in perception, structure or behaviour are taking place in your life, you will still have the experience of pain.
The objective of NetworkSpinal is greater nervous system coherence and regulation. As your nervous system changes, it is very common that the body is able to resolve the symptoms (and more), however, NetworkSpinal is not a treatment for pain, as that is not the objective.
Your body orchestrates its own healing, so pain can resolve when it is no longer needed, and not a moment sooner.
Instead of asking Will this help my pain?, what happens if you ask How is my pain trying to help me?
A study of 165,569 adults found opioid pain relief prescription was 55% lower among chiropractic clients compared with those not under care.
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NetworkSpinal has demonstrated positive outcomes for improving HRV (Heart-Rate Variability), which is a gold standard measure of nervous system stress. Because of the strong correlation between HRV, vagus nerve tone and the parasympathetic (Rest-and-Repair) nervous system, NetworkSpinal can play a big part in regulating healthy vagal tone.
A healthy vagus nerve (or healthy vagal tone) regulates cardiac, digestive and immune function. In order to have healthy vagal tone, the body needs to be able to engage its natural Rest-and-Repair state.
Stress, trauma and other nervous system overwhelm can engage the sympathetic Fight-or-Flight state for long periods of time, inhibiting the Rest-and-Repair functions.
NetworkSpinal can assist the body to naturally move from Fight-or-Flight into Rest-and-Repair, meaning healthier vagal tone, HRV, cardiac function, immune regulation and digestive function.
NetworkSpinal and HRV research can be found here.
Further chiropractic and HRV research can be found in article one and article two.