Did you know that trauma and stress don’t just affect your emotions but can also be stored in your body—especially in your spine? How can we release this tension and improve our overall well-being?
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Stefanik, a chiropractor at Wellness Rhythms, to explore the powerful connection between stored trauma and physical health. Drawing inspiration from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Stefanik explains how everyday stressors and past trauma manifest physically, leading to discomfort and emotional imbalances.
We dive into Network Spinal chiropractic, a gentle technique that helps release tension in the spinal cord, promoting higher energy states and better health. Dr. Stefanik also shares her journey into this integrative healing approach and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion, body awareness, and open communication for overall well-being. If you’re looking for ways to release stored tension, enhance your health, and embrace a holistic approach to healing, this conversation is one you won’t want to miss!
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Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Recently, I read a book called The Body Keeps Score, which talks a lot about the idea of all of our traumas, everything happening in our past, regardless of what it is, kind of being stored in our body, this is oftentimes things that we sometimes tend to forget about, forget about how it’s continuing to impact our lives, such as continued patterns in our childhood that we kind of lived through or even other kind of more acute lived experiences that could be one car accident when you’re 16 and now you’re 35 so it doesn’t really become something you think about in a lot of your minds. Now, there’s been some study about how some of these subconscious patterns continue to emerge through some subconscious programming, but here today, I’m here to talk to you a little bit more about how the body itself keeps score, how certain parts of the body kind of retain the memories of these traumas and how it can still be impacting what we’re doing today and how we’re showing up in everything around. And to facilitate this conversation, I’d like to invite on my guest, Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk with Wellness Rhythms. She is a doctor of chiropractic services.
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Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk, welcome to the program.
Hi, Stephen. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful that you have this awesome podcast and that you’ve given me the opportunity to be on it. And, yeah, I do network spinal as a doctor of chiropractor.
We’re talking about how the body keeps score, and your focus specifically is on how the spine has kind of kept score of some of these traumas or other items from our past.
Yeah. So, what we like to say is that what goes to the back of the mind tends to go to the spine and so what Network Spinal is specifically helping people realize is that there’s events that happen in our life, whether you call them stressors or traumas or just stressful events, your body actually doesn’t really know the difference between a massive stressor like something that we usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” or the small kind of everyday stressors, where we’re stressing to get to work on time or we have a deadline or our dog is barking at us and we don’t know why. Your nervous system actually doesn’t know the difference between a massive stressor and a small stressor. It really responds in the exact same way and, sometimes, that is responding by going into fight or flight. So, when we go into fight or flight, there’s a lot of things that people realize happens. So, your eyes, your pupils are going to dilate, your breath becomes a little bit more shallow and more rapid, your heart rate becomes more rapid, your muscles tense, all of those things people recognize, but a lot of people don’t realize that your nervous system actually contracts when you’re in fight or flight. So, literally, your spinal cord is going to elongate because it’s contracted and tight within the canal about two to three inches, which is a lot.
So explain to me the mechanism by which this nervous system contracts. So, is this what you mean when you said what goes to the back of the mind probably goes to the spine? What exactly happens if –– let’s say it’s a chronic stress, let’s just say, every day, you’re unnaturally worried about, I don’t know, another member of your family just blowing up on you and slamming doors and picking things.
Yeah, so great question. So, it’s pretty much that fight or flight response. If you are having that stressor every day where you are worried about that family member blowing up at you, your nervous system is really smart and if there was an event where that family member did actually blow up at you and you survived that moment, obviously, because you’re still living today, that was in the past, your nervous system learned, oh, man, this was ––
That is that physical manifestation. Pretty much all of your connective tissue, everything is tightening up, especially the connective tissue surrounding the spinal cord, so that’s how that happens. And your nervous system is super smart and it’s like, “Oh my god, I survived in that moment and that was the coping mechanism that I did, I went into fight or flight but I survived,” and so when you even think about that stressful thing happening again, your nervous system has that memory of that’s how I survived in that moment so it’s going to want to do that same coping mechanism and so, unfortunately, maybe your whole body doesn’t go into fight or flight but parts of your nervous system that had that traumatic event, that memory that you talked about with the body keeps the score, the part that kept that memory and your body is super smart, it was like, “I survived so I’m gonna do that again,” and we keep doing the same types of coping mechanisms over and over again in our body, unless it is taught how to do something else. So that’s my whole job is to get your brain actually connect with your body again, realize, “Oh, man, I’ve actually been holding something here for 20 years and I had no idea,” or you did have an idea but you’re actually probably having pain. Getting your brain to connect with your body again, realize that you actually have all of that stress and tension and trauma stored in your body and want to release it by itself so that your nervous system is creating a new coping mechanism for the stress that you actually have instead of what happened in the past and the coping mechanisms that it gained from that experience.
So that coping mechanism, that tightening of your muscles, each time you do it, it has a small impact on your spine that adds up over time/
Exactly. Yeah, so it’s the accumulative stressors that we have in our life. What we’ve talked about, that was an emotional stressor. They’re really the most prevalent type of stress that we have in our lives. And it’s the big things that people you know usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” like divorce and moving and losses of loved ones and abuse and all those awful things, but there’s also the smaller emotional traumas, like getting to work on time and the text messages, the deadlines, the boss calling, the cat constantly being everywhere and you don’t know what they want. Those are some of the smaller emotional stressors, like getting to work on time, sitting in traffic. Those things are definitely very prevalent that might lead your nervous system to actually still be holding on to any of the stress from something remotely similar to it in the past, if it hasn’t actually let that go. So there’s the emotional stress. There’s also the physical stressors and the chemical stressors that we have in our lives.
So the physical stressors, you’re talking about things like accidents, right?
Exactly. So those are the some of the bigger ones, just like most people assume so like an accident, a car accident or a skiing accident or jumping off a trampoline and landing weird. There’s also the smaller physical stressors, like if you have a job where you have to sit all day long or a job where you have to stand all day long, you’re talking on the phone, if you’re leaning over typing over a computer, those are some physical stressors.
So the physical stressors could be just the manner in which our day to day lives in the modern world don’t exactly line up with what humans were evolved to live, we never mentioned, I have this I have this acronym, I just think of AIS for Alone Indoors and Seated for what we spend too much time generally doing, so spending too much time alone indoors and seated as opposed to the natural human condition, that type of stuff, and it probably takes on a different form with, say, more of an assembly line manual labor worker who may spend too much time in like one specific position because that’s where their station has their body moving.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you’ve got it. We were taught in school sitting is the no smoking. It’s as bad for you as smoking if you’re sitting for eight hours a day at a job so that’s why I love what I do because it actually teaches you to listen to the small messages that your body wants to tell you, like, “Hey, I’ve been sitting for two hours. Can I stand up and stretch for a little bit?” or go and get some more water or step outside for 30 seconds and get some sunlight on your body, like those are some of the small communications that most of us have shoved down and they’ve shoved them down because we have to be perfect. We have to fall in line with what we have to do to, quote-unquote, “succeed in this world,” and we have to hustle and all that stuff at the detriment of our health, and that’s usually why people come to see me is because there’s something in their life that their body is like, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m holding all this stress. I’ve tried to communicate to you that something needs to change and I just can’t take it anymore.” Whether their conscious brain is saying that or whether it’s literally just their physical body screaming at them, usually sort of pain or through some sort of mental health problem, or they’re actually at that overwhelm point where they’re like, “I just can’t take this anymore.” Those are people who I love to work with because being able to actually have your brain and your body communicate appropriately allows you to be your authentic self, and, sometimes, that’ll help you to actually make those challenging decisions that you could not make when you were just trying to fit in the status quo.
And now you also talked about chemical stressors, the third category.
Yeah. So the chemical stressors are –– they’re pretty much everywhere so it’s like the air that we’re breathing, the food that we’re eating, the water that we’re drinking, all of that kind of stuff. There’s only so many things that we can take out of the water so we have to make sure that your body can actually adapt to that. And I’m going to say there’s like an epidemic of people becoming gluten and lactose intolerant.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, you suddenly hear about it all the time.
Yeah, exactly. You hear it all the time. And people having dietary restrictions, and if you were able to eat gluten or eat dairy when you were younger, your body does know how to actually digest those things. It literally has the enzymes that you need to be able to digest those things. So a lot of the time, it actually leads me to believe that your nervous system is probably in just such a state of stress surrounding those nerves that go to your digestive system, it’s either at the top where the vagus nerve is coming out of from your brain stem or in those areas that are closer to your digestive system so your low thoracic into the lumbar spine. If your spinal cord is in that fight or flight state where it is contracted and tense and tight, that’s going to basically make the nerves in that area not function as well. And so when you actually take in that gluten or that dairy molecule into your body and it goes to your digestive system, if your body is already freaking out in that area basically because it’s just holding on to too much stress, it’s not going to react appropriately. It is actually just going to react in an inflammation reaction or an immune reaction instead of just telling your pancreas to secrete the enzymes to digest that thing. So we find that a lot of people can actually eat things again. They can eat whatever they want again when their metabolism is working properly, when they don’t have inflammation and stress in their nervous system.
And so how much of this can be thought of as the cumulative stress that you’ve experienced over your lifetime versus how much stress you have in your life at this current moment, the current phase of your life, what your day to day is like right now?
Great question. I’m going to say it all contributes. Some people, they come to me and they’re like, “Yeah, my life’s great right now, but I’ve had all of this awful like stress in the past,” and we go through their paperwork and they’ve listed this and this and this and this and this and this, massive amounts of stress throughout their life, but right now it’s great. However, they’re still having these issues moving forward so they have some sort of pain or whatever that’s going on, or they literally are like, “I can’t find the job, like my dream job, I just can’t find it,” or something so those are different types of problems that they can have too. So, it’s not always about the current stress load. Definitely, the accumulative stress is really important and like how much have you done for that, so it really depends on –– it depends on your perceived amount of stress.
First of all, you’re talking about something that could be way in the past. You could be talking about something like three decades ago.
Yeah, absolutely.
Your perception of that could be very different from the reality.
Yeah.
And depending on how much stress your body is currently holding at that time during that stressor, even if it was three decades ago, that can determine how much your body actually perceives if it’s stressful or not. Share on XSome of that is related to energy states. And so the gentleman that created this work that I do, Network Spinal, his name is Donny Epstein. His website is called EpiEnergetics and I encourage people to go take the five-day challenge, it’s completely free, and you can learn a little bit more about energy states, all of this kind of like higher thinking things that I’m about to just touch on a little bit here, because me talking about this stuff, honestly, we could have like ten podcasts to actually get into the nitty-gritty of what energy states is and all of this extra stuff that is actually involved in Network Spinal other than just the body stuff, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, I get that there’s a lot of specific details.
Yeah. So, basically, it depends on your energy state. If your energy state is energy rich in that moment, you are probably going to actually see the gift of what that trauma was. That’s where you’re going to be at. Instead of if you’re maybe in an energy poor or energy low neutral state, you’re probably going to resort to blaming that person for the rest of your life.
So, let’s say someone had some sort of a traumatic experience or relatively regular habitually traumatic experience around the turn of the century, around 2000, and say that person spends about 10 years in this poor energy state and they were blaming that person, seeing no value in it, was mad at the world, blah, blah, blah. Then, 10 years later, they did some work, therapy and some psychological work to get into a better energy state. Does that 10 years of having perceived what happened the way that that person was perceiving it still have a memory term in how the spine responded?
Precisely. You’re awesome, Stephen. Yep, precisely. Yeah. So that is where the body is still keeping the score. That is where it’s still holding that memory. It might still be having that unconscious coping mechanism related to that trauma.
Even if your mindset might be changing, your body and the actual unconscious parts of how you’re responding to stress might not have changed Share on Xand that’s where we step in with Network Spinal to actually change how you’re doing that and that innately can help you basically be aware of what you’re holding in your body. And that doesn’t mean going back and reliving it. So getting your brain to actually connect with your body and realize what you might be storing and want to create a way to release it by itself, right? I don’t want to be a magic genie to release it for you, we’re actually teaching your brain to connect with your body, realize that you even have this coping mechanism in the first place, and what traumas and stressors that it has actually been related to for potentially decades and want to release that on its own. So it’s connecting with what’s going on, because you need to actually feel things in order to deal with them. So that’s pretty cool. That’s number one. And number two is that we’re literally helping your body constantly practice get into a higher energy state. That’s also what’s happening. So when we can release that spinal cord tension that’s related to that event and practice going back into rest and digest, back into relaxation, away from this fight or flight stress state, then, therefore, you are literally practicing innately going into an energy rich state, or at least energy high neutral state, where you might actually eventually be able to perceive the gift with it just because your body’s not actually holding on to all of that stress anymore.
So it sounds like there’s another component to it, because in the example of the person who had probably gone through some maybe talk therapy and meditation but it’s been over a decade, they’re probably not even remembering the fact that they used to think of these events as the events that ruined their lives. But what you’re saying is in this situation, they may still be susceptible to that fight or flight historic response, to some of those body memory terms, and so, therefore, even though they’ve spent all the time doing the work to overcome one challenge, if something were to happen to them now, they could end up kind of going through that cycle again.
Yeah, absolutely. Definitely, they would be susceptible for their spinal cord still holding that stress and that is still probably the coping mechanism that their body would do. So maybe they have overcome the past stressors but what their current stress load is, the nervous system still has that memory and it hasn’t released it and it hasn’t been trained and learned how to create something new and even realized that that’s valuable for them. So, yeah, sometimes, things need to be changed unconsciously and that’s where we come in. It’s kind of the difference between the top-down and the bottom-up approaches to healing. A lot of people really like the top-down approach, where they are coming from their brain, their frontal cortex, and then to change things downwards, so that’s like frontal cortex down to the body, including the spinal cord, including muscles connected to –– like everything. A good example of that is talk therapy, even meditation where you’re going to like a happy place or a safe place or something, that’s still something that you’re consciously doing with your brain to be able to change what your physiology. A bottom-up approach is what Network Spinal approach is from. So we’re literally changing your physiology to then go from the bottom up to actually change your frontal cortex so that can help you change your perceptions. It can help you become more adaptable to stress. Now you can juggle ten plates when, before, juggling two plates was massively out of your realm and you were completely overwhelmed. So it can definitely –– it can actually change your thought processes and it can change how you’re perceiving stress and it also can change how quickly you’re adapting to stress. So if you do go into fight or flight, it is much faster and it is not as frequent or as often as it used to be.
And would something like physical therapy also represent a bottom-up approach, because it’s kind of working on your muscular system and how it connects to everything?
Great question. A lot of people like to ask how we are similar or different between physical therapy, between massage therapy, between Western medicine, in general. To be honest, there is nothing like what we do. Obviously, I’m extremely passionate about it. I’ve never experienced anything that is remotely similar. Physical therapists are often wanting to restore people to the way they were so there’s usually some sort of physical thing that happened and it’s either an acute or a chronic thing, so if an it’s a cute thing, a lot of physical therapists are great at helping you, if you just broke your arm and you want to get your arm back to actually functioning and being able to lift weights again and stuff, that’s fantastic. Or they’re trying to fix something that has some sort of pain so they’re trying to fix a symptom. Those are usually the two different goals with physical therapy. So that’s not our goal. It’s not even close to a goal that I would want for people. I understand that there are symptoms and that there are pain that happen and I am happy to hear what’s going on and listen to people and completely honor and respect the fact that there is a symptom that’s going on, but that is not going to be the first place that I look.
so like all of that kind of stuff. It’s a very holistic approach. And my goal is not to restore people to a prior state. I actually would much rather help people evolve to who they want to be. What are their goals? What are their ultimate life goals? Where they want –– like where are they going to be thriving and what do they really want in life? That’s what I want to help bring out. And so when I’m literally working with people, the places that we are contacting are the places that your body is doing everything right in that moment. So I’m not necessarily going to the place that is completely screaming with pain or going to the place that feels disconnected or is tense or tight, that’s not necessarily the place that I’m doing that. I’m going to feel that place and respect and realize that it’s there, but that might not actually be the place that you want to have the most attention brought to because what you focus on grows, right, Stephen. What you focus on grows. So what I want to focus on is that place in your body that’s like, “Yeah, everything’s amazing. Life is awesome,” that is where we need to help flourish through positive reinforcement. That’s what we want your body to actually keep doing more of. And so that is how people can actually just naturally feel a little bit more at ease, feel more authentic, feel more like they’re in alignment with what they’re supposed to be doing and they are not stuck, they’re not being held back, they’re not struggling. So this is why this talk is perfect for your audience as a podcast because I don’t want people to feel stuck. I don’t want people to feel like they’re struggling and they’re in pain. Their body actually has a way to get through this, we just need to stop focusing on what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed. That’s what most of Western medicine does and how far has that gotten us?
Yeah. I think the saying is Western medicine is all about buying your health back whenever something goes wrong as opposed to the more preventative aspects of it in general.
Absolutely.
Now, also, what differentiates your practice from a more standard chiropractic endeavor? Because there’s plenty of chiropractors out there doing it in a somewhat different manner.
Yeah, great question. What we just talked about, first of all, is the actual perspective shift. I don’t want to be somebody’s hero that I saved them. I don’t want to find the most broken down, upset, angry, restricted part in your spine and put a high velocity force in there. I would much rather focus on what I want to grow so we kind of go to something that might have the same tension pattern and might be related to that same type of stressor that your body is holding, but it’s kind of like the flip side of the coin. So, instead of the negative and they’re stuck in the pain, I’m actually going to that place where your body is open and at ease but it’s related to the same type of stressor. So that’s the perspective shift, the paradigm shift. And also physically what I’m doing, I’m not cracking or snapping or popping or anything to your body. The type of force that I make is very, very gentle. It’s like light force, honestly, maybe even as light as putting a contact lens in your eye, so very light, in your neck and in your pelvis where your spinal cord attaches at either end so that it can physically release that spinal cord tension and also bring your nervous system so that the fight or flight kind of reactor portion of your brain is not in the driver’s seat. It’s actually allowing the frontal cortex of you, like the human, compassionate, the logical, analytical part of you to be in the driver’s seat so that part of you is making decisions and seeing reality as it is instead of the reactor survivor, fight or flight brain.
And so the essence of your program is releasing that tension in the spinal cord. How does that work for a customer? How long does it usually take for someone to, I don’t know, a standard amount of tension that someone may have stored over the past couple decades of their lives?
Cool, yeah. I would say, on average, I start working with people anywhere from like 4 to 9 months. So when I first meet with people, I do some objective measures that include heart rate variability, surface EMG, full spine X rays, if needed, and a posture assessment. So we kind of get those objective measures and we put them together with the subjective measures of what’s going on with the person. So subjective is like how they’re feeling, like what’s going on and what they did in the past, and so I put those together and then, in the second visit, I go over all of those details with that person so that they can understand why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling and then I put together like an action plan that would actually help them release all of that. So I would say, on average, 4 to 9 months. It might take longer than that to get somebody to a place of ideal. It might take 12 to 24 months, but it really depends on the person. And if the goal is to just get rid of their pain or their tension or their symptoms, sure, that might happen a lot sooner, but, eventually, their goal will eventually change, like, “Hey, can you help me get out of this job that I’ve hated for 10 years,” or, “Hey, I wanna be the best mother that I could ever be for my kids.” There’s no limit to helping people with those kinds of goals so it’s hard for me to answer that when, maybe, if they’re walking in in a low energy neutral state and all they want to do is get rid of something, okay, yeah, that’ll take a certain amount of time and it depends on those objective measures that we take at the beginning. But when people start to actually become more human and they actually realize that they want to, I don’t know, help the world in a different way, there’s really no limit, and that’s the beauty of this work so people can use what they want.
And then you have your own story with this program that actually precluded you to choose to do this for a career.
Yes. So, I started receiving Network Spinal as a patient in 2020. Of course, right? But that was actually when I had already been in chiropractic college, I already knew I wanted to be a chiropractor. So there’s a little backstory behind that as well. When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to help people. I was always like, “I wanna be a teacher,” or something. That was always my answer when I was a little kid, and I knew that I wanted to help people and listen to what’s going on with them and I was always a really, really good listener but I also really wanted to help people hands on because my dad was like, “AI is coming up, you need to do something as a human.” It’s funny, I brought up my dad because that was actually a big instigator for why I wanted to be a chiropractor in the first place. He was in an insane car crash where a semi hit a semi hit a car hit him, and when the cops –– yeah, there’s a lot.
Yeah, I saw this going through with my hands, like a semi, a semi, a car, and then I assumed he was in a car, so you got like the force of a semi hitting into another semi and then maybe, luckily, there was a car in the middle of it to dampen it, I don’t know, but either way, it sounds pretty intense.
It was really intense and when the cops came up to that car, they said, “Where’s the dead body from this car?” and he was standing there being like, “Hey,” so he had some pretty insane low back pain and I was a young kid at that point, like he couldn’t pick me up anymore. We couldn’t go for bike rides. It completely changed my life. I basically lost my dad. And he had tried everything. He tried physical therapy, acupuncture, traditional chiropractic, Western medicine. Nobody could help him with his low back pain, and he went to a type of chiropractor, I’m just going to call it an upper cervical chiropractor. Technically, it’s called an NUCCA, that’s the exact type of upper cervical, but we’re just going to call it upper cervical so we don’t get confused. Upper cervical really helped him. In the first adjustment, his low back pain was gone. So I was like, “Oh my God, that’s what I’m gonna do.” And they do x-rays to be able to find the exact specific vector to apply to your upper cervicals to align you and all, blah, blah, blah, like definitely helps people with pain a lot. And I was like, “Great. I get to do math. I get to help people hands on. I get to listen to what’s going on with them, and I get to help them heal. Awesome. That is what I wanna do.” So I went into chiropractor college in 2019 to do that. That was my whole goal the whole time. I’m going to do this upper cervical chiropractor. And then my best friend in chiropractic college, she started going to this Network Spinal doctor, and she invited me to come to a dinner talk to learn about what the heck it was. And at that dinner talk, I was invited to have a first adjustment with –– her name is Dr. Jeannie Kakizaki, she’s the one that first introduced me to Network Spinal. And so on a separate day, I went and I got that first adjustment and she made one tiny little contact on my pelvis, like super-duper light, brief. It felt like almost nothing. But she told me I was going to be very sore after that adjustment, and I did also bawl my eyes out.
Oh, wow, okay.
Oh yeah. Yeah, honestly, with this work, I bawled my eyes out every single time I got adjusted for the first six months, because a lot of the stressors that I had were those emotional stressors. They weren’t even the big ones, they were a lot of just regular life that most people would consider but I was a perfectionist. I had to get straight A’s. I had to have the 4.0. I had to be the perfect girlfriend. I had to be the perfect volleyball player. So I literally stifled what was anything that was actually authentic for myself in order to fit into all of these roles that society deems as good. So I had all of this emotional stress bottled up in my body that I had no idea.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. It was crazy.
Crazy, powerful experience with that. If you bawled every time you went in for six months, I mean, that’s, obviously, it’s releasing this emotional stress and historic emotional stress, but, I mean, that’s a powerful release,
Right? So that’s how I can say that this work literally changed my life, because when I was able to release that emotional stress, like, eventually, I was releasing anger, I was releasing physical pains that I had in my body, like my wrist pain and my low back pain and all that kind of stuff totally went away. And so, now my emotional perseverance is amazing. Honestly, like my husband, he was my fiancé when he used to say this, but he was like, “That’s one of the things that I love most about you is that you are actually emotional. You understand your emotions. You let them be expressed for a brief amount of time and then they’re gone. You don’t hold on to stuff. You’re not like this angry, raging person for like weeks because of one thing that happened.” That’s something that he prides me in being as his wife so that’s really cool, but it also allowed me to be myself. I was able to say no to people for once in my life. That’s pretty rare, right?
Yeah.
And I was able to actually have my own goals in life, like I wasn’t just doing everything that everybody else told me to do. I did them all perfectly but I wasn’t myself and they weren’t necessarily my own goals, so I actually have my own goals and I am able to strive towards what I actually want and what my body and my brain are communicating is like, yeah, this is where you’re thriving instead of being a numb robot that just kind of did everything perfect.
And thinking of having your own goals, because I tend to refer to it as living by the script on this podcast, which is those standard goals that are set out for you that we oftentimes pursue not even thinking and I think like having to get straight A’s may be a good example of like once you become aware, once you think about it, you can kind of like decide what is it that I want to prioritize? What is the most important thing to me in my life? So, now that you’ve gotten a chance to think about them and actually pursue them, what are your top three goals?
I like this one. Eventually, I want to start my own practice. I want to be the one running the show and helping people. I am already helping people all day long but with my own little rules and quirks and artistry that will come through that so that’s definitely number one. Number two is with my husband. I want to have kids. I’ve already seen both of our kids in meditations and after actually experiencing network spinal, sometimes, I have little visions that happen afterwards. I’ve seen both of them and I’m excited for when the universe wants to bring them onto this plane with us. So I’m super excited. The more realistic part, I just want to have a life where I can go boating on the weekends or in the morning and then I can come into my practice and I can help them be shining, amazing, happy people and just balance life and being fun and authentic and having board game nights with friends and –– yeah, so I love being on the water. That’s definitely a place where I thrive so I’m excited to find where I’m going to live that has a lake that I can go boating all the time and stuff too. So, yeah.
Well, and I think a lot of people listening out there probably relate to this idea of wanting that autonomy over how you set up your life and how you set up your days, because we kind of have the system here and we’ve developed these standard practices about what hours people work and stuff and I actually oftentimes say that I have this vision of a history textbook from the year 2100 looking back on this era and saying, “So, wait, these people worked mostly computer jobs that required being indoors and then they chose to do it all during daylight hours. Why were they doing that?” So being able to look at everything in front of you and saying, okay, but this is how I would set up my days, knowing I still have to get all this work done, I still want to have this impact, I still have these responsibilities, but being able to kind of decide your best way of setting up based on what makes you feel happy or your natural circadian rhythms, in some cases, would kind of dictate that, not making everyone kind of be a copy of the same person in a way.
Precisely. And we don’t deserve that either. I don’t want to be the same as everybody else. Why do we want to do that? Why are we raised that that is what we want to strive to is to fit in like that? That’s actually not what people want. We should be our own individuals, and I think that being able to structure your work day, I think that’s really important and I want more people to have that. I know that that’s becoming more prevalent in the last, I’d say, five years, for sure, and there’s still a lot of restrictions for people. And I think that a lot of that is the mindset that people need to stick within the status quo. They need to fit in the culture. They need to fit in with what’s right and that is literally just being in a low energy, neutral state. You need to work hard and hustle and effort, effort, effort, everything is hard and I need to work at it for it to work right. That’s actually not the case. We can have things be effortless, including our work life.
Life can work for you, you don’t always need to work for life to happen so that is where actually having your body and your brain in alignment and more often in an energy rich state, that’ll just literally happen for you. It is so cool. Share on X
So one of the things I’m thinking about is that confidence around it. So, on the employee end, let’s say you have a somewhat flexible job and you decide that since today is the nicest day of the week, I’m going to go for a bike ride but it’s going to be from two to three. Let’s say, it’s mid to late winter and you don’t have that much nice weather, so Tuesday, from two to three, you’re going to go for a bike because that’s the best time to do it. It’s going to rain on the weekend or something. Question is, do I feel guilty? Do I feel this sense of guilt about the fact that during this time that’s supposed to be society designates to be a work hour for everybody, I’m off doing something else? And I notice a lot of people feel guilty about that, even if they were the ones that donated some of their weekend hours to get a deadline done or came home from the office on the previous Wednesday and logged in and answered some more emails and answered some more calls and stuff. And then on the other end, from the employer end, the confidence to say, “Okay, I trust this person. I know this person cares about their job. They’re competent and they want to get everything done so I don’t need to worry about the fact that it’s Tuesday, it’s three in the afternoon, and they’re running their bikes because I know that, based on ––” and it’s not just the weather, it could be life, it could be children, it could be a family member or a good friend that needs emotional support going through something and maybe you just feel like you’re needed more somewhere else, any of that stuff, the employer having confidence to have that trust and if people kind of get their nervous system back, regulated again, more people will be able to enter that state where we trust ourselves, we trust one another, and we just allow each other to operate their lives based on everyone’s different priorities, principles and personalities.
Heck, yeah. You got it. Absolutely, yeah. If we’re all more often in a state where trust and love and compassion is more on the forefront instead of victimization and blaming and shame, then, absolutely, life will just be more like that. If you want to learn more about that stuff, read The Seeker’s Code. You can learn about the energy states. You don’t need to be under Network Spinal care to know about energy states and to be able to shift that for yourself. Read The Seeker’s Code. At least chapters on energy states. But also communicate. If there’s open and honest communication, and, Stephen, that’s how we actually met at an event that talks about this stuff. If there’s open and honest communication with people, things can be more flexible with that and there can be more trust and if also that thing that you’re doing from 2 to 3 p.m. on a Tuesday is actually something that is really fueling you, you shouldn’t feel guilty. Maybe for a second when you’re leaving the office, you might feel a little bit of guilt, and that’s just the societal norms that are being pressured onto you. But if you go and do that thing that is really helping you be a totally thriving, awesome person, you’re going to feel even better after you did it because you’re going to go back to work and maybe something that might have taken you five hours before you had done that thing only took you an hour and a half because you were actually listening to what your body needed in that moment and you’re at a better state to be able to do that instead of this state that’s like…
Yeah. I mean, and that’s like one of the first things I noticed at like my first jobs after school was people would reach a state where they run out of steam or they’re just trying to take their work and extend it outward just for their appearance and, all of a sudden, there’s a lot of just not really healthy internet scrolling and social media scrolling where it’s like –– and your eyes are kind of limp like this and you’re just sitting there, it’s like, okay, this is not really good for anyone, it’s just this idea that it’s having everyone be there at all those hours is something that just needs to be happening.
Right. I agree. I don’t believe that work should be based on hours, because I think people are just wasting time. They’re sitting there on their computers and scrolling through this numb stuff that is pretty much just having them escape life in that moment, right? They’re not actually listening to their body and sometimes you get out of scrolling, you’re like, “Oh, my neck or my back,” or something because you’re in this poor posture, because that’s probably actually putting you in a little bit of fight or flight. Small.
Yeah. I mean, especially with some of the content you read online because I definitely believe that the algorithms that want to keep you on those websites are oftentimes putting people into fight or flight because you get someone’s attention and it’s like, oh my gosh, like the people we all know that are chronically online and every day it’s always this, “Oh my gosh, dude, did you hear what this person said? Did you hear what this person did? Did you what this group of people are doing now?” It’s always something, and if you take a deep breath and think about it in the long term, you’re like, “This actually doesn’t really impact my life. I’m sorry. I’m not gonna go into fight or flight mode myself over this.”
Yes, absolutely. No, you totally got it. That’s why I’m super excited about your app.
Undoubtedly. So, before we wrap up, Dr. Stefaniuk, do you have any last messages for my audience? Whether it be about any of your practices or just about how we can all go about creating a healthier life, creating healthier thoughts, and getting the life that we really want.
Yeah. First of all, be compassionate to yourself. Recognize that you might have some stress and tension and trauma stored in your body that your body doesn’t actually know how to release. So just be compassionate with yourself. Take care of yourself as best as you can. If you really want help with it, find a Network Spinal practitioner, they are all over this country and other countries. They’re all over the place. Epienergetics.org has the directory of a lot of them.
And very quick, if someone’s in Denver and they want to specifically talk with you, what will be the best way to get a hold of you?
Yes, Wellness Rhythms is the practice name. So if you really do want to meet with us in Denver, our website is wellnessrhythms.com and you can book a free consult even if you just want to come and talk and talk to us about what’s going on in your life before even moving forward and seeing how we could help you, that’s totally available. Or if you’re like, “Yeah, show me the scans, let’s do the x-rays, whatever you want, show me how stressed I am, let’s see how we can do,” that’s totally available too. So you can book it online or you can call us. That’s the website. Take those hints from your body. Listen to them. If it’s like, “Hey, I do want to go on that bike ride too, can we?”
Start listening to those things that that your soul and your body are asking for that are going to make your life better and act on them and see what happens. Share on X
So, could it be your soul in the sense of you feel like I need to go home and get this item done but I’m hanging out with my friends and I’m really enjoying myself and if I deliver this one thing a day or two late, it’s not really going to impact that much, but I need this time with my friends.
Yep. Absolutely, yeah. Listen to your intuition. What are those gut feelings telling you? And don’t always do what everybody wants you to do perfectly. And when I started doing that, my whole life changed. So I encourage other people to listen to yourself a little bit more, like don’t go losing your job because of it but maybe try to communicate to somebody that you need a different schedule.
To wrap up, be kind to yourself, be forgiving, gentle on yourself, listen to your intuition but also communicate things outward and communicate and just say things to people and, maybe, I mean, what’s the thing they always tell you when you’re like 15 years old and you want to start trying to ask people out on dates, it’s like, well, if you don’t ask, the answer is always no. I mean ––
Exactly.
It’s the same with anything else in life, if you don’t ask, the answer is no. So good, logical thing. Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us all about your story and how some of these things we do have kind of impacted your life and how you’re helping everybody else.
Cool. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me today. It was a pleasure.
And I would also like to thank everybody listening today for taking time out of your life to listen to Action’s Antidotes and I hope that you can be kind to yourself and go ahead and communicate what you think you need.
Important Link:
About Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk
Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk is a classically trained chiropractor and specializes in helping the spine and nervous system work more efficiently and effectively.
Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk has been passionate about chiropractic care since high school, drawn to the incredible ability of the human body to heal itself. With a deep love for teaching, hands-on healing, and patient care, she knew early on that chiropractic was her calling. Her approach combines scientific precision with compassionate care, helping patients create lasting, meaningful changes in their health and well-being.
Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Dr. Lauren earned her Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology, majoring in Exercise and Health Physiology. Her academic journey led her to publish research on anti-bullying policies in Canadian National Sport Organizations, a cause close to her heart. Determined to pursue her dream, she moved to California, where she earned her Doctor of Chiropractic degree from Life Chiropractic College West, graduating Summa Cum Laude as Salutatorian of her class.
During her chiropractic studies, Dr. Lauren was introduced to NetworkSpinal Chiropractic, a technique that profoundly transformed her life. Struggling with anxiety and emotional numbness, she found clarity, presence, and a renewed sense of self through this unique approach. Inspired by her own healing, she dedicated her practice to NetworkSpinal care, completing all six levels of training—twice—and attending Gate Healing Fest multiple times to deepen her expertise. Since 2020, she has been helping others break free from limiting patterns, reconnect with their authentic selves, and experience profound healing.
Beyond her practice, Dr. Lauren is an avid lover of board games, softball, water sports, fitness, and travel. A daily practitioner of yoga and meditation, she values the mind-body connection in both her personal and professional life. She also has a passion for music, finding joy in humming and singing—a perfect harmony with the vibrational aspects of NetworkSpinal care.
With a deep commitment to holistic healing, Dr. Lauren empowers her patients to tap into their body’s innate wisdom, embrace transformational change, and live with greater ease, vitality, and self-awareness.