Craniosacral. Say it again? Cranial Osteopathy. Er? The Breath of Life informs the system with Potency and Biodynamic Stillness, unwinding the inertial fulcrums and re-establishing the Blueprint of inherent Health. What the..?! Confused? I'm sure I'm already losing you at this point. I think you get the idea, these are all very esoteric, somewhat pretentious terms.
Articles about Craniosacral therapy in the past have been chock-full of mystery. In the majority of publications about the subject, the osteopathic community, where this kind of therapy originated from, has typically resorted to using their obscure and obtuse language of proprietary terms only they understand. Most attempts at explaining the modality or its benefits are mired in jargon, which often comes across as elitist, therefore Craniosacral therapy remains a mystery and any interested parties are left in the dark. Even to a new student of the modality, this can be frustrating. While it can sometimes have a beautiful, flowery, somewhat intriguing (ultimately confusing) effect to use these terms, not unlike the affect an old Taoist poem or haiku has, I am of the school of thought that demystification is the most beneficial cause here. My goal is twofold, to get you to understand the basic nature of energy in the body, as well as the comprehension of Craniosacral therapy as a distinct modality amongst its many counterparts in the ocean of body energy therapies that are out there. I hope I will have achieved this in an accessible way, using layman's terms and allegories. An explanation of this kind of work warrants a preface on the background of energy therapy, yet I don't want to bore the average reader with too much material right away, so I am saving the history for later and will jump right into the thick of it. For a background on Western energetic practices and the history of this work, please stay tuned for a future article from myself on the subject.
EXPLANATION
Craniosacral therapy (CST) is a gentle bodywork technique that facilitates the release of physical, mental and emotional tension by affecting the energetic, nervous and skeletal systems of the body in a profound, yet subtle way. It is in fact a full-body system of healing, yet the boney/nervous systems are typically used as an initial diagnostic gateway into the health of the other systems of the body.
Through listening to and interfacing with the delicate movements of the craniosacral rhythm, which is generated by the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid within the membranes surrounding our brain and spinal cord, the practitioner finds the meeting place between the energetic systems of the body and its physical structures.
ELECTROMAGNETIC (EM) FIELDS AND THE LIFE-FORCE
Every living thing emits an EM field. This field is in fact our life-force, manifesting itself energetically. While mainstream science and Western allopathic medicine do not acknowledge this correlation as fact, viewing it only as one of many suspect hypotheses to explain away 'unexplained' phenomena, every month there are more and more scientific studies that cannot prove this 'hypothesis' wrong. We can't see the entire spectrum of radiation and electromagnetic energy, as is obvious with things like infrared light, which we use thermal imagers to see. The same goes for the electromagnetic energy the body emits, it is generally not within our range of seeing ability, but we CAN feel it, if we slow down enough. Since we all have our own EM field, I have come to the conclusion that each of us can experience and feel this field, both as client and as practitioner. I am of the belief that this is in the grasp of anyone and everyone, if only we were all to take a break from the neurotic rat-race we live in and become more coherent with the forces of Nature, as is our birthright.
Healing is not an external force, it is the act of bringing your true inner essence, the Self outward, to inform the rest of your body and soul. Much like the alchemists of old were intent upon bringing the quintessence, the 'Philosopher's Stone', the pure gold out of base matter (lead), a healing practitioner is someone who facilitates the expression of your inner nature, the perfect Self, to inform the rest of the body which may have forgotten what and who it is over time. This Self I am referring to is the perfection or 'Blueprint' that the osteopaths talked about in their work. This 'Blueprint' happens to exist beyond the influence of genetics, in our EM field, pervading all through our body and is our true ordering principle, it is the intelligence behind 'body memory', a quantum storage bank of information. Healing is ultimately done by the client, not by the practitioner. Trapped or stuck energy inside you is waiting to come out into its own freedom of expression. The real role your therapist plays is acting as a mirror, by bringing themselves into the state of 'holistic shift' and being fully aware of the health already present inside your body, this encourages your own body to resonate with that vibration and thus awakens the potent healing power within you.
OSTEOPATHIC INFLUENCES/IDEAS
Craniosacral therapy belongs to the lineage of medical discovery by Osteopathic doctors over the last 100 years or so. For now, I will keep it at that and tell you some of the philosophy behind Osteopathy that greatly influenced CST. These are some tenets of Osteopathy:
-The body operates as a unit (this was an early expression of the 'holistic' idea, that one's body is not an independently-working grouping of parts but an entire ecosystem or 'biosphere' of intimately related and symbiotic phenomena)
-structure and function are interrelated and reciprocal (this idea is most obvious when observing the musculoskeletal system, however it applies to the entire body - when structures are closest to their 'Blueprint' in size, shape and location, they function their best in this state)
-life is a dance between motion and stillness. Without movement, health cannot fully express itself (prolonged stagnation and disease occur when movement ceases. A cessation of motion is not the same thing as stillness, stillness is actually a very healthy part of the energetic oscillation that happens in the 'zero point' between movements, like the resting point between when you inhale and exhale. It has a very 'full', expansive and potent quality to it, unlike stagnation, which feels empty.)
THE SECRET
Now I'm sure you're wondering by this point "how on Earth could someone possibly feel the innermost physiological happenings inside of someone's body, let alone anything just below the surface level of the skin (besides obvious things like circulatory pulses, organs making noises, bones adjusting or muscles moving, all things we can feel with our hands on the skin?)" Any rational and naturally skeptical person would rightly ask this question. This is a particular point I have surprisingly yet to find a sufficient enough explanation of in all my studies and I hope to nip that in the bud right here.
In your hands, you have the highest concentration of sensitive and discriminatory nociceptors (nerve cells that detect pressure, heat, chemical and electrical changes in sensory homeostasis, or the 'baseline' of average sensation. This can range from severe pain to very subtle, almost unnoticeable changes). The key here is to note the 'electrical' part of the nociceptor's ability. They are very sophisticated, you'd be surprised what they can detect. To give an example of the sophistication of your nervous system, there are more neural networks in the mesentery, or the connective tissue lining in your gut/organs than in the brain. This can explain a lot about how real 'gut feelings' can be. I think people subconsciously have the notion that the brain and the rest of their nervous system are so far away from each other that, while communicatively connected, are not exactly one and the same system. In order to understand Craniosacral therapy and the workings of your body, it is necessary to realize the brain and nervous system are one and the same, your NS is only an extension of the brain. What this ultimately all means is that a therapist, with 'thinking, feeling hands', palpates the echoes of the inner workings of your body by way of subtle electromagnetic fluctuations and impulses that are projected into your EM field.
Now you may be thinking, "Ok, so how does the EM field contain 'echos' that tell a therapist what is happening in their client's body." To explain this, I usually use a satellite analogy; internal physiology is manifested externally in the EM field in a similar way to how we send signals from Earth to a satellite, orbiting in the periphery of its stratosphere. Electromagnetic waves carry the signal to the satellite and then bounce information back to Earth. Your EM field behaves in a similar fashion, orbiting and surrounding your periphery, receiving energy to and fro from the body. Like a language, it can be palpated and understood via the nociceptors of a therapist, skillfully trained in anatomy and the energetic 'feel' of that anatomy. Diagnosis and treatment in Craniosacral therapy are achieved through this same channel.
THE MOVEMENTS
The life-force expresses itself many ways. The primary movement that we work with in CST is the longitudinal fluctuation, or midline/central channel oscillation of fluidic movement in the body. This happens to be felt the most easily in the central nervous system and in the occiput bone (part of the skull) and sacrum bone (your 2nd lowest back bone before the coccyx, or tip of the tailbone), hence the name 'craniosacral'. The second aspect of this movement is an expansive force that rotates inward and outward in the EM field, and the third aspect is the overall expansive, full quality or lack of expansiveness in the field. In a naturally healthy state, these fluctuations are very noticeable and potent, but can become dim or less obvious in someone who is not in their optimal health. As CS therapists, we try to encourage the free-flowing expression of these movements.
FULCRUMS
Energy governs form. There are two kinds of 'fulcrums', or organizing centers in the body. Natural fulcrums occur where the generative/formative force of your Blueprint that formed your body created an inherent point that energy flows around and follows. These are normal and healthy. Inertial fulcrums are points that were created by the energetic force, sometimes called a 'force vector', of physical and/or emotional trauma. Everyone who has lived has these as well.
Better explained, imagine a fulcrum and the energy surrounding it is like a hurricane. The 'center of the storm', or organizing center, is full of stillness and calm, whilst the energy surrounding it is rapidly swirling around the still center of the vortex. Inertial fulcrums do require some of the 'baseline' health within us, in other words, some of the energy we could be utilizing towards being problem-free and in a perfect state of health is used towards stabilizing the destructive force of the force vector caused by an injury or trauma. Imagine inertial fulcrums like vortices in the space-time continuum, but only within a particular band of electromagnetic energy. Forces organize, spin and twist around these vortexes in order to maintain some form of stability. Without these inertial fulcrums, as pathological as they may seem in some respects, we would fall apart and start to deteriorate, causing disease and eventually death. It is valuable to honor the intelligence in the holding pattern keeping things together, they are helping us more than hindering us. All they need is a little reminder of what the 'Blueprint' looks like to establish a better order of health. This is achieved by a migration of the trapped energy within inertial fulcrums to the natural ones and to the field as a whole. Through treatment, the forces inside inertial fulcrums dissipate, much like a storm losing it's spiralic circulation and power. The energy is now released and available for utilization by the rest of your body to it's energy reserves and it's health, the 'Blueprint'. The energetic 'Blueprint', all its natural fulcrums and the inertial fulcrums inside us make up the energetic composite that is our energy body. The goal of CST and all kinds of energy therapy is to bring your whole system back to a state that more resembles your 'Blueprint'.
CRANIOSACRAL IS UNIQUE
- your therapist, if solely practicing this modality will not channel external vitalized energy or life-force into your or anyone else's body, unlike many other kinds of energy therapy, in practicing CST they are only working with YOUR energy. Your own energy is already tailored towards you, it has your imprint, it contains all the health you could ever need and working with it tends to have longer lasting positive effects than trying to bring in other energy and attempting for it to assimilate and stay within you.
- in this modality we are not 'healing' you, but are in fact encouraging your own inner healer to express itself naturally, which is the true source of health. By coming into 'resonance' with your energy field, which a practitioner does by grounding themselves, slowing down, and expanding their awareness, the ensuing process of subtle listening to the systems of your body allows for the organizing intelligence of your 'Inner Physician' to manifest, expand and heal old patterns that no longer suit you. From a practitioner standpoint, it is much like 'deeply meditating with your hands on somebody'.
- the study of Craniosacral therapy does not entail or include any work with 'Spirit Guides', 'angels', divination, initiations, nor any kind of practices prone towards superstition. Some practitioners with backgrounds in other energy modalities may incorporate elements of these practices in their sessions but they have never been part of a standardized Craniosacral curriculum.
- the practice of naming phenomena as 'this or that' is discouraged (especially in Biodynamic CST) as it is sometimes seen as creating an obstacle towards holistic awareness in the practitioner. The reasoning behind this is that the many complex hierarchical frameworks that exist within 'energy medicine' can get in the way of present-moment awareness. A CST practitioner as well as you, the client may experience many qualitative sensations during the session, and discussion of these sensations is not only acceptable but encouraged, as it is helpful for the facilitation of release of old patterns and the expression of health to be present with those sensations in mind and body. Yet, if one becomes too focused on what these sensations 'might be', or on naming or pidgeon-holing them, one can get distracted, even dissociated from what is really happening in the moment. In other words, you're hopefully not going to hear a lot of things like this from your therapist: "You have an imbalance in your 5th chakra and the 7th dimensional level of your auric field. You need to work on that.." etc
- it is quite empirical in practice, i.e. - "try this, and get 'x' set of possible results/outcomes", much like present-moment awareness somatic-based meditation practices (such as the 'Focusing' technique of Ann Weiser Cornell and Eugene T. Gendlin or the work of Eckhart Tolle) and does not include the usage of active or imaginative visualizations.
- while remaining a full-body holistic therapy in philosophy AND practice, there is, at least initially with a client, more of an intentional focus on the CNS (central nervous system) and skeletal systems more so than other modalities.
- unlike massage, which works with inward, usually downward-focused force, otherwise known as 'positive pressure' (excluding the Swedish massage technique 'petrissage', which includes elements of both positive and negative pressure), CST works primarily with the expansive force of 'negative pressure' (much the same force as is used in the acupuncture technique of 'cupping', but without the cups/gadgets!), giving injuries and trauma the space they need to breathe, re-organize and heal properly.
- CST has little if any known contraindications.
- like many types of energy healing, CST has several 'branches' or 'versions'/offshoots within it. The two primary distinctions can be seen between the 'Upledger method' and 'Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy'. A concise comparison and differentiation between the two is essentially this - Upledger students are taught and encouraged to use a sequential '10-step protocol' of techniques in their sessions, yet are not bound to this sequence. Upledger techniques also tend to be more mechanistic, hands-on and 'osteopathic', with the musculoskeletal system/fascia in mind. Biodynamic practitioners are taught most of the same techniques independently, yet are encouraged to follow their intuition and insight over any protocol into the current-moment movements and 'hints' given by the patient's body signals. 'What to do next' is considered entirely guided by the body's intelligence, or "Inner Physician", in the present moment. However, with these things in mind, the two main 'branches' seem to be becoming more and more coherent in philosophy as time goes on.
WHAT A SESSION IS LIKE
Typically in a session your CST therapist will ask you some preliminary questions before you get on the table, as do most bodyworkers. This is to get a sense of where things are at for you physically, mentally and emotionally. When you're ready you will lie supine (face-up), fully clothed (hopefully with your shoes off for comfort!), unless you are pregnant or have some other physical constraint that does not allow you to lie on your back. Side-lying and/or prone positions are used in those cases. In the initial stage of the session your therapist will ground themselves and begin with assessing your overall system, meanwhile helping your body release any nervous system 'charge' that may be built up. This is often done at the feet, the shoulders or just below the back of the arms. Once that has been established, typically the therapist will then wait for the 'holistic shift' to happen, where they can get a broader sense of what is happening in terms of your body's health as well as any inertial fulcrums that are present. Then they will often move to various parts of the body, remaining there for varying times, such as under the low back at the sacrum, at the pelvic bones, at certain vertebrae, several spots on the cranium, any and all joints, and even on top or below the viscera or organs in the stomach region. In the 'holistic shift' there is a pervading stillness throughout the body, and within it, minute subtle movements can be detected. These are the movements of the various fulcrums, natural (inherent) and induced over your lifetime (inertial). The practitioner works with these subtle movements keeping the bigger picture of stillness, and of the whole, in mind and in perception. By 'holding a space' for any and all phenomena, including pathology or inertial fulcrums within the wider perspective of health, profound changes can happen to the body in a session.
Sometimes really noticeable improvements occur, even after just one session. In other cases, a few sessions are needed before the client experiences the potent state of resourced health that can be achieved through this work. After a session, it is generally advisable to take it easy physically as well as emotionally. Often people are sleepy, even exhausted after CST, as their nervous system's previously depleted state has finally gotten a chance to be heard and acknowledged. Sometimes taking a walk before jumping in a car and driving on the freeway is a good idea. Things can seem slower and more peaceful internally, while the external world can seem bright, hostile, loud, hectic and obnoxious. This is not always the case but it is something to be aware of. Food might taste better, nature might seem more enticing, things may seem more enjoyable and relaxed in general. You might find you have more capacity, for life, for pain and suffering, and the ability to move through trauma with more courage and resource. Occasionally people feel more energized than ever, more alert, more focused. This kind of response can be expected further down the line in your treatment plan and is something to look forward to, especially if receiving CST has inspired you to improve your own self-care habits. Sometimes people have repressed things come up for them emotionally or psychologically after the session or did not complete their process during its timeframe, in this case it is best to try and consult with your therapist for ways of healthfully continuing processing or dealing with that as well as avoiding anything strenuous if possible. Sometimes these kinds of processes simply need time and awareness to work themselves out.
CRANIOSACRAL CAN HELP WITH...
In my own experience, this modality of healing has been incredibly crucial to my own life's journey. I find Craniosacral to be quite life-affirming; my initial exposure to it was what brought me out of a deep depression some years ago. I have experienced and thoroughly enjoyed the resourced and supporting states induced by Upledger, Biodynamic CST and it's related cousins, Cranial Osteopathy, Core Syncronism and Polarity Therapy. Craniosacral therapy offers deep relaxation, pain relief, stress reduction, increased energy, improved immunity and a heightened sense of overall well-being by way of enhancing the body's own healing capabilities. Great for conditions such as chronic stress, anxiety, headaches, neck, low back and jaw pain, chemical or mental imbalances, brain injuries and general trauma. Craniosacral therapy is a safe option for anyone.
RESOURCES
Look out for future articles by none other than myself on the history of 'energy medicine' in the West, as well as an in-depth study of the dynamics and 'mechanisms', of energy in the body.
For a great (yet much more thorough) introduction to the concepts of Craniosacral therapy, pick up a copy of 'Wisdom in the Body: The Craniosacral Approach to Essential Health' by Michael Kern, D.O., N.D.
Find out more about Kyle here.
