The Monthly Aspectarian: Donald, I know you're the founder of Network Chiropractic.

Donald Epstein: Yes, I developed Network Chiropractic, which is a compilation of the many methods available in the chiropractic profession. It's based upon the concept that timing is everything in the healing arts, and that using a network of techniques rather than just one specific one, at the timing in which that body can best receive it, will result in a change that exceeds an improperly timed technique or one that is not suited for that body. Over the past five years, I've worked with over 10,000 attendees at transformational weekend seminars and thousands of people receiving Network Chiropractic care. I've observed the processes people go through in their healing, including my own, and I've found that there are characteristics in everyone's healing. Each person's healing experience is tailored for their body and their life, and each experience has certain attributes characteristic of different stages of consciousness.

TMA: It sounds as if Network Chiropractic goes well beyond what people think of as chiropractic.

DE: The application of it is specifically chiropractic. You deliver adjustments with a variety of different techniques, at the timing and in the area to which the body can best respond to it — so your priority is not your technique, your priority is the person you're adjusting. The body acts as a healing potential, which the philosophy of chiropractic originally promised.  Chiropractic, in its original intent — which truly has not very well been fulfilled in the public image — is to unite man the physical to man the spiritual (and that's not to be sexist; women also, but around the turn of the century that was the verbiage), and that uniting is Organizing Intelligence. This Organizing Intelligence in the universe is the same intelligence that creates living cells and maintains us in this organizational state called life. Also, if the spinal system is under mechanical tension, what will happen is that the nervous system (which is a conduit with expression of this intelligence or consciousness) will be impaired, not able to resonate with its full repertoire.

The profession developed from that as the vitalistic approach in healing arts: that there's a vital force in intelligence that became replaced by a reductionistic or mechanistic approach. [In other words, the body as] a machine that can be broken into our parts. A good deal of the original intent of spirit from which the chiropractic profession has developed had been lost. So the application of forces that a Network Chiropractor or the traditional network practitioner will utilize are consistent with or look identical to what some of the other chiropractors use; many gentle forces, some of the structural type adjustments where [the patient] may feel a pop or a klunk — but the result is that a person is more introduced to their inner intelligence, and then that is more available for them.  This is where the need for better understanding of the healing process comes about. As people receive chiropractic adjustments, they re-experience old traumatic physical and emotional events; re-experience them and somehow go through them feeling more empowered and whole.

I had to look at various models to better understand this because at that time, I was not in the state of awareness to develop a clinical work. I just wanted to give the best adjustment I could. I knew the original philosophy of chiropractic, but I had not yet seen people who were getting adjusted re-experience the birth process, re-experience a rape, re-experience a personal violation, re-experience a traumatic physical event. I was aware, though, that it was a very good thing happening because after the adjustment, the person's spine was really at peace and the tension and its holding patterns were gone. Things a person hadn't been able to get past in years were totally released. I had to start investigating what was really going on here.

TMA: It seems like over the years during chiropractic's long struggle to be accepted by the  mainstream, that the more spiritual end of it was deemphasized; and most, but certainly not all, of the chiropractors you see out there are pretty conservative in that sense.

DE: Well, my profession is filled with people from all different modals and models and backgrounds, and my experience with chiropractic — having taught thousands of chiropractors for years — is that the basic understanding is that there is intelligence that runs the body. Chiropractors are really committed to helping that intelligence to express itself. But each practitioner has a relationship with the person based upon their clinical experiences of what change can really occur. [If instead of applying] your technique to the person you shift the perspective to which technique is the most appropriate for this person in a particular sequence, a wonderful change really starts occurring.

It's important, though, that the practitioner understand what healing is about, and that it's totally different from curing. There is a difference between healing and curing — and that is, to cure something is to alleviate it, to control it, to manipulate it, to help it so that the patient or client is in control of their experience again.  To cure something, by implication, means to separate  that part of the body from the rest of the body, draw a smaller and smaller circle until you have specialists or people who know more and more about less and less. That is the exact opposite of healing, where healing involves drawing a larger circle or increasing your perspective or seeing how things relate in community with each other; how the heart relates to the kidneys, how the kidneys relate to the lungs, how the neck relates to the lower spine, how you relate to your family members and your larger community. If the person's attempt is to cure something, to make someone more comfortable, that has very little to do with the discussion we're going to be having, or with my book on the twelve stages of healing.

TMA: You're right. "Cure" would be more along the allopathic model.

DE: And it's important. I really want to state that curing may prolong someone's life and give them enough time until they can have a healing experience; that healing may occur by attempting to cure, but healing is not intended to cure or control a person's physiology situation. In curing, the person is further disconnected from whatever it was that they need to be connected with. Healing, by the other intent, is simply to help a person to experience their experiences, and to help them be more whole. I feel that health is a function of all our relationships, of our kinship.

Chiropractic is my starting point in discovering the twelve stages of healing — but it's important that we get across that the twelve stages of healing concept is not chiropractic; it's a generic form of healing. The way I discovered it is through my tool as a healing facilitator, as a chiropractor. It's real important that the two not be connected, other than that the chiropractic tool I developed is the way I was able to experience people at all these stages. Having a whole smorgasbord of healing in front of me is such a wonderful vehicle to help promote healing.

Now when I adjust someone or when doctors utilizing network spinal analysis adjust someone, we might adjust the neck and see the hips gently rock, and adjust the hips and see the neck gently rock and an actual wavelike movement may occur as one part of the body starts connecting to the other in a natural rhythm. Very often it looks like a serpentine type movement moving through an individual. The intent is not to produce the wave. The wave is actually a connection of intelligence in one part or the other. The wave movement is developing community. As we adjust one part of the spine, we would like to see that that part of the spine is able to be in a rhythmic connection with other vertebrae in the spine so as to function as one whole unit — not looking at the low back spine except from the back of the neck to the low back spine. In any area where we actually initiate a change through an adjustment, even if that adjustment is just about a two-ounce pressure contact in the area for a second, we would like to observe that another part of the spine is responding to that, receiving the correction, and starting to, as I like to look at it, see itself in the mirror and change it's own part, or fix the collar of a shirt or something of that nature . . . it's a  self referral corrective system. That's what's healing is about. One part of the body will become more aware of another part when it's safe to do so.

TMA: What do you mean,"when it's safe to do so"?

DE: Well, there are many people in the New Age movement who say, Well, what caused this? Own up to it. Why don't you forgive this person? What did you do to create that? I find that rather offensive because forgiveness, truly, when it's appropriate, is spontaneous. Awareness of what you did to create something happens when you're ready to have it. There's so many people who are trying to increase people's awareness of things. I am not trying to increase someone's awareness either through the Network Chiropractic, nor through the healing process in twelve stages. I'd like people to increase their flexibility. When the system becomes more flexible and more vital and more pliable, awareness becomes a natural consequence.

TMA: And you provide a context for that awareness to manifest.

DE: That's right. One of the ideas behind the twelve stages of healing is that someone will say to you, you have high blood pressure (or something), why don't you meditate. And there are times where it is just not appropriate to do that. Meditation can really not work for the person, and actually is pretty harmful for them.

TMA: It can be more stressful, trying to silence the mind, for instance, and not being able to.

DE: That's right . . . when it's only my tension holding me together. Another time, somebody can say to you, Well, why does this keep happening in your life? Do you know what the meaning of this is? In the model of healing that we have, until you get the reason in a flash, it's not time to know it. At no point do you ever have to figure out what you did, why you did it, how you did it, or what you have to do next. You never need to figure any of it out in this model.

TMA: What do you do instead?

DE: That's a wonderful question. I'm going to answer that with another question. Do you ever have to figure out how to have diarrhea? When you reach a certain threshold of nausea, do you have to figure out how to throw up, or how to sneeze? Does somebody have to figure out how to have an orgasm once they get past the particular point of excitement? The answer is no. This is a very important point; and that there's an inherent consciousness or information that expresses itself through the body in rhythm, and that rhythm shows up in wave form, which basically shows up in rhythm. The wave form in the body has been assessed for years as the pulse. The pulse is basically two waves colliding and forming an interference pattern known as a beat. And what happens is, the acupuncture pulse, the vedic pulse, the radial pulse used in modern medicine, is a function of wave form. All medical diagnostic procedures are basically determined assessments of disturbance in the body's natural wave function or biochem ical changes that occur when that wave function is altered. We measure the heart by EKG, which is really a measurement of the electrical — what's called "wave depolarization of the heart." The brain wave, the EEG, is wave depolarization of the brain. The intestinal villi move in wave form. Basically, your entire neurological reality, your entire reality, is a function of the oscillation of your nervous system; how they vibrate — and vibration is a function of wave again.

TMA: The whole of manifestation is.

DE: That's exactly it. And you have particle/wave duality where beyond our three-dimensional reality per se it's the wave, and within our reality, it's the particle. Modern scientists describe intelligence as non-local. Consciousness itself is non-local. It cannot be defined through space or time, but it functions through a three-dimensional localized physiology. So if we can improve the physiology's ability to connect to its inherent wave and rhythmic functions, that would increase its repertoire of consciousness. By freeing the interference in the spinal system, a chiropractor can actually help the tone of the nervous system to be modified into a more natural state.

TMA: Then healing would occur.

DE: And then healing can occur —

TMA: — by itself.

DE: And that's the intent. Everything must be self healing, or it's not healing. There's a paradox here, and my friend Nick Gordon, who is head of the Emissary Foundation, has an expression,"If you have not found the paradox or the contradiction, you haven't found the truth." So part of the paradox is that we are a self-healing organism, but we need an external agent to activate that healing.

So now, with the healing concept, when healing occurs, an individual is more whole; one part can communicate with the other parts. This is a key point. All of us have areas in our physiology, in our psyche, that have been alienated, isolated, abused, ignored, redirected, shamed or denied. It may have been a result of a physical, emotional or chemical trauma from which we may not have fully recovered. We haven't even been aware of the trauma . . . until it's safe to be aware of it, until the body can do something with it. And when I say "safe to be aware of," it's like if you were to say, "Please God, tell me everything there is to know about the rest of my life right now" — most people cannot handle that. If a husband or wife says, "Well, tell me every lover that you had before, how they compare to me" . . . are you sure you want to do this to your relationship?

TMA: (laughs)"Why don't you just hit me with a hammer."

DE: That's right. You don't know the information at that point in time because you're not necessarily at the state in which you can handle it. That's what life is about: growing so we can assimilate more information. What happens is that each part of the body that is carrying or expressing traumatic information — in reality or metaphorically — is connecting, somehow, to physical or emotional trauma. That area is not allowing information to flow through it the same way information flows through other areas. It may be associated with fixation of movement. It's definitely associated with altered respiration. The breath doesn't fully fill up that area and you may, after a while, try to get your attention through symptoms. Most often, the symptoms will actually show up in a different area. Very rarely will the symptom actually show up in an area that really, really needs attention.

TMA: Some sympathetic or corresponding area?

DE: That's right, because it's safer to feel it there than in another area.

There are three things that are always true: Your touch is always true, your movement is always true, and your breath is always true. You can talk to a physician about an area that's bothering you. You can talk from today until tomorrow and very rarely will it have any bearing on what's really going on. It's what you're allowing yourself to experience that's really going on. It's what you're capable of experiencing that you're able to talk about. You could lie with your own thoughts, you can fool yourself or someone else with your thoughts, but you can't lie to your touch, your breath, and movement.

Different methods of healing talk about touching the body, other ones talk about breathing, and others talk about moving. In this Twelve Stages of Healing model, I noticed that each state of consciousness has a different way of breathing, moving and holding oneself. If one can breathe, move, and hold oneself in a particular fashion, that instantly will connect you to that state of consciousness and the rhythm there, and the lessons you need to learn from that state of consciousness. There's a different lesson and rhythm when a person is suffering than when a person is resolving their suffering through vomiting or through fever, and there's a different rhythm if a person is realizing they're stuck, and it's a different one if a person is realizing a beautiful expression of their inherent life force, and it's different from if a person actually feels one with everything in the universe.

Each state of consciousness is associated with a different rhythm in the body, and manifests with a different type of breath, combined with movement and touch. They've noticed that when as people receive Network Chiropractic care, and they start stretching or unwinding in their healing process, and breathing or vocalizing as a natural consequence, they did it differently depending on what their experience was at that point in time. When I mapped this, I realized by observing a person's breath and movement that there were people connecting to movements that are part of humanity but have been lost from the human psyche due to socialization, our centuries of loss of participation in our internal world. When you no longer participate in your internal world, your physiology, you no longer participate in your external world. The actions you have in life externally are surfacing with the actions or your connections internally. There really is no difference in that, but you can't perceive that until you get to a later stage of consciousness.

TMA: This would be where people were talking about "how did you create that."

DE: At that point, "how did you create that," and you don't figure it out, you just know it. The difficulty is that there is some thought process in the New Age movement — and I use that term loosely for it means different things to different people —that taking responsibility for your actions is where it's at. Taking responsibility for your action is not where it's at until you're whole enough. You can't take responsibility for your action if you're not responsible for your own physiology. The only way out is in.

TMA: Well going in is taking responsibility.

DE: But you can only take responsibility for whichever parts of your body you connect with . . . and what happens is, if you're only connected to part of you, you're taking responsibility for the parts that you can express, not necessarily parts that you're not connected with. You still don't take responsibility for the parts that you're not aware of. What I'm saying here is that there's a time for transcendence. Transformation is through your physiology, not away from your physiology.

Many people say, Oh, I want healing; I'm a healer; I like healing; and, Oh, you're supposed to be nice and loving all the time. Those people are expressing a certain aspect of their reality, but they're not expressing the part of that reality that might actually be furious or really upset, whatever it may be, because that's not nice. Whoever said someone's supposed to be nice all the time? That's an attempt to escape your physiology. What you need to do is to bless yourself, and to bless yourself is to be present with wherever you're at at the time. And the way to be present with where you're at is to be able to experience your rhythms at the stages. So what the Twelve Stages of Healing is about is giving people back the vocabulary of human consciousness through the body rhythm.

I want to make a couple of major points. Number one, you never have to figure anything out because when the rhythm takes over, you're with the rhythm. The rhythm carries information from the cells of your body about your previously existing experiences and that tells you what you need to know. It gives you rhythm.

Basically, you have a Board of Directors of forty to seventy thousand quadrillion cells in your body which have the wisdom of creation in them through every experience, and it's a matter of drawing on your own internal Board of Directors. At first we are each other's medicine, but first we must be our own medicine. What we look to do is not try to get out of a stage; we don't want to get to the next stage at all. We want to get further into the stage so when we connect to the lesson of the stage, the pure essence rhythm, we don't need to have all the external chaotic rites of passage to get us to learn what we need to learn.

Our biblical stories, our myths and our fairy tales tell us exactly how to heal. They tell us about the twelve stages of healing, from being lost in the forest to being lost in a dungeon, to being burned to the stake to being swallowed by a whale; and all the positive things we can have — living happily ever after, marrying a prince, marrying a princess — all these things are actual stories for the different stages of healing. The only thing is, we no longer consider a myth or a fairy tale or biblical story to be real. People used to identify with them as being very real. We've cleaned up our fairy tales. Oh, it wasn't a wicked witch, she had PMS. Oh, he wasn't really a bad king, he was taxing them because he was functioning on a negative deficit. So people don't get to feel the dark part of self, or the lightness of self. And if people don't experience the pain, they can't experience the ecstasy. Neither one is more valid than the other. It just is. Having a euphoric experience is no more valid or righteous than a person truly being present with the pain.

TMA: One might be more desirable than the other.

DE: One might be more desirable at a different point in time. Every pain that you have has a rhythm to it; every heartache, every headache, every asthmatic attack, everything has a rhythm, and in the rhythm are the solutions to what you're in.

TMA: What you've described is the duality of existence.

DE: That's exactly it. Any model of healing must represent that.

The first stage of healing is suffering. The lesson we need to get out of it is, My God, nothing works for me right now. I'm helpless. I feel I'm going to die.

TMA: Helpless to deal with whatever the symptoms are.

DE: That's it. And at that point, the difference between pain and suffering — everyone knows the difference: suffering is a spiritual situation where one feels nothing is working right now. Many people go to emergency rooms of hospitals when they're suffering because they're having an emergency . . . emergency comes from the root"emergent." A person's true self is emerging, and they're seeing that what's been happening is not working. It's not trying to figure it out and it's not trying to tell the person that they're going to be okay. The best gift you can give to somebody who's suffering is to acknowledge how miserable life seems to them. And often, they can move through some things very quickly.

Now if at any time in this healing process a person feels they can't take any more, that they need help, please seek professional assistance by whatever type of practitioner feels right to you at the time. This model incorporates all of the models, including the therapeutic model in the sense that at times you need help from that external agent. Part of healing is seeking that. What's going to happen, the type of help you're going to look for, the type of practitioner you're going to seek will change, depending upon what healing you're after. The book talks about when you may want to do what. I've networked the different models of the healing arts and therapeutic arts and present the techniques in the Network Chiropractic model. In stage one, Aladdin fell down in a dark cave, and at that point, he finds a lamp and he rubs it and this magic genie will help you out.

TMA: At the point of greatest darkness . . .

DE: That's right. When he surrendered to his desperation. And most people never truly allow themselves to fully suffer; you try to find your way out of it rather than just feel, experience it.

TMA: My inclination is to fight it; no doubt about it.

DE: Everyone's is. And what happens is, when you finally surrender to it, writhing on the floor holding your head or stomach or whatever movement it is, and saying "Oh God, oh God, no," and really getting into it, vocalizing it and moving with it, all of a sudden your eye fixes on something, you remember somebody who could help you. My God, you could help me! The therapist can help me, the physician — you then find the magical genie who can help you. But that magical genie is giving you power, it releases the help or the power available outside yourself but not inside yourself. And that's the second stage of healing.

Now in the first stage of healing you go to a physician, and this physician says you have cancer, you have AIDS, you have XYZ disease and you're going to die. Many a New Age person would say"Oh, that's terrible." You may ask, How can you say this to a person? But to someone truly in suffering, it's the greatest gift you can give to them. That's really important, to acknowledge people where they're at. The same way when chiropractors adjust people, we acknowledge them in the stage they're at with a technique that's most appropriate at that point and a touch that's most appropriate. Now you have the magical genie. Our economy is based upon that. It's based upon what one part of you represses and another expresses, or one part of you expresses, one part of you represses, individually or in relationship.

One part of your body is out of touch with the rhythm in another part. . . . If you put your hands both on one part of the body and the other part, you'll find there's two different rhythms; and they probably don't even talk to each other. And with that, in your life, there will be areas that don't talk to each other.

Whatever part you cannot connect with when you touch and breathe, whatever information is in there, that's what you're not going to like in other people whom you consider evil or wrong or bad. What's going to happen as you find what this magical genie is going to offer you, this treatment, this procedure, this relationship, it offers you the greatest answers."This is what can do it for me." The lesson of that stage is what you thought was so great is not so great, and what you thought was so good was not so good, because as the two parts of the body start connecting their rhythm again, the boundaries start blurring. Therefore, the boundary of how good somebody is or how bad somebody is starts shifting. And you say, Geez, how could I not have seen this before. This is the fifth time this has happened to me, oh my God. And you start saying, Gee, maybe there's a process going on. Somehow, I'm involved in it. I've finally seen this. And this is the end of stage two.

What I'm saying right now, a lot of that is right at the very beginning of the book.

I'd like to talk about the reason, the motivation for the book. Most people know about sickness and diseases, but very few people really know about healing and they're frightened by the process because they don't know about it. If you had a diamond in the rough, you may have a ton of ore to get out before you get one carat of diamond. You don't want to carry around a ton of ore. You're going to say, I'm not going to go for this. I'm not going to carry this. If someone told you that the rock that you have — even though it is tough to carry around and very inconvenient — if someone told you the actual value of it, that it has a diamond in it, you wouldn't mind carrying it around and changing your life experience and doing all the inconvenient things for it. You'd go back to the mine and get some more. So the intent of the model of the book we have is to let people know that they have diamonds all around them all the time in their experiences. The argument they have with somebody, with a significant other, is healing. They're acting with a tuning fork to resonate with part of themselves that they cannot connect with to help them connect to a rhythm they can connect to.

TMA: That would explain why, when I get in a fight with my wife, I don't know what the hell she's talking about?

DE: That's because she's a woman and you're a guy. What's going to happen is, she is going to perfectly help you to express that which you're repressing, because that's what relationships are about. What's going to happen is, she's going to activate that part of you that you're not whole with. That will create anger, upset or symptoms, depending on where you're at. What happens is, we can recognize that all of our symptoms, our losses, our crises, our bankruptcies, all of these rites of passage in our society — are attempts to get us to connect to our physiology, the parts of us that are not whole. And everything around us is a tool for our healing, but we don't know what these experiences are like. We don't know what point in the healing process we're at. We have no map for it. The Twelve Stages of Healing is the map to let you know just where you are in the healing process when you're saying, "Oh my God, I'm helpless." And what experience can be most effective where you are when you go, "God, I'm so stuck," without even trying to figure out how to get unstuck. It's when you recognize there's a life force flowing free but you don't feel joy, that you're not really in that state that we speak about which is recognized in the light behind the form.

Basically, by giving fairy tales, myths and personal experiences, we are giving people an absolute map of the territory of healing so that they can be okay holding this ore and not being upset about having to spend effort, energy, or time to refine it — because they know the value in it. So what happens is, this allows your everyday experience to be turned into a healing experience, rather than rejecting the experiences and having life give you more and more traumatic or chaotic events in order to finally get you to surrender to the rhythms inside you. Every society has rites of passage. In our society, we have lost most of the rites of passage that help us to connect to our rhythm.

TMA: We've lost almost all our rites of passage for everything.

DE: Yes, our major rites of passage now are bankruptcy, divorce, relationship making and breaking, disease and sickness — and birth.

TMA: We've got to do better than that.

DE: That's exactly it. We can allow ourselves to see the rites of passage in our everyday experience. You could have a wakeup call of someone pounding on the door, breaking in and pouring a bucket of cold water on you, or you can just have someone tap you and say, "Sweetheart, it's time to wake up."

TMA: One would be preferable to the other.

DE: Exactly. And the more disconnected you are from your body's rhythms and recognizing the cues of healing around you, the harder the wakeup call.

TMA: So what we're talking about is not limited in usefulness to people who are sick.

DE: It depends on what you call"sick" people. Some of the sickest people I know are people who are not actively having symptoms.

TMA: No physical symptoms.

DE: That's right. But their finances are always in trouble or a person has difficulty with lots of people — "these are good people, these are bad people." One of the things about healing is being able to have authority for your being, that you're exactly where you'd like to be — and gratitude for wherever you're at. So healing doesn't mean, perhaps, sick. You can heal and still have the symptom or disease of sickness. What you have done is, you've changed your relationship with it. There are many people who pass on with a chronic, degenerative disease, but heal so beautifully in the last days of their lives. Things that have happened during relations with the family have changed. Their life has changed.

TMA: I've said myself that healing doesn't always mean surviving.

DE: That's right. Healing actually means being more whole, developing more relationships and being present with them. So what I hope my book, The Twelve Stages of Healing, will do for people is help them to realize that if they can't be in the stage they love, they can love the stage they're with.

Another major point there is to be able to participate in the concept that we are each other's medicine, but we first must be our own medicine. The answers are inside but most often, they're hidden from us. Healing is usually inconvenient; it takes you places you don't want to be. Involves you with people you don't want to be caught with. Has you saying and doing things you promised you never would say or do. It turns your life inside out and gives you purpose. Not someone else's, but yours, and no matter what your experience is, it is valid. No matter what your experience is, your experience is valid. I mean, you never have to figure it out. All you need to do is be present with your body and your physiology, and life will bring right in front of you the obvious.

TMA: You'll know what you need to know . . .

DE: . . . when you need to know it. And then we can stop rehearsing for whatever we fear, which is called thinking —

TMA: Or worrying . . .

DE: — and we can start breathing, moving and touching because your rhythm is your truth, and your truth shall set you free.

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