I could spend fifteen minutes just telling you how much I love Galina Denzel. But she would probably make me run up a hill first, so I will get to the point.
Galina practices out of Move Well Studio, which is right next to my office in Rancho Santa Margarita. Not down the street. Next door. Because being down the street was not close enough. She is a restorative exercise specialist, a nutrition coach, a cookbook author, a wellness speaker, a personal trainer, and one of the most deeply trained somatic experiencing practitioners I know. She studied directly under Peter Levine, the creator of somatic experiencing, which she will tell you herself is not something she takes lightly.
She is also my closest friend in practice. And this conversation is one I have wanted to have on the podcast for a long time.
God Brought Me From Bulgaria to Meet You on This Hill
Before we get into the clinical material, I want to tell you the story of how Galina and I became friends, because it is the perfect introduction to who she is.
We were training together in the early days of our friendship. She had me running up a hill in Central Park in Rancho Santa Margarita. I was not thrilled about the hill. It was steep. I was tired. And she stood at the top and looked down at me and said: do you understand that God brought me out of communist Bulgaria to meet you on this hill today?
I stopped arguing about the hill.
She came to California from Bulgaria, built a practice from the ground up, trained under the people who founded the modalities she practices, and ended up next door to a Blair chiropractor whose patients kept coming to her with needs she was not yet equipped to meet. That is when she decided to go deeper into trauma work. And what she found changed her practice, and mine, completely.
What Trauma Actually Is
The first thing Galina wants everyone to understand is that trauma is not what most people think it is.
Trauma is not only the dramatic, obvious things. It is not only combat or assault or catastrophic loss. The definition is broader and more human than that: any event that was not processed with enough support can become traumatic.
She uses an example that I think will land for a lot of people. A mild car accident, the kind where someone bumps you from behind in a Starbucks drive-through, can be a traumatic event. Not because of the physical force involved, but because of the state of the nervous system that receives it. Someone with a history of developmental trauma, with a nervous system that was calibrated in an environment of threat or unpredictability, may take a month to recover from that small bump. Someone else might shake it off in an afternoon.
Neither person is weak. Neither person is overreacting. They are experiencing the same event through completely different nervous systems, shaped by completely different histories. That is biology. That is not a character flaw.
Somatic Experiencing and the Body's Story
Galina found somatic experiencing after her own mild car accident, when she realized that despite having access to some of the best physical therapists and movement specialists in the field, certain things were not getting better. She found a somatic experiencing practitioner, had two sessions, and immediately knew she needed to bring this to her clients.
Somatic experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, works directly with the body's response to trauma rather than just the cognitive narrative around it. The premise is that trauma gets stored in the nervous system, not just in the memory, and the body holds the unresolved survival responses that were activated at the moment of the event. Talk therapy alone often cannot reach those stored responses. Somatic work goes into the body itself.
Galina described reading Peter Levine's books and crying through them. Not from sadness, but from recognition. For the first time in her life she felt like she was not crazy on the inside. The things she had been experiencing, the anxiety, the heightened responses, the things that felt disproportionate, were not signs that something was fundamentally wrong with her. They were normal responses of a nervous system that had been shaped by her developmental history.
I had the same experience reading Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. It named things I had lived without having language for. That kind of recognition is itself part of the healing.
How Our Work Fits Together
Here is the part of this conversation I want every patient who comes through either of our doors to understand.
Structural alignment and trauma resolution are not competing approaches. They are addressing different layers of the same whole person, and they are most powerful when they work together.
When the upper cervical spine is misaligned, the nervous system operates under structural pressure. The signals traveling between the brain and the body are compromised. A person's ability to accurately read their environment, to feel safe in a room, to regulate their emotional responses, can all be affected by that structural interference. I lived this personally. Before my Blair correction, I misperceived social situations. I experienced paranoia that did not match reality. Once my head was literally on straight, the world looked different. The nervous system could finally assess what was actually there.
Galina has sent me patients whose bodies were holding trauma in ways that prevented their structural corrections from holding. The tension in the tissues was too chronic, too patterned, too deeply held for the correction to stick without addressing what was underneath. And I have sent her patients who had done all the structural work and still could not fully regulate, because the trauma pattern in the nervous system had its own momentum.
Together, we can reach people more completely than either of us can alone.
Healing Wants to Happen
Galina said something near the end of our conversation that I want to close with, because it is one of the truest things I have ever heard said about this work.
Healing wants to happen.
She did not originate that phrase, and she was careful to say so. But she lives by it. The inner physician, the body's own intelligence, is always moving toward healing when we give it the environment to do so. Our job as practitioners is not to fix people. It is to get out of the way enough and create the right conditions enough that the body can do what it already knows how to do.
That means resting after an adjustment instead of scrolling on your phone. That means finding your health tribe, the people who are moving in the direction of healing alongside you. That means not giving up if the first practitioner you try does not hear you.
And it means understanding that you are not broken. You are not crazy. You are a nervous system that learned what it learned in the environment it was given. And that nervous system is capable of learning something new.
Find Galina
Galina Denzel can be found at movewellstudio.com or galinadenzel.com. If you are at my office, you will also find her right next to the bathroom, which she pointed out herself is strategically useful. If you are not in Southern California and you are looking for a somatic experiencing practitioner near you, visit traumahealing.org or simply search somatic experiencing and the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute will come up.
She will be back on the podcast again. She promised. And next time she is going to walk you through some actual tools and exercises you can use. I cannot wait.
Listen to the full conversation with Galina Denzel on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Galina at movewellstudio.com or galinadenzel.com. Find a somatic experiencing practitioner near you at traumahealing.org.
