We’ve all felt it: the stress that lingers long after the moment has passed. A tension headache that won’t quit, a lower back that flares when life feels like too much, an exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to touch. The idea behind somatic healing is that this isn’t random, it’s the body holding onto what it couldn’t process, and waiting for us to finally listen.
To understand what that really means, we sat down with Dr. Carli Axford, founder of the Spinal Flow Technique and a nervous system expert with more than 30 years in holistic healing. Here, she explains what somatic healing actually is, how the body stores stress, and the signs that we’re carrying more than we realise. She’s also the author of the forthcoming Awaken Your Spinal Flow (Hay House, May 2027).
What is Somatic Healing?
You trained at leading Western institutions like the Texas Back Institute, but you also studied wisdom traditions in India. How did those two very different worlds come together in your work? For a long time they felt like separate worlds, and like two separate parts of myself. I started out purely scientific; as a chiropractic student I’d roll my eyes whenever anyone mentioned energy or emotion. That focus led me to the Texas Back Institute, where orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nutritionists and science-focused chiropractors all worked under one roof. I watched people with devastating spinal injuries recover without surgery. During my time there, 85 per cent of surgeries were prevented. It showed me what becomes possible when many modalities work together rather than in competition.
India gave me what science hadn’t. It was there I learned how energy moves, where emotion stores stress inside the nervous system, and how to trust the wisdom of the body more than anything a textbook had taught me. The two worlds stopped competing and became one lens: the West gave me the how, the spine, the nervous system, the physiology of stress, and the East gave me the why, that the body holds the story of a life and everything it needs to heal, that healing comes from within, and that our symptoms are messages we’re meant to listen to.
What is the Spinal Flow Technique, and what led you to develop it? The Spinal Flow Technique is a gentle, hands-on modality that works with the spine and nervous system to release the stress and trauma the body has been holding, often for years. When something overwhelms us and doesn’t get fully processed, that stress doesn’t simply vanish. It settles into the body as a blockage: a headache, low energy, an aching lower back, a wave of anxiety that seems to come from nowhere. Spinal Flow works with the 33 access points along the spine to help that stored stress finally move, so the body can do what it has always known how to do, heal itself.
I didn’t set out to create a modality. It grew out of decades of sitting with people with stress and pain and refusing to accept that some of them simply couldn’t be helped. Every approach I trained in revealed only part of the picture. Chiropractic focused on what was blocked, the energy modalities didn’t reach the deep blockages, the mind-based work didn’t address the body, and the body-based work didn’t address the mind. So I created Spinal Flow to work with all of it: the nervous system, the physical blockages I came to recognise through chiropractic, and the flow of wisdom that lives inside the body. I drew on Eastern modalities, craniosacral work, and Taoist understanding of what we each hold within us for healing, including that river of intelligence, the cerebrospinal fluid that flows up and down the spine. The blockage is the message, and Spinal Flow is the language I developed to help people hear and release it.
For someone who’s never heard the term, how would you define somatic healing in the simplest way? And what does it mean to “release” stress somatically? Somatic simply means “of the body.” Somatic healing rests on a truth we often overlook: we don’t only think and feel our stress, we physically store it. Think of a time we were too busy to stop and listen to the body and simply had to keep going, a shock, a loss, a fear there was no time to feel. The mind moves on, but the body doesn’t quite let go. Because it couldn’t process the moment then, it holds onto it as a blockage, and that stored stress can’t be resolved through thinking, because it was never a thought to begin with.
To release it somatically isn’t something we force or figure out, it’s something the body does in its own way, in its own time. The body placed the blockage there for a reason, and the body is the one that knows how to release it. With Spinal Flow, we don’t chase the blockage or try to fix it. We switch the system out of fight-or-flight and into the healing zone, then engage the nervous system to bring awareness to what’s held. As the body feels safe, it creates more flow, more ease, more cerebrospinal fluid moving through the system, and from that place its own wisdom finds and corrects the blockages, releasing what it no longer needs to carry. My work is simply to turn that process on, then trust, watch and allow the body to do what it has always known how to do.
When someone begins somatic work, what does the process actually look like? Is there a natural sequence the body moves through? There is, and it often surprises people, because it doesn’t begin where they expect. The body is always talking to us. Every symptom, every tightness is stored for a reason, but knowing the story isn’t what heals us. The first and most important step is to move the body out of fight-or-flight and into the healing zone, because repair simply isn’t possible while the nervous system is braced for survival. And this is where my work differs from most approaches: rather than chasing what’s stuck or blocked and trying to fix it, we do the opposite. We work at the level of the brain and nervous system to focus on what’s already working, the places where there is abundant energy, flow and wisdom, and we grow that. As the body feels safer and that healing state expands, it naturally begins to release what it’s been holding, in its own order and its own time.
And what this looks like, visually, is a river. There’s a flow that runs from the sacrum all the way up to the cranium, the cerebrospinal fluid moving up and down the spine, and you can actually see that movement in the body. That’s the end point of the sequence: full flow with no blockages, where the whole body moves and interacts as one rather than in separate, guarded segments. It’s beautiful to watch, and it’s the body doing exactly what it was always designed to do.
What are the most common signs that someone’s body is holding onto stress, even if they don’t feel “stressed” day to day? The most common sign is simply the way the body talks to us. It’s always communicating, sometimes it whispers, sometimes it screams, and the first place to look is the symptoms we’ve learned to normalise: tension headaches, a stiff neck, a lower back that flares when life feels like too much, digestion that never quite settles, an exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch. Breathing is another early clue; when it’s shallow and high in the chest, the system is already bracing. Most of the people I work with wouldn’t describe themselves as stressed at all. They’ve simply grown so used to these signals that they assume they’re normal.
Beyond the symptoms, with Spinal Flow we have two clear ways to see what the body is holding. The first is posture: when someone’s posture has shifted, shoulders rounding forward to protect the heart, the chin pushing ahead of the body, it tells us stress has accumulated, sometimes over twenty or thirty years. The second is the assessments I’ve created for each of the seven gateways, designed to reveal exactly how and where stress is stored. The pause gateway, for example, is assessed by turning the head fully to the right and left to check whether there’s full, free movement. Between the body’s own symptoms, the posture and the gateway assessments, we can show someone precisely what they’ve been carrying in their bodies.
