Good Neighbor Podcast: Cobb County
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Cobb County. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Milli M. helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Cobb County, Georgia.
Is your business serving the residents of Cobb County? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpCobbCounty.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Cobb County
E80: Your Body Whispers Before It Screams: Dr. Vanessa Gale's Journey to Holistic Healing
Your body whispers long before it screams. Are you listening? Dr. Vanessa Gale of Holistic Alignment Strategies joins the Good Neighbor Podcast to reveal how chiropractic care transforms lives by shifting the nervous system from chaos to coherence.
Dr. Gale's journey from dancer to powerlifter to chiropractor offers powerful insights into how our bodies communicate. After discovering network spinal technique following a significant back injury, she experienced not just pain relief but profound transformation in her relationships, boundaries, and life approach. This revelation forms the foundation of her practice in Marietta, Georgia, where she helps patients understand what their pain is telling them rather than simply making it disappear.
Most people tragically misunderstand chiropractic care as merely a solution for back pain or post-accident recovery. Dr. Gale dispels this myth, explaining how the nervous system—particularly the vagus nerve connecting to all internal organs—affects everything from sleep and digestion to heart function. Those mysterious heart palpitations, digestive issues, or panic attacks? They might actually be signals from a misaligned nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode.
Dr. Gale specializes in supporting "superwomen"—those doing it all as business owners, professionals, mothers, and caregivers while neglecting their own wellbeing. "When the mom's in alignment, everyone's in alignment," she explains, highlighting how personal wellness creates ripple effects throughout families and communities. Self-care isn't selfish; it's essential for showing up fully in every role we play.
Her own health crisis with frightening heart symptoms that multiple ER visits couldn't resolve reinforced the profound connection between nervous system regulation and overall health. Through this experience, she learned to recognize her body's whispers before they became screams—a lesson she now shares with patients.
Ready to transform your relationship with your body and reclaim your vitality? Connect with Dr. Gale at HASChiro.com or follow her educational content on Instagram @DrPrettyStrong to discover how nervous system alignment could be the missing piece in your wellness journey.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Millie.
Speaker 2:M. Hello everybody, welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I am your host, millie M. Are you in need of ease in your nervous system through chiropractic care? Well, we have just the right person for you. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, dr Vanessa Gale of Holistic Alignment Strategies. How are you, dr Gale? I'm excellent. Thank you, glad to hear it. We are so excited to learn all about you and your business. Tell us more about Holistic Alignment Strategies.
Speaker 3:Yes, Holistic Alignment Strategies is located in Marietta, georgia. We are a collective of two doctors and we have office hours ranging from early mornings to late afternoons into the evening, and what we do is we help people get out of that state of fight or flight and into a state of ease where their bodies can just relax and experience that effortlessness and more resilience in their body and in their ability to adapt to stress.
Speaker 2:Stress kills. We know that, and so to be able to just be more relaxed in your body I even noticed that when I'm more relaxed, I'm on time. There's a, there's a grace in which in which I move, so this is definitely a valuable service. So how did you get into this? How did you get into chiropractic care to start? And then how did you say I want to focus on ease of the nervous system specifically?
Speaker 3:Yes, well, so I have a background in dance and for years I was under chiropractic care and I loved my chiropractor. And halfway through chiropractic or dance school, my chiropractor was like, what are you going to do after school?
Speaker 3:And I said, oh, I'm going to dance, of course a little bit further down the road, I started to get burnt out, started to be very stressed and like panicked and understanding, like how chiropractic can help me with that and not just my aches and my pains. So he introduced me to Life University where I came and began chiropractic care. I also are understanding chiropractic and in chiropractic school, and what happened about halfway through chiropractic school is I discovered this technique called network spinal. I sustained a very significant injury in my low back while lifting weights. I was also a competitive power lifter, yeah, and this was the only technique that really helped unwind the tension and alleviate the pain for one.
Speaker 3:But also it shifted so much about my life and how I set boundaries in the world and how I showed up in my personal and professional life, because before that it was just all about helping people get out of pain, and now it's about understanding your pain and teaching people how to integrate and how to shift out of that state of I'm helpless, I can't do anything about this, it's going to be like this forever into a state of what is my pain telling me and I use that as a gift, and then, all of a sudden, your pain shifts and your body shifts and your life starts to shift. Your relationships get better, your work gets better because, right, you have more coherence in your nervous system and, like you said, you show up on time. You show up different in the world. You show up with more energy and more availability to be flexible and make progress and changes in your life that need to happen.
Speaker 2:I love the therapeutic nature of everything that you're talking about and it gives a whole new meaning to trauma being stored in the body and being able to release that and, like you said, show up in different ways in your relationships. Chiropractic care, I'm learning, is not, like you said, just about neck and back pain. Realigning that nervous system sprouts out to so many different areas, gastro attention. It's just so much and I really feel like we need to go on a campaign to get people to think of it before other methods, as opposed to a last resort or after an accident. So what are some of the myths and misconceptions about your industry or what you do specifically?
Speaker 3:Absolutely Well.
Speaker 3:I think you hit the nail on the head right there with a lot of people just go to a chiropractor when they're in pain or when they have a fall or a car crash or something like that. And chiropractic really is about wellness and it's about your nervous system. And if your nervous system is in that stressed out, fight or flight state you cannot function and show up properly. It affects your sleep, it affects your digestion, it affects your heart. That's a big one. People don't understand like the vagus nerve goes to all of the internal organs and when that is misaligned and there's pressure and that vagus nerve is not firing properly, you can have tachycardia, panic attacks, all sorts of things that show up that people think, oh, this is a heart issue or this is a GI issue, and it's not. It's typically a nervous system issue and that is the root cause of most things and our nervous system is affected. It's how we interface with the world and people and all of the stress that we can or can't adapt to.
Speaker 2:Understood, understood. So we know that marketing is very important to any business. So who are your target customers and how do you reach them?
Speaker 3:Yeah, my target customers, or who I would say I work with, are super women, people who, yeah, people who are doing it all. So there was like a term coined in the eighties and nineties. It was called the super woman syndrome and it's like the people who are, they own their own businesses, their moms, or they work a nine to five in big corporate jobs and they're like doing everything. They're showing up as caregivers in so many avenues of their life, but are they taking care of themselves? And I like to work with those super women because when they come in and they get their life back on track, it affects everyone in their immediate community, especially their own household, so their husbands, their partners, their kids. If the mom's in line, everyone's in alignment.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think we need to reframe. This idea of taking care of ourself is selfish. It's so full, because then we have more to give, like you said, to our families and to our communities. Have you ever thought about like I said, we're going to blow the horn here have you ever thought about doing your own podcast and really specifically talking about those issues that affect those super moms and super women and getting the word out?
Speaker 3:I definitely have thought about having my own podcast. I've been on many podcasts before and other people's podcasts, but yeah, it is something I've thought about Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You just have such a wealth of information and you know I think it needs to be broadcast. So, outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:Oh, I, am a homeschool mama, so we do a lot of outdoor play. Love to go paddle boarding out on the lake, love to go for hikes. I love to dance, I love to lift. Those are my main things that I love doing A beautiful life, it sounds like.
Speaker 2:So let's switch gears a little bit. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge you overcame and how it made you stronger?
Speaker 3:Oh, yes, absolutely. A couple of years ago, I was having a similar experience as the one I was describing. I was having these flutters in my heart and my heart would like just go crazy in terms of like the speed, and it was very nerve wracking and I was like, oh my gosh, like what is going on? Am I dying? It really felt like I was having a heart attack and I ended up. I went and got to the ER multiple times because it was occurring over and over and over again.
Speaker 3:But deep down in my soul and my heart, I really knew like this was not a heart issue.
Speaker 3:I knew it was a nervous system issue, and so I called up one of my my chiropractors, my steadfast, and I got adjusted and it shifted so much.
Speaker 3:But what it really taught me was that if we're not paying attention to our bodies on a regular basis, in a in a way where it's whispering and giving us signals cause my heart was definitely giving me signals for a long time then it's going to show up in a yell or a scream or chaos, you know. And what I've experienced after that was like, oh, those little flutters like what are they telling me? What are they telling me to take action on? What are they telling me to do? What are they telling me to step away from and honor? You know where I'm at and what I can accomplish in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year. So that's my like biggest thing. It's like I went through this crazy health period. It was a few months of trying to get to the bottom of this and it just once I found the root cause. It instilled in me how much chiropractic, how powerful chiropractic is, on a regular basis, over and over again, definitely a reinforcement through your own experience.
Speaker 2:And I love that word honor. We need to honor our bodies and what they are saying to us for sure. So, those super moms and super women and super people out there that want to connect with you and get those nervous systems to a place where they need to be, please tell our listeners how they can learn more about you.
Speaker 3:Well, you can find me on my website, which is HAS Cairo dot com, and you can check me out on Instagram as well. Dr Pretty strong, I have a wealth of information on Instagram. It's constantly educating my current patients as well as people who are seeking this sort of nervous system intervention.
Speaker 2:Sounds good and I think this would be a great gift certificate idea for people that feel like need that. So I'll be sending some people your way. Really appreciate you being on the show and best of luck to you and your business moving forward.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpcobbcountycom. That's gnpcobbcountycom, or call 470-470-4506.