'It seemed like he was hardly doing anything.' I just lay there as he put his hands on my head, but when I got up it felt like more wind was in my sails. I don't know what was going on, but my back pain disappeared afterwards."
Wisdom in the Body
Michael Kern
The Craniosacral Approach to Essential Health
How does it work? A frequent question from people after experiencing Craniosacral Therapy.
It can be a surprise, if not a culture shock, to realise that inside us we have all the resources needed for healing. Our life force, or animating force is always orienting towards health. We have such a culture of orienting towards dis-ease, that it takes some thought to understand what an orientation to health means. And if we have all the resources inside us, why are we sick, exhausted, and in pain??
To understand this, it may be good to look at what health means for you? That's going to have a different feel for everyone, but some underlying basics are common for all. For some, it will just be a sense of wellness. For others feeling connected and engaged? Getting good sleep. Having loving relationships. Having an energy abundance. A good belly laugh. Training physically or being creative? Curling up on the couch with a great book. Whatever health looks like for you, health is dependent on your physical, emotional, energetic, social, and environmental resources. When there is lots of rest, love, time, joy, purpose, appreciation and nature we feel pretty good. All of these things contribute to our health. Understanding this, helps us to appreciate what contributes to our dis-ease.
Consider your whole life, even the life of your parents, even your grandparents, your conception, your place in the family, your birth, the experience of your childhood, teenagehood and early adult. Right up until now. Take some time. Write it down. Warning - this can be celebratory, and it can be confronting, or a mixture of both!
You'll have your list of traumas and positive experiences. Your struggles and your strengths. Joys and sorrows. But when you start to look at a whole, a complete you, in relationship to all that influenced, supports, depleted and resourced you, and you hold that whole relational mix gently and with grace, then maybe you feel something. A tone, a feel, a recognition maybe that all is related. Nothing is separate, and therefore working with the whole is the only way to move forward. That and a lot of self-compassion, awareness, and time. There is space for celebration and joy in this experience as well!
So where does Craniosacral come in all this? We have tides in our body, which are animated by the life force or the Breath of Life. This breath of life supports and holds health at deep levels. People experience a felt perception of these tides during slow processes like breathwork and meditation. You may feel the pulse or rhythm of them in a Craniosacral treatment.
In a 'healthy' person, one that gets many things on our health checklist from an early age, and consistently throughout life, an experience of trauma, from any realm is met with healthy body resources, and resiliently recovers from whatever happened. When there has been trauma, physical emotional or spiritual, and the traumatic event overwhelms our body's natural resources to deal with it, the trauma can stay in the body, it stays as a source of compression, or restriction. The tidal flow becomes inhibited.
We experience this as pain, anxiety, exhaustion or depression. The block in the tide, or flow is perceptible to the trained Craniosacral Therapist. When this block is 'listened' to with sensitive hands and heart, it starts to energetically organise itself back towards the whole, to become less separate, holding, or isolated, and reunites with the rest of the body, simultaneously releasing all the energy it was using to keep it held stuck. This is the reason people often feel lighter after a session, and can have more energy. Craniosacral allows space for a gentle reset, a resourcing of your system if severely depleted, and a gentle, yet perceptible movement towards better health.
When I'm holding someone in a session. I'm not just holding their tissues. I'm working with the whole. I'm holding their cells, their cellular memories, I'm holding the fluids and the energetic expression. I'm holding space for the relational exchanges in their life. Im holding their history, heck, if you are a Bruce Lipton fan, maybe even their future. And I listen for the tide, and what it is telling me as it shifts and changes moment to moment. And I let the infinate wisdom of your body sort out what it needs to, gently and in a way that works best for it, without manipulation or force.
Craniosacral for me is a way of holding wholes and bringing you back to a sense of wholeness.