Colleen Norris
Speaker • Group Facilitator • Network Spinal Chiropractor
The day after I walked away from my marriage, my home, and my life as I knew it, I was scheduled to have a booth at a wellness expo at Golden Hour Counseling in Amesbury, Massachusetts.
That morning, I woke up only halfway inside my body, in an unfamiliar bed in a friend’s apartment. I wandered around in a daze and somehow managed to pack my Sharpies, twinkle lights, copies of my books, Mirror Magick spell, and business cards into my Mary Poppins bag.
When I arrived at the expo, I tried to be cool. I tried to look as though I had everything under control, as though I wasn’t terrified of what my life was about to become or quietly wondering where I was going to live. I arranged my lights, displayed my books, and smiled through the exhaustion while talking to strangers about my work as a witch.
Across from me, Dr. Colleen Norris was offering fifteen-minute introductions to Network Spinal chiropractic care. She had an ease about her—the kind of confidence earned through years of practice, self-study, and intimacy with her own gifts.
I remember looking at her and thinking, I would love to be where she is someday.
Toward the end of the expo, Colleen walked over and asked if I would like a session. I almost cried. I was so touched that she had thought of me. More precisely, I was touched by the possibility that she believed I deserved to receive something when I felt as though I had arrived with nothing to give.
And what a gift it was. I lay down in a quiet room where the energy of the crowd began to fade. Colleen touched my body lightly, gently, and strategically. Her touch did not demand anything from me.
It simply invited me to notice that my body was still there—and that it might be safe to come back.
As she worked, a mantra began emerging from somewhere deep inside me: You are worthy of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.
I had just left the house I called home. I did not know where I belonged. I wasn’t sure I deserved comfort, care, or even the elemental materials of a life. But on Colleen’s table, my body began telling me a different story.
On her website, Colleen describes Network Spinal as a gentle, “no crack” approach to chiropractic care that uses light touch, breath, and movement to help the body become aware of—and begin releasing—patterns of tension and stress. Her work focuses particularly on the nervous system and the ways sustained stress can leave someone organized around fight, flight, freeze, or please. The intention is not to force the body into relaxation, but to help it develop greater awareness, adaptability, and access to safety.
That description closely resembles what I experienced with her. Colleen did not tell my body to calm down or insist that I was safe when so much of my life felt frighteningly uncertain. She offered a gentle invitation and allowed my body to discover what was true for itself.
Story is one of the primary healing modalities I have come to associate with Colleen—not story as an intellectual exercise imposed upon the body, but story discovered through relationship with it.
During one of my favorite group healing experiences with her, Colleen invited us to become present with a physical symptom and allow it to be witnessed as an animal. I sat with post-coital urinary discomfort. In my imagination, it appeared as a small snake wrapped tightly around my urethra. Through Colleen’s steady guidance, I stayed with the image rather than recoiling from it. Slowly, the little snake changed. It grew into a giant boa draped around my shoulders. Something I had experienced as constriction became protection. Something entangled with sexual shame became a source of power. Colleen did not tell me what the snake meant or replace my story with one of her own. She created enough safety for my body to change the image itself. That distinction matters.
Colleen’s work lives at the gorgeous intersection of story and soma. She understands that the body is not merely a setting where our stories happen. It is a participant in their creation—and sometimes, given the right conditions, in their revision. She helps create those conditions. A sensation can become an image. An image can reveal a story. And a story that once organized itself around shame, fear, or powerlessness may discover that it has another possible ending.
Colleen’s relationship with story is not theoretical. She writes openly about her own experiences with trauma, anxiety, panic attacks, and the gradual recovery of parts of herself that had been locked away. I have had the pleasure of witnessing that truth-telling firsthand. At the New Hampshire Conference for Women, I watched Colleen stand onstage and speak about a time when she was profoundly vulnerable. She did not tell the story as someone still trapped inside it, nor did she erase the pain in order to make it inspirational. As she spoke, we watched her transform lived experience into authorship. She offered the audience more than encouragement. She modeled a possibility: You can return to the story that shaped you without surrendering your power to it. You can listen for what your body knows now. You can become an author again.
It is no surprise that Colleen was also the person who introduced me to Lorraine Connell and the Speak Boldly Showcase, where women are finding healing through telling their stories before a compassionate and curious audience. Colleen knows what can happen when a story is given the right witness.
She has spent years becoming intimate with her own body’s wisdom, and she is generous with the stories it has shared with her. She offers that wisdom not as a fixed interpretation of what anyone else’s body should mean, but as an invitation to become curious about what our bodies might be trying to show us.
This is what Colleen gave me the day after I left my marriage.
I had walked away from the place I called home, carrying a story that I no longer deserved care, safety, or belonging. Colleen could not tell me where I would live next or what my life would become. Instead, she helped me return to the one place I had not truly lost. My body was still there. And inside it, beneath the fear and exhaustion, another story was waiting:
You are worthy of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.
Colleen helps the body feel safe enough to speak and the story become brave enough to change.
With Colleen, it is safe for my story to come home.