The craniosacral therapist’s concept of health
Craniosacral therapy can achieve powerful results, and often people do not understand how these results were achieved with such gentle touch. To understand how this happens, we need to look deeper at the craniosacral concepts of disease and healing.
Your bodymind (body + mind, which are really one inseparable entity) is brilliantly adaptable. It is always seeking homeostasis, or equilibrium, and it does this in the context of the unique experiences and conditions of your life. For example, if you break your leg, you will adapt your gait to favour the other leg so that you can still walk while you are healing. This adaptation causes a cascade of other processes of compensation, all for the benefit of your overall wellbeing – your continued ability to walk. According to the theory underlying craniosacral therapy, what appears externally as the symptoms of disease always has some function of promoting equilibrium within the body.
When your broken leg heals, one might imagine that your body would automatically revert to a more symmetrical walking pattern. However, your bodymind has likely adapted to the new way of walking. This phenomenon, in which we hang onto outdated coping strategies, happens not only with broken bones but with other kinds of physical injuries, with deeply ingrained habits, and with emotional traumas. In these cases, your system needs a reminder of other possibilities of how to carry itself.
How does craniosacral therapy help with all this? The bodymind is masterful at establishing its healing priorities. The coping strategies that have been serving us so faithfully have worked precisely because they have become second nature, invisible to our conscious minds. The key ingredient of craniosacral therapy is empathic awareness: both the client's and the therapist's. In session, we attend together to your present state of embodiment – as it is, not as we assume or want it to be. We update the body's understanding of itself, so that it is not perpetually living in the state of adaptation that was necessary when it was first exposed to challenging or overwhelming circumstances.
For example, when you had just broken your leg or recently experienced a serious emotional trauma, an array of highly intelligent adjustments took place in your body to help you survive. Perhaps there was a numbing of pain or a tensing of vulnerable parts of the body. In addition to changes that may have occurred in the physical structure of your muscles, bones, and so on, a significant part of this adaptation is maintained neurologically: by the habit patterns of our brains.
The good news is that as compared with muscles and bones, neurological adjustments can happen much more quickly. Craniosacral therapy works with the nervous system, which is highly sensitive to subtle touch (think of the number of nerve endings in your skin). Through our dialogue during the session, the information I receive through my hands, and other forms of nonverbal communication, we can bring awareness to specific maladaptive patterns and cue your system to update its schema of the degree of vibrancy wellbeing that is possible.
When we update the bodymind’s schema to reflect its present-moment state, we often find new ways of holding ourselves (physically, emotionally, and energetically) that we hadn’t previously realized were available. These new ways of being can be much less effortful to maintain because they reflect a more optimal use of our anatomy and energy systems. Therefore, you might find that you have more ease in your life once the energy that you were using to maintain an inefficient coping pattern has been freed up for other uses.
Craniosacral therapy can be very supportive for specific ailments, as well as for general vitality and wellbeing. If you would like to experience this for yourself and you’re in the Nelson, BC area, I would be delighted to work with you — book an appointment here.