Most of us know the feeling of doing everything “right”, eight hours of sleep, a quiet evening, no obvious crisis, and still waking up depleted. According to Dr. Carli Axford, founder of the Spinal Flow Technique, that’s because sleep and true rest are not the same thing, and the difference comes down to what the body is still holding.
In the first part of our conversation, Dr. Carli explained what somatic healing is and how the body stores stress, often for years, as physical blockages along the spine. Here, she turns to what we can actually do about it: why rest so often fails to restore us, and the simple, practitioner-free practices anyone can start today. Her book, Awaken Your Spinal Flow, is out from Hay House in May 2027.
You’ve talked about how rest doesn’t always feel restorative. Why can someone sleep eight hours and still wake up depleted? Because sleep and true rest are not the same thing. Most of us are carrying years and years of stored tension, layer upon layer of stress the body never got to release, and while all of that is held in the spine, the body stays in fight-or-flight. We close our eyes and sleep, but the blockages are still there. That river of energy that’s meant to flow from the sacrum all the way up to the cranium and back again can’t move freely; it’s interrupted, stuck, working in segments rather than as one connected system. So the body rests without ever truly connecting, and the deep repair that’s supposed to happen overnight simply can’t take place.
This is why a person can do everything “right” and still wake up heavy and depleted. It’s not a lack of hours, it’s a body that’s still braced, still holding, still running on survival. The abundant energy that lives inside us is what leaves us feeling rested, restored and genuinely energised, but we can only access it when the flow is connected and the blockages have cleared. Sleeping with a stressed, stuck body doesn’t restore us. Real rest comes when the body moves out of survival mode, the river flows freely again, and the whole system can finally move as one.
What are a few simple, accessible practices someone could try at home today to support their nervous system? Nothing requiring a practitioner. Everything we need is already inside us and we have three tools that we can use to access this, breath, touch and movement, and the body knows exactly what to do with them. The first practice is simply to listen. Rest both hands on your belly or your heart, close your eyes, and notice what’s there, with no judgement and nothing to fix. Your body speaks in sensation, your heart in feeling, your mind in thought, and most of us have never stopped to hear them. Is your body whispering, or is it screaming? Where? Gently ask what it might be telling you and whether there’s one small thing you could change to give it what it needs. This is where all healing begins, because the body is always talking to us. We’ve just forgotten how to listen.
The second is to shift into the healing zone, and this is the switch that takes you out of stress. Rest both hands on your lower belly, let them sink in, and breathe into that place beneath your hands, in through the nose for a count of four, out slowly for a count of six. That longer exhale is the one signal that moves the body out of fight-or-flight and into the state where healing can actually happen. The third is to activate the base of your spine with movement: lying on your back with your knees bent and hands on your lower belly, gently rocking your pelvis forward and backwards, letting soft breath and motion return to the lowest part of your spine. This is where the river of cerebrospinal fluid begins its rise, and even a minute of gentle movement invites it to flow.
If someone has only five minutes a day, what’s the single most effective thing they can do to support their nervous system? Start by shifting into the healing zone, hands on your lower belly, breathing in for four and out for six, letting the exhale grow longer than the inhale to bring your body out of survival. Then, once you’ve settled, let the breath begin to travel. On each inhale, draw the breath all the way up your spine from the very base to the top of your neck; on each exhale, let it flow all the way back down again. You can let your spine gently move with it too, softly rising as the breath climbs, softening as it descends, so the breath and the spine are moving together as one, up and down, up and down. It’s a simplified version of the full practice I teach in my forthcoming book, but even in this small form it’s powerful.
This is the most valuable five minutes you can give yourself, because it does more than calm you. It invites the river of cerebrospinal fluid to flow freely up and down the spine, clearing interference and easing the blockages where stress gets stored. When the breath and the body move as one like this, even for a few minutes a day, you’re not just relaxing, you’re restoring the natural flow your whole nervous system depends on, and teaching your body to work as one connected whole again.
For someone who feels “wired but tired” at the end of the day, what would you recommend they try before bed to actually downshift? That wired-but-tired feeling is the signature of a nervous system that’s been running on adrenaline all day and doesn’t know how to come down, exhausted underneath, yet still buzzing on the surface. The mistake is to lie down and expect sleep to do the settling on its own. It won’t, because the body hasn’t yet received the message that it’s safe to let go. So before sleep, you can do a short practice I call The Spinal Rest. Lie down, rest both hands on your tummy, and begin the 4-6 breath, in through the nose for four, out for six. As your body settles, gently reflect on your day: what worked, what you can learn from it, what you might need more of, and how you’d love tomorrow to feel.
Then, once you feel settled, let the breath begin to move through your spine. Inhale for a count of four, drawing the breath all the way up from the base of your spine to the very top; exhale for a count of six, letting it flow all the way back down again. Up on the inhale, down on the exhale, slow and unforced. With each round, let yourself sink a little deeper: into the bed beneath you, into that flow moving up and down your spine, into the innate intelligence that is you. This is the place of peace that has always been inside your body, and as you connect to it, the whole system settles as one, and true, restorative rest can finally reach you.
These daily practices are a starting point, but your work points to something bigger: the idea that the body has its own innate capacity to heal. That’s the heart of your forthcoming book, Awaken Your Spinal Flow. What’s the core idea you most want readers to take away from it? If there’s only one thing to take from the book, let it be this: the body already holds everything it needs to heal. We’re each born with an innate intelligence that knows how to repair, regulate and restore, and healing isn’t about adding something from the outside. It’s about removing what’s been blocking that intelligence from flowing, and reconnecting to a capacity that has been there all along.
The Healer’s Journey is where we remember that the healer we’ve been searching for is not someone else, it’s ourselves. Pain, symptoms and exhaustion do not show us that something is wrong with us; they are messages, and once we learn to read them and release what we’ve been carrying, we get to come home to a body that feels calm, light and free. I’ve watched that happen for tens of thousands of people, and I wrote this book so it can happen for many more.
