04/30/2026
I just read a very recent opinion piece in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Not because it gave me something new to say…
but because it put language to something I’ve been feeling and observing for a long time.
It challenges this really common idea that “the body keeps the score.”
And the more I sit with it, the more I find myself asking…
What if it’s not the body keeping the score at all?
What if it’s the brain organizing the score… through the body?
If you’ve been following me for a while or are a client of mine, you’ve heard me talk about this — how I see the brain as a kind of processing and predictive unit. It’s constantly taking in information, interpreting it, and organizing responses based on what it believes is needed in that moment.
That perspective isn’t just mine. It lines up closely with the work of Neuroscientists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Feldman Barrett, who both speak to the brain as something that is actively constructing our experience — not just reacting to it.
And this article goes even further into that idea.
It describes what we often call “trauma” not as something stored somewhere in the body, but as a dysregulation in how the system organizes itself — specifically, a loss of what they call metastability, the ability to move fluidly between different states.
That part really landed for me.
The article puts it this way…
Understanding trauma as a disruption in this dynamic balance may help explain why so many different approaches — exposure therapy, EMDR, mindfulness, movement, even flow-inducing activities — can all be effective. Not because of the specific content of what’s being done, but because they support the nervous system in reorganizing itself.
They help restore communication between large-scale networks in the brain.
They quiet repetitive, self-referential loops.
They rebalance how the system regulates itself.
And ultimately, the system relearns how to move between states — finding a balance between activation and settling, between inhibition and excitation.
That reframe is powerful.
Because it doesn’t minimize the impact of what someone has experienced…
but it grounds it in something that can actually be worked with.
Not something “stuck”…
But something dynamic. Changeable. Adaptable.
And as I was reading that, I kept thinking… this is exactly what I see happening through Spinal Flow®.
Not in a theoretical way — but in a lived, observable way.
Because when I’m working with someone, I’m not trying to fix their body or chase symptoms. I’m offering very specific, gentle input into the nervous system through access points along the spine.
And then… the system responds.
Sometimes subtly, sometimes quite profoundly — but what I’m witnessing over time is not something being “released” in a mechanical sense.
It’s the system beginning to reorganize.
Patterns shift.
Responses change.
There’s often less tension, less reactivity, more ease — but also something deeper… a change in how that person is experiencing themselves and the world around them.
And when the article started speaking about “flow” states, it just clicked even more.
Not as a buzzword, but as a biological reality.
A state where the system is no longer over-organizing around protection… and can start moving with more efficiency, more adaptability, more coherence.
A system that can oscillate, rather than get stuck.
A system that can connect, rather than contract.
That’s what I would call flow.
And from this lens, it’s not something I create or force.
It’s something that emerges when the brain no longer needs to hold the same patterns in place.
I know this way of looking at things might feel different, maybe even uncomfortable if it challenges what you’ve heard before.
But for me, it’s been one of the most grounding and clarifying ways to understand what I’m seeing every day in practice.
Not a body holding onto the past…
But a brain and nervous system that learned patterns — and, given the right input, can learn new ones.
