I invited Dr. Kim Makoi for noodels and to record a Puzzle Exchange podcast episode. We had a real conversation about his work with Neuro Emotional Technique (NET). But more than that, I got a glimpse of a truly rare kind of practitioner—someone who is unafraid to talk about the hardest things in life: death, grief, and the messy, magical human experience we're all navigating.

A Chiropractor Who Became Something More

Dr. Makoi started as a chiropractor because it seemed straightforward—set your own hours, learn the spine, adjust people, they get better. But he quickly realized healthcare isn't simple. There were always other factors affecting whether people got well.

Early on, he discovered NET and something clicked. He'd do this mind-body intervention and people would experience actual physical relief. "It really blew my mind," he said. He saw his edge: most chiropractors weren't addressing the emotional and stress components of illness. "There's not as much of things like NET and I feel like people are really struggling with stress and trauma."

What's remarkable about Dr. Kim isn't just his clinical skill—it's his humanity. He's compassionate in the way he meets people where they are, acknowledging that our deepest struggles often live in the places we don't want to look. He does his own deep work too, having had significant NET sessions around his own relationship with his mother. "I have a similar mom, so I've had a lot of NET on mom stuff. So even though mom is still mom, like we still have conflict, I don't feel the same way in my body that I used to."

What Is NET, Actually?

NET is useful when your pain gets worse under stress, when your digestion falls apart during busy weeks, or when physical problems show up right after something emotionally difficult happens. It's not for injuries—it's for when stress and emotions are tangled up in your physical symptoms.

The core tool is something Dr. Makoi calls "low tech biofeedback"—a muscle test. He establishes how strong your muscle is normally, then introduces different stress triggers (a tight body area, a thought, an emotion). When your muscle strength changes, it tells him where your nervous system is registering stress.

Once he finds what's triggering it, the resolution combines three things: slow breathing (which tells your body it's safe), touching specific points on your body, and focusing on the emotional trigger itself. "Slow breathing tells the body that it's safe. It's mixing safety physiology combined with touching the points combined with imagining the trauma or the stressful event. It's the combination that settles it down."

What makes NET different is that it has a protocol. "I like NET because it can take a complicated thing, but it's a simple protocol," he said. "It's like, here's the steps, follow these steps." It's not dependent on intuition—it's a systematic process that starts broad and gets more specific.

The Death Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

What really sets Dr. Kim apart is his willingness to talk about something most practitioners avoid: death. He's working on a project called AfterWife, which helps people organize "living funerals"—formal experiences where you prepare yourself and your loved ones for death before it actually happens.

He noticed that Western culture doesn't have good death rituals anymore, which means people are unprepared when loss comes. "Death is such an important part of life and I feel like we avoid it so much that it's such a shit show. Like when people die, it's like, wow, they didn't do their paperwork, they didn't emotionally prepare."

It's the chance to grieve, to honor, to prepare—not just for death, but for all the transitions and losses we experience in life. He's even writing a book about grieving gender transition, because he understands that we don't just grieve people. We grieve versions of ourselves. We grieve the old life when we step into a new one.

What Stayed With Me

What struck me most about Dr. Kim is a man who is deeply compassionate, unafraid to go into the hard places with his patients, willing to discuss death and grief and the messy, magical human experience we're all navigating—physically, emotionally, and even existentially. He's the kind of practitioner who understands that healing isn't just about fixing what's broken. It's about honoring the full complexity of being human.