Episode 55: Chiropractic Care: Realigning Your Body To Live Your Best Life With Dr. Laura Brayton
Are you seeking a medical practitioner with a deep knowledge of overall health and who offers several holistic modalities in a loving and supportive environment? In today's episode, you will meet one of the personal health practitioners I go to improve my health and get my body physically aligned. Dr. Laura Brayton is the owner and founder of Hoboken Family Chiropractic + Wellness in Hoboken, NJ. She holds certifications in Chiropractic Pediatrics, Webster Technique for breech presentation, Sacro-Occipital Technique (S.O.T.), Craniopathy, and is an advanced level practitioner of Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Technique (NAET) and a Tupler Technique® trainer. In this conversation, Dr. Laura talks about chiropractic as a way to heal physical pain, how she helps mothers and babies have holistic health, and how people with allergies minimize the risk of allergen exposure. Let's get limitless with our health by tuning in!
Follow her on FB and IG @drlaurabrayton, and at www.drlaurabrayton.com.
Also, Check out her Podcast, The Well Adjusted Mama, on iTunes, Spotify and more.
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Chiropractic Care: Realigning Your Body To Live Your Best Life With Dr. Laura Brayton
Are you seeking out a medical practitioner with a deep knowledge of overall health that offers several holistic modalities situated in a loving and supportive environment? In this episode, you will meet one of my personal health practitioners that I go to improve my health and get my body physically aligned. Dr. Laura Brayton, DC, CSP, CSCP, CACCP is a graduate of New York Chiropractic College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds certifications in Chiropractic Pediatrics, Webster Technique for Breech Presentation, Sacro-Occipital Technique or SOT, Craniopathy, and is an advanced level practitioner of Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique, also known as NAET, and a Tupler Technique trainer.
She is the Owner and Founder of Hoboken Family Chiropractic & Wellness, in Hoboken, NJ. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @DrLauraBrayton and at DrLauraBrayton.com. Also check out her podcast, the Well-Adjusted Mama, on iTunes, Spotify, and all the other podcast platforms. You can even check out the episode where she interviewed yours truly. Let’s get limitless with our health 0:01:33. Here we go.
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Dr. Laura Brayton, how are you?
I’m doing great. How are you?
I’m doing fantastic. I get to spend a lot of time with you. I come to you weekly for my allergy treatments, as well as my chiropractic adjustments. I know a lot about your practice and I’m so excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Let’s jump right into it. What does living a limitless life mean to you?
That is something that I’m still figuring out, but I’ve done years and years of personal development work. I think what I’ve realized is that a lot of us have strong subconscious beliefs from the first seven years of our life that become our pattern, truth, and stories, and they create limitations. As we’re doing this work on ourselves and we’re starting to recognize those patterns or blocks that might be no longer serving us, we can recognize that once we change that story, some of those limitations are removed. To me, it’s like an onion peeling back those layers and discovering your true self, which is limitless but is different than our subconscious patterns.
Chiropractic Care: You change your story, and you change your life.
You changed your story and life. Any time there needs to be a change, you have to ask a question like, “What is your belief around any particular area of your life?” If it’s not empowering, it takes effort, but it is possible to change everything. There’s nothing that is static. Any belief that we have can be changed. For those on the limitless path, that’s what we have to address and be honest with ourselves.
We have to have our ego get over it and go there. As a mother, parenting is one of the best ways to become more conscious of these patterns and change the story because our child will mirror back those blocks or limitations. It will create frustration, irritability, and anger within ourselves when we’re getting that mirror reflection. There’s an opportunity to learn and grow from that. It’s very important to do that. Not only, number one, for ourselves, but then also for our child because then we’re able to model what being conscious and present is. Our children will learn how to do that as well, especially, in the first seven years of their life.
Kids come into this place. They have limitless beliefs and believe in imaginary friends. They have so much abundance of thought and no limitations. Their environments, especially parents and people around them start implanting their own subconscious blockages into the child. It’s so important to be aware of that. It’s also a great practice, especially as a parent to monitor your own thoughts. Dr. Laura, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you became a successful entrepreneur and chiropractor?
I have to give a lot of credit to my father. He was an electrical engineer his entire career. He worked for twenty years at GE and Siemens. Those are the two businesses that he worked for. He never wanted to own his own business but loves to have a 9:00 to 5:00 and time for family after that. Also, have that work-life balance. It wasn’t stressful for him. That’s what was comfortable for him, but he was fascinated with the chiropractic profession because he understood that structure equals function. It was so logical to him. When he was exposed to chiropractic in his early twenties, soon after graduating as an engineer, it clicked.
He was like, “This is going to be my healthcare for the rest of my life.” He introduced my mom to it when she was pregnant with me as her first child for her pregnancy back pain. My sister and I have been under care our entire lives, which is what you will find if you have a family member who’s a chiropractor. A lot of people are like, “Your dad must’ve been a chiropractor.” I’m like, “He was a wannabe chiropractor.”
He was so fascinated with how powerful and simple it was to get a chiropractic adjustment. He loved that you could work with your hands because he loved to build things. He was a very hands-on kind of guy. You can have the opportunity to have your own business, make your hours, make your schedule, and get paid well for it.
There was a lot about it he liked, but I think he was not really into doing four more years of school. That was why he never became one. He strongly encouraged me to become one. I remember around the age of five, he was like, “You should be a chiropractor one day because of all these great reasons,” and here I am. That was my destiny, and I do love working with my hands. I do believe that some people are born with a gift to use healing through their hands. I have that gift. I’m also always called to work with babies and pregnant moms, even as a child. I would play like a pediatrician, and when I was in college, for a second, I thought about becoming a midwife.
There was something always very fascinating to me about a pregnant woman’s body, what is being created, births, the baby, and all of that. For me, being able to merge that as a chiropractor that specializes in taking care of pediatrics, including newborns, as well as women throughout their whole perinatal journey, which is the preconception pregnancy and the postpartum phase.
Many of us have strong subconscious beliefs from the first seven years of our lives. They become our pattern, our truth, and our stories.
I get to do both of that and work as a specialist in that area without necessarily having to be on call for births or having to be responsible for a life-threatening illness with a pregnant mom and or a baby. That’s where other doctors come in, but I get to be their wellness provider, which I love. I get to see people when they’re healthy and help keep them healthy, as opposed to when they’re sick or have a trauma that is life-threatening.
That’s one of the things I got to experience growing up. My parents were doctors and my sister was an Ayurvedic doctor. I had to see the whole spectrum of healthcare and realize that you have to be proactive about your health. If you’re not proactive, then obviously, you have to wait until something happens to you. You then go see a doctor that will prescribe you medicine, surgery, or something like that. Whereas if you’re maintaining the vehicle and this beautiful creation that we have, this body, and if we’re honoring it and making sure that we’re doing everything we can, in putting the right things in the mind, the body, and in the spirit, it runs a lot smoother. You don’t have to worry too much about the breakdowns of it.
What I absolutely love about the chiropractic philosophy is as chiropractors, we believe in innate intelligence within our bodies that’s then controlled by universal intelligence. There’s very much a spiritual component to chiropractic. There’s an art, a science, and philosophy. Foundationally, anybody who is interested in doing work on themselves and addressing mental, emotional, and spiritual health, you have to do the physical health first. It is impossible to do the evolution of those other areas if the physical body is not being taken care of.
What’s cool is that when I give somebody a chiropractic adjustment, I am addressing their physical body. I’m specifically optimizing their nervous system function so that the computer of the body can work more effectively. From there, we’ll then allow them to think clearly and manage their emotion or their states in a more managed way because their nervous system is now in a better tone with the sympathetic and parasympathetic. They’re out of that fight or flight, and then they can make better, more grounded decisions from that place. That allows us to then have our meditation practice and other areas in spiritual development that will help us grow as human beings because the body is imbalanced.
It comes down to the functionality of the body and the skeletal system. If your posture is off, you’re not breathing as deep, you’re under stress if you’re in pain, your neck is a little bit misaligned, you’re going to be thinking about that. Stress hormones are released, and that leads to a poison created in the body. It then cycles from there. It’s a vicious cycle.
When we get our bodies back, that’s the foundation and then we can start pursuing greater levels of this human experience. When we’re in constant pain, which so many individuals are, unfortunately, how do you go and start pursuing those higher levels of awareness and consciousness? It’s almost impossible when you’re physically in a lot of things.
I agree. It’s pain. This is the big thing here. Pain can be caused by emotional trauma and stress. Even as chiropractors, we believe that the misalignments in the spine or what we call Subluxations are created not only from physical stress, which is what a lot of people only want to think of, “The bones are out of alignment. That must be because of my poor posture, I was in a fender bender, or I slipped on the ice.”
We know that those are all physical stressors on our bodies and can certainly create these misalignments. Chemical stress is a second reason. You mentioned the hormones in our body, junk food, and alcohol. Chemicals in our environment are all chemical stressors, which can also create misalignments in our spine and then negatively impact that nervous system function.
Chiropractic Care: When we're in physical pain, it's almost impossible to start pursuing those higher levels of awareness and consciousness.
The third thing is the emotional stressors. Sometimes people come in and be like, “I woke up and I couldn’t turn my neck.” They’re trying to think of all the physical reasons for that reaction. I’m like, “How’s your stress level?” “I’m so stressed out.” I’m like, “Maybe that’s why you can’t turn your neck.” I can once again work on their neck. I can give them relief. They leave my office moving their head much freer. However, I know that it will not hold if they don’t do something to manage those emotional stressors and recognize that we will have physical, chemical, and emotional stress in our life as humans. There needs to be something there going on however we want to minimize those stressors to the best of our ability, and that is a lifestyle.
That is, “How are you sitting or standing for work? How are you moving? What are you eating? How are you breathing and thinking? Is your brain bombarded with negative thoughts and emotions?” What can you do to help shift that story and not be stuck in those negative patterns? It’s because all that will impact the body. The more we can minimize that, the happier and healthier we can be.
It’s about everything we consume on every level. I was reading this quote from Hippocrates. What he says is, “If somebody wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then, it is possible to help them.”
That’s a very good quote. I’ve heard that one before and it’s very true. Part of the challenge for me in my practice is when I have somebody coming in, maybe for the first time, because they are experiencing pain. I’d love to see people when they’re healthy, but sometimes they’re like, “I feel good. Nothing is broken. Why fix it?” It’s that mentality. They got to be broken to come in sometimes for their first visit. We then educate them about the wellness maintenance component as well.
When they come in and we’re talking to them, we’re always mentioning lifestyle. It’s not just like, “Let me put you back in a place with your alignment and send you on your way, but let’s talk about all the things you’re doing outside of my office that I have no control over. I’m not going to your house and cooking your meals. Also, make sure you’re exercising and meditating. That’s on you as an adult and/or the parent of a child to manage those lifestyles, but I can help show you how to do it.”
What’s cool is people come in with pain and they’re feeling pain relief within those first couple of visits. What we do see is there’s a motivation to make more of those lifestyle changes because they are feeling better, and they don’t want to go back to pain. That’s a strong stimulus there. They want to feel pleasure, good, and how do you do things that are going to help me move towards that? A healthy lifestyle is foundational for that.
Success breeds success. All these little ways pile on top of each other, and then you’re more motivated because you know what’s possible. One of the things I love most about you and your practice is that you take a holistic approach. It’s not like you’re only going to get adjusted. Can you tell us a little bit about the primary focuses of your practice?
My practice is in Hoboken and we do take care of the whole family. We specialize in taking care of women that are perinatal, which is a preconception. Ideally, supporting them before they get pregnant and throughout the pregnancy, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd trimester. Helping them feel good, have a healthy head-down baby, and then helping prepare their pelvis for an easier labor and delivery if they’re able to have a vaginal delivery. Also, helping their body heal and recover after the birth, milk production, and all the things that go into that 4th trimester or those 1st three months after giving birth.
Some people are born with a gift to use healing through their hands.
We do a lot of that work. We take care of a lot of babies having latching challenges, digestive issues and sleep challenges because those babies have a stressed nervous system as well, potentially from the birth process or in-utero positioning. When we see a newborn, it’s got to be one or the other or both. We’re able to gently adjust that baby, no popping or cracking, to also, once again, essentially allow optimal nervous system function.
We see that impacts their milestone development, the first year of life, tummy time, rolling, crawling, walking, and all the things are going to work better when their nervous system is working better. Once again, it’s so logical, but not everybody knows. “I can bring my baby to a chiropractor.” We do these things. We certainly take care of dads and young professionals as well with chiropractic alignment. I also want to mention that I’m a craniopath, which means I have additional training on adjusting the skull, which 80% of our nervous system is within our skull.
When I’m impacting the nervous system, if I only do the spine, I’m missing 80%. Addressing the alignment of the bones of the skull, which do move even as adults, but especially a baby, their skulls are very malleable. We want to make sure those bones are lined up so that essentially the brain that doubles in size in the first year of life can grow optimally within this case of a skull and that there’s not any restriction from a bony perspective in that growth and development.
In addition to chiropractic, I offer NAET, which is Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique. That specifically is working to find any type of energetic allergy or physical allergen that is stressing the body or the energy system. We have people holding a vial of a potential allergen. It could be food, environmental like pollen or grass, emotional, a part of the body, or hormone.
I have thousands of vials with any of these potential allergens, and when you hold a vial of something that is stressing your energy field, your muscle will go weak with a muscle test because every allergen has its own energy field, and each person’s body has its own energy field. If those energy fields are in conflict with each other, it will create a weakness in the muscle. To clear that specific allergen, the person holds the vial while I do acupressure points along the spine and acupressure gate points with a laser on their body to help their body hold the treatment. It’s very powerful.
I am working with a little girl that has several anaphylactic allergens to foods. This is a big deal because when you have an anaphylaxis level allergy, your life feels threatened on a daily basis. It’s hard for a parent to feel safe and our nervous system needs to feel safe to fully thrive. I’m not going to eliminate that little girl’s allergies to peanuts, sesame, and other allergens that she has, but I can reduce her allergy load with this technique.
Ideally, she’s still avoiding it and not eating it. If there’s an accidental exposure, it doesn’t have to be a life-threatening event. That’s the power of NAET. Most of my patients are coming in because they’re having milder-type seasonal allergies or maybe a food intolerance like if they eat glow gluten, they get bloated. NAET can be used for anything like that, but it can also be used for more of severe ones. Recognizing that if it’s a mild allergy, we can eliminate it, but if it’s a severe allergy, we bring the level down and we can check this with pre and post-blood work to show that the intensity of the allergy has decreased, even though it’s still there and not healthy for that person to eat that food.
You went over so much there. I want to chat a little bit about NAET and then go back to some of the other things you talked about. The reason why I started coming to you is because you and I had a conversation. You came to my spa, and I was telling you about how I’m so allergic to everything. I have really bad seasonal allergies and allergies to food. I had this bad, dry, cracked skin on my fingers, which is completely gone right now.
Chiropractic Care: 80% of our nervous system is within our skull. So, if I only do the spine, I'm missing 80%.
I was suffering a lot and what was happening was I’m very much into meditation, spiritual growth, self-development and all this stuff. As I was suffering so much in the allergy part of my life, it was hard for me to get to that next level. I have been working with you since the late fall of 2021. I’ve been coming in every single week. We’ve been testing everything, and you started out with fifteen different allergens and vials. They call them The Basic Fifteen.
We went through that, and then we went into sub-sectors of specific allergies that I have like grass pollen, wheat, and all the famous ones like dust, mold, and all that stuff. I started noticing that each week, there were things that were happening in my body where I felt more in alignment. My allergies severely diminished over that time. I still had flare-ups, but they kept going down, and now, knock on wood, I don’t have any big allergy flare-ups in my life.
One of the biggest results I got was my hands for years. I would say about 5 to 10 years, I had this really dry, cracked skin. It was itchy all the time. Every time I ate something, it was causing inflammation and histamine is being produced in my body. It was causing this bad cycle. These were things that I love to eat, like avocados and all these other things. This works. My parents used to take me for allergy tests and do allergy shots with an allergist every single week, and it didn’t y do that much for me.
I took Claritins, the Zyrtecs, and all that stuff. I noticed that it was affecting my body and making me tired during the day. This is something that I know works and it helped me out so much. I’m super excited to share this with everyone who’s suffering from allergies because it absolutely will lower the load of the allergic response.
It does, and for bigger allergies, you might have to do the specific allergen multiple times. I’ve had that with some patients. This little girl, I haven’t even gotten to her severe ones yet. We have to prepare her body and we might even have to use her mother as a surrogate because she can’t hold that vial in the beginning. We can use a surrogate, which is also what I do when I do NAET with babies or children that are under five and don’t know how to do muscle testing or hold their arms strong. We can use a parent as a surrogate, which is so powerful. It’s a very powerful, energetic modality. We call it allergies because you can use it for that food and environmental allergens, but I’ve had really powerful results even with people that are having a lot of emotional things that they’re blocked in.
Each kid has 80 vials, but I have four of just emotions. It’s like, “How are you allergic to an emotion?” Each emotion has its own energy as well. We can clear things like that and I’ve worked with autoimmune conditions because autoimmune means you’re allergic to a specific part of your body. We can clear that organ and the hormones associated with it and help the body be at ease with itself, so it’s not attacking itself, which is what autoimmune is.
It’s powerful if you think about all the different applications. I’ve even had patients that have had reactions with either COVID or the vaccine that we’re able to use NAET to help desensitize. I have the vial company in California shipping me out the updated COVID variants. I have people coming in and I’m like, “I have the variant from a year ago,” and that’s not doing it anymore.
Do you have monkeypox yet?
It is impossible to do the evolution in the mental, emotional, and spiritual health areas if the physical body is not taken care of.
They’re sending me monkeypox. I’m like, “I can’t believe I’m going to have a monkeypox vial in my office,” but it’s on its way. It’s good to have these on hand because bizarre things can get stuck in our bodies. I had one patient. She moved out of the area, but we were treating things that we were both like, “This has got to be a past lifetime,” but the whole point is because we’re working on energy, it could be present life or past life or when you were a fetus. We don’t always have to know the story behind it.
We do muscle test. What’s cool is I can ask the body like, “What’s this day’s priority?” It tells me specifically what vials, maybe more than one that, the person needs at that moment to help in their healing journey. That’s what we do. You keep it simple. The body knows what’s best for it, and we have to listen and be respectful to get that information. It’s cool because, with muscle testing, I can also use it for the bioenergetic evaluations I do in my office.
If somebody is coming in with health challenges and needs to take some supplements to help their body heal, in addition to the chiropractic adjustments, we can also use muscle testing for that. It’s the same idea. You’re lying on the table, you have a strong arm up and then I’m testing where there’s an imbalance in the organ systems. Also, based on their history and their symptoms, we are now thinking, “Maybe this herb or this homeopathic or this nutritional supplement could benefit.”
I have them hold a sample of it and it’s a yes or no. “Yes. My body needs that,” or “No, it doesn’t need it.” I can also check the dosage. If it’s a yes, “How many drops or how many capsules a day does the body need? When do we need to recheck?” Is it 3, 4, or 5 weeks to change the protocol? Because recognizing as the body’s healing, especially when we’re not doing a maintenance-type supplement, they’re not going to be on these supplements long-term. This is not a medication for life. We’re healing the body. As the body is healing, the type of supplement and the dosage will also change.
The higher dose supplements are now reduced to a smaller dose per day or that remedy is no longer needed, but now we’re ready for this new remedy. We can continue that healing journey through supplementation. I love it because it’s very specific. We don’t have to guess, “You have a thyroid issue. Take this thyroid supplement,” which, unfortunately, I feel like allopathic medicine. It’s like, “Here’s the diagnosis. This is the drug we use for that diagnosis.”
“The person has horrible side effects.” “You don’t tolerate it. Let’s try the second drug. That didn’t work. Let’s try the third drug.” It’s a guessing game. It could be a potential a lot of side effects and/or death complementing that. We don’t need to do that. All these supplements are safe. Even though they’re safe but they’re not effective, I don’t want you to put them in your body. Let’s be clear about what’s going to be effective and safe. Let’s help your body heal and get you to where you want to be faster.
What I love about that is the whole approach is a do no harm, the Hippocratic Oath. That should be the number one priority for all healers. Also, you’re incorporating multiple modalities at the same time. You are using muscle testing, chiropractic adjustments, and lasers to hit all the energy points in the body as well as the NAET. Using it as a collective, you yield better results. Dr. Laura, you’re talking about the angle where you’re helping conceiving parents as well as the fertilization and all that stuff. I know it’s a big challenge these days. Fertility rates are low. What do you see as the number one challenge people are having while they’re trying to conceive these days?
We’re in the New York City area, so in general, people are waiting later to start families for a good reason. Especially if both partners, including the woman, are very career-oriented, there’s a hustle that goes with building your career and going up the rungs. It’s hard to do that when you have children and/or are pregnant. You do that beforehand, and then you’re like, “I’m ready to start a family.” You’re in your 30s or even early 40s, and it could be a little harder potentially to conceive.
Chiropractic Care: When you hold a vial of something stressing your energy field, your muscle will go weak with a muscle test because every allergen has its own energy field, and each person's body has its own energy field.
What I find is ideally I’m working with women and their partners’ preconceptions. If you’ve had a healthy lifestyle in your 20s and 30s like myself, I was able to conceive very easily naturally at the age of 39, but that’s because that was my lifestyle and it was years of that. If you’ve been working hard, stressed and perhaps not taking care of your body as much, now is the time to do that. Your partner needs to do that too.
When we look at the ability to conceive and not only get pregnant but maintain a healthy pregnancy, we have to look at both partners. Unfortunately, if it’s challenging to get pregnant and/or if a woman gets pregnant but has recurrent miscarriages, people tend to put all the blame on the woman because that’s the most obvious. However, we have to understand that the male partner contributes 50% of the genetics. The vessel with the woman’s body could potentially be part of the challenges with getting pregnant and maintaining a pregnancy, but we also have to look at the genetic health of that baby.
Recurrent miscarriages could also be indicative or difficulty even getting pregnant in the first place. It could be because of the father’s sperm. That’s why it’s wonderful for both partners to up their lifestyle habits towards health. That’s taking a deep dive into doing a physical detox of your body. We can have an epigenetic component on the egg and the sperm prior to conception, which is very important for the health of the baby.
Also, recognizing the toxins in our skincare, home, and foods, we want to be very conscious of what we’re minimizing during this preconception phase. Once again, for both partners. That’s going to make it much easier to get pregnant, be healthy during the pregnancy, and have a healthy baby. It does take two to have that, and unfortunately, our current environment is so toxic that we cannot completely avoid toxic exposure. There’s been a lot of research to show that moms living in all parts of the world have the cord blood of their baby showing hundreds of toxins. We can’t avoid it, but we can do our best to lower that and minimize it. There needs to be a lot of consciousness around that. That’s a big part of it.
Thank you so much for sharing. We could do an entire episode on this topic because it’s so in-depth. You’re such an expert on it. If anyone wants to learn more about it, check out Dr. Laura’s website. Can you tell us the name of the site?
My site is DrLauraBrayton.com. If you go there, you can find out more about my practice in Hoboken. It’s Hoboken Family Chiropractic & Wellness. You can also find out about my online products. I had a preconception online module that’s self-paced called the Brayton Birth Method. I also have my documentary that’s on my own pregnancy and birth journey. That’s available. I have a fertility eBook, and a one-week excerpt from the Brayton Birth Method that’s specifically on how to do an environmental detox. There are a lot of different options there for women and couples that are thinking about getting pregnant in the next 3 to 6 months to learn how they can do that from a more educated and empowered place.
Switching gears a little bit. I know you and I are both very much into self-development. You can say we’re self-development junkies in a way.
Thousands and thousands of dollars later, all worth every penny.
Our body knows what's best for it. We have to listen and be respectful to get that information.
We connected on that level so many times, but tell us about your journey to entrepreneurialism and why you decided to become an entrepreneur. I know a lot of chiropractors they’ll join a practice or they’ll only be a single-person practitioner, but you developed an amazing business that takes care of the entire family. You also have several practitioners working for you. Tell us about how you got into that and where you started because nobody gives you a manual on how to become a great entrepreneur.
No, and I would say that I’m a few years now as an entrepreneur, but if you had asked me years ago when I graduated from chiropractic school, would I have my own business one day? I wasn’t exactly sure what the answer was. It wasn’t very clear to me that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I wanted to be a chiropractor and use the gifts in my hands. I didn’t even necessarily know I wanted to have a whole personal brand.
This has been an evolution over the past couple of decades for myself in understanding what my life’s purpose is and how I can serve at the highest level, but essentially right out of school, like a lot of people, I was looking for an associateship. I found a practice in New Jersey. I had no family living in New Jersey, but I was dating my chiropractic school boyfriend who was from New Jersey. I was like, “I’ll move to New Jersey.”
I moved to New Jersey and he dumped me. I was like, “Now, what do I do?” I was living in Bergen County, in a town that wasn’t a bunch of young single people. It was miserable for me. My life was going into this practice and adjusting to people but not having any social life. I didn’t have any family support. After a few months of that, I was like, “This is not good for me. I don’t feel fulfilled and I’m living my purpose.”
I connected with a woman, another chiropractor in town, and she’s like, “All the young, single people live in Hoboken.” I’m like, “Hoboken, where’s that? I never heard of it. I’m not from New Jersey.” I remember driving there one day and being like, “This is where I want to live.” I found an apartment and then a year after that, recognizing, “I don’t want to work for somebody anymore. I want to practice the way I want to practice. I want to do all these additional trainings to evolve my gifts and practice the way I want to practice.”
I wasn’t seeing a lot of pregnant women and babies in my first position, so I knew that it was missing. The blessing of all that is then I found a place to open my practice in Hoboken and that felt in alignment with what I wanted. I figured it out from there. I don’t think I knew what I was doing, but I just took it one day at a time. I hustled a lot. I was at every networking event.
I was all out there meeting everyone I could, networking, and connecting with other like-minded providers and practitioners in my area and just grow. Those first few years, I worked a lot and it was also easier for me because I was single. I didn’t have a partner and a child that required my energy. My business was my first baby.
What a business it is. If anyone’s in the Northern Jersey area, New Jersey City, or Hoboken, please check her out. She’s got so many different modalities, and it’s a wonderful experience. It feels like you’re going into a spa. Dr. Laura, why do you think you came here to Earth as Dr. Laura Brayton? What did you want to experience?
Chiropractic Care: These foundational things—caring for and loving ourselves and understanding that we're a temple of God—are still valuable and very important to learn.
It took me a long time to figure that out beyond like, “I’m a chiropractor.” I’m like, “No. I’m not just a chiropractor. I have more to offer than that.” That’s been an evolution over the past few years where I got clear that my North Star is birthing global peace, and even understanding what that means has been an evolution. The first thing that was like, “I want to create programs and products where I can work with perinatal women living anywhere in the world.” I’ve been doing that for years within my office one-on-one with these women and perfecting that empowerment plays of helping women not only get pregnant and be pregnant in healthy, thriving pregnancy but also create an empowered birth experience, which will then create an empowered mother.
That is literally shifting the consciousness of these women and, therefore, their children in the next generation. I felt very strongly about that, but in addition to that, what also has come up for me is then becoming a mother myself and understanding my son has a place to play in birthing global peace as well as a future leader and peacekeeper for the Earth. How do I mother that person? How do I show up? It feels like a lot of responsibility, but he’s a very special soul. I just have to get out of the way, honestly.
Thank you for sharing that. What role does spirituality play in your life?
It plays a big role, and that’s also interesting. That’s been an evolution over the years. Growing up, my parents were fairly strict Christians. My mom was raised Catholic, but my dad was not. When he got married, he told my mom. He’s like, “I don’t like Catholicism and I’m never going to be a Catholic.” My mother essentially left the Catholic church, much to my grandparent’s dismay. My sister and I were not raised Catholic. We were raised in a Christian church. We read the Bible every day and it was very Bible-focused and Jesus-focused.
I don’t live my life that way anymore, but I know that the morality and the ethics that I learned from my childhood are with me. I appreciate that because there were a lot of teachings about what that meant to essentially be kind, generous, and care for others. Some of these foundational things like caring for ourselves and understanding that we’re a temple of God, so understanding what that means to love ourselves and care for ourselves.
As an adult, I can look back at those teachings and Sunday school. I have a different perspective on them, but they’re still valuable. Now, how do I teach that also to my son without necessarily going to church but recognizing that those values and belief systems are very important for him to learn as well? I would say currently I have a meditation practice that has fulfilled me very much spiritually and then being a conscious parent as well.
Dr. Laura, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your gifts with the world and your community. Also, thank you personally for helping me in my health journey with the allergies and helping my body get back into proper alignment. I want to wish you a wonderful day and I can’t wait for the audience to learn more about you.
Thank you so much.
You’re very welcome.
Important Links
Instagram – Dr. Laura Brayton
@DrLauraBrayton - Facebook
iTunes - Well-Adjusted Mama
Spotify - Well-Adjusted Mama
Episode – John Livesay’s episode on Well-Adjusted Mama
About Dr Laura Brayton
Dr Laura Brayton, DC, CSP, CSCP, CACCP, is a graduate of New York Chiropractic College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds certifications in Chiropractic Pediatrics, Webster Technique for breech presentation, Sacro-Occipital Technique (S.O.T.), Craniopathy, is an advanced level practitioner of Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique (NAET) and a Tupler Technique® trainer.
She is owner and founder of Hoboken Family Chiropractic + Wellness, in Hoboken, NJ. Follow her on FB and IG @drlaurabrayton and at www.drlaurabrayton.com. Also Check out her Podcast, The Well Adjusted Mama, on iTunes, Spotify and more. You can even check out the episode where she interviewed yours truly.
