Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash
My path from Spinal Flow client to Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics practitioner in Samford, Brisbane
I love how new experiences drop in for me, and likely many of you can resonate. You hear about something from one person, then from a different source, and the third time is the charm. You take a step toward this new experience, and next thing you’re down the rabbit hole of learning, experiencing and exploring until enough data has been collected. For me, the data was in having many sessions of Spinal Flow and my body feeling a strong pull towards this work. My body was primed for this work after completing a 4 day vision quest in September 2025 and an awareness of needing to support my body to move through some challenging material in had been holding onto since childhood.
What are Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics?
Spinal Flow is a gentle, hands-on somatic technique that uses light touch on the sacrum and cranium to help the nervous system find ease and release long-held tension patterns. Spinal Energetics works with the body’s own biofield to move energy towards areas of bound tension to assist with release and regulation. Both are about the body listening and reorganising itself, and I now offer them in my clinic in Samford, north-west of Brisbane.
Why I was drawn to somatic therapies
I love hands-on, somatic-based therapies and healing processes, not just for my body but for my whole being. There is something so deeply satisfying in having my body touched and nurtured in ways I am unable to do for myself. Fully receiving in those moments is even more amazing when the practitioner is also receiving. In Kahuna massage, there is a rhythmic flow that is deeply meditative for both parties. In Reiki, the universal Reiki energy moves through the practitioner to the client. In Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics, it also feels like I am receiving while guiding my clients’ bodies towards their self-healing capabilities. I often feel energised from these sessions. I don’t just relate this to the energy flowing through the session, but also to the deep presence of the practitioners, which isn’t really possible when coming from the mind.
I definitely feel aligned in this new way of working with clients, even more so than in consultations where herbal medicines, diet and lifestyle are the focus. On the face of it, it’s because my body is talking to their body, and my mind does not really have to enter the conversation. It’s purely somatic. When doing herbal medicine consults, even though I feel a strong intuitive connection to the plants and the people I work with, the mind needs to be engaged far more than in these somatic modalities. As a perimenopausal woman who often forgets my words and who has always felt my way through life, this feels like a coming home, in a way I haven’t experienced before.
I feel I have been working towards this for some time. On my own healing path, from a challenging early childhood, to immune and gut issues in my teens and 20s, to breast cancer at 34 and many, many years of recovering from cancer treatment, I have relied heavily on somatic-based therapies to bring me back into a state of balance and bliss, time and time again. I knew that once I had completed my degree in health science in 2023, I would pursue further studies that brought in some form of somatic training. I can see that the modalities that have supported me the most from my mid 30s to now (I’m 48) have mostly been somatic. Even when the focus has been on healing trauma or moving through challenging emotions, somatic therapies are the ones that have moved the needle the most, more than any type of talk therapy or ingestion therapy (herbs, nutrients, dietary changes). That’s not to say these don’t also have their place. They really do, I use them personally, and I still offer holistic herbal medicine consults for those needing extra support in these areas. I just have a very strong sense that, a lot of the time, disease states in the body can start from (and are exacerbated by) a dysfunctional nervous system. I know Hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut, but he didn’t live with the stressors of modern life. The spine is the communication highway of the body. It really is no wonder that working with this part of the body, connecting directly into the nervous system, can have such profound effects.
Why Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics feel different
I’ve noticed even more nuances in which types of somatic therapies I feel most engaged with. I have experienced and engaged with massage therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, acupuncturists, craniosacral therapists, kinesiologists, Bowen therapy practitioners, energy healers and many more, and never once did my body respond to the input the way it does with Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics. Sure, I would feel relaxed, my nervous system would drop into parasympathetic, and a felt sense of a shift would occur. However, in many cases my physical body would go back to its holding, protective pattern within weeks, if not days, and my nervous system would settle for days but be back on alert at the next sign of trouble (or triggers). With SF and SE, my body responds with a deep listening and then movement as it starts to literally reorganise itself, release bound tension, address fixations and let go of long-held protective patterns. I like that my body responds in a way that feels like it is creating change in the moment. Not everyone has strong physical movement. The sessions you see online with these modalities often show bodies that are moving, but that is not always the case.
What to expect in a Spinal Flow session
With SF, you can see or experience movement like shaking, twitching, jolting/jerking, or a wave-like flow. You may notice changes in breath, where the body expands outwards more deeply than before the session, creating more space within the body and a feeling of expansion through the spine. The client may also experience internal movement, signals, electricity, bubbles of energy shifting, or absolute stillness with a sense of recalibration, in ways individual to the body on the table.
What to expect in a Spinal Energetics session
In SE, the body may initially be quite still for many, many sessions, until it’s not, and then more and more movement may come into the sessions. If your body is primed for a release of these tension patterns and you’ve been moving towards this in other ways, movement may occur in the first few sessions. In both instances, the body is seeking safety in order to work with, and bring ease to, these protective patterns.
How Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics work with the nervous system
When I say protective patterns, I mean actual tension in the muscles and compensation that has created physical change of form and structure. This doesn’t just occur from physical disturbances, but also from emotional, mental, spiritual, chemical, ancestral and intergenerational ones. The body responds to its environment in ways that keep it safe and protect it from harm. It’s a very clever system. However, in doing so, it can create more harm down the track if it repeats the same response over and over to a trigger or stimulus and the problem becomes chronic.
In the moment, though, it is doing what it needs to do to stay safe. Through light touch directly on the sacrum and cranium (SF), or in the body’s biofield/electromagnetic field (SE), we connect with the body’s innate intelligence and the body is able to find and experience ease. In SF, this happens through connecting with the body’s life force energy. In SE, we use the energy already in the system and move it towards areas of bound tension that need support in releasing. Either way, we are working with the body’s own innate intelligence and not bringing energy in from elsewhere (like in Reiki). This is working within the contained loop of the body and its own electromagnetic fields. That said, there is a greater healthy energy field we are all connected into, and if we as practitioners can calm our own energy fields and nervous systems when working with clients, we too can intentionally access this and allow it to become part of our sessions.
To throw even more weight behind my own personal experience with these modalities, I am currently in late perimenopause and feeling more balanced and settled within myself than… well, forever. Of course, I’ve been taking other approaches too. I did some Internal Family Systems therapy earlier this year (hardly any talking involved, for me anyway), I have done a lot of nature-based programs over the last few years, and a lot of dancing. I have connected with each of these practices and therapies in somatic ways, so again, it is connection and healing from a very embodied space.
Why I love this work for women’s nervous system health
So, coming back to why I see Spinal Flow and Spinal Energetics as so important in my new approach with clients. Say someone wanted to have a holistic health consult with me. I would spend 1.5 hours delving into their health history and having them speak into their current health issues, the ones that interfere with their daily life on an ongoing basis. Most of the time there is a nervous system component to their health challenges, and these days most of the people I see can see and feel this loud and clear, which is wonderful! There is so much awareness around nervous system health now. They can see how it affects their gut health, immune health, thyroid and endocrine health, and of course it’s strongly entwined with mental health, even cardiovascular health. I nearly always have my clients on nervous system support with herbs, flower essences and lifestyle/sleep hygiene adjustments.
Working directly with the body, bypassing the mind, assists the client to implement change. They are in a state of receptivity, and many women do not receive enough and are often giving beyond their capacity. They get to come into my clinic space, lie down on the table, rest their bodies and minds, receive the healing, take some time to rest and integrate, then move slowly back into their day. Rinse and repeat, and before too long (often even in that first session) they feel themselves again. They remember who they are underneath it all. They connect to that deeper part within that has been slowly buried under all of the masks they wear. I love seeing how their faces change, soften and open from the beginning to the end of a session when they rise from the table, dishevelled in the most beautiful of ways. That is why this work is my favourite way of working with women. I feel so blessed to see into the depths of my clients’ hearts in a session: so open, expanded and in awe of how rested they feel.
Book a Spinal Flow or Spinal Energetics session in Samford
If this sounds like something you need in your life, please book in for your initial appointment or find out more about each modality I offer. I would truly be honoured to care for you in this way. If you would like to connect first, send me a message via the chat box or send an email from the contact page.