I am often asked how I came to be practicing Craniosacral Therapy. Well……… there were these sheep, you see.
I was living in a farming community and my task was to care for the sheep.
So I went on a lambing course. Dead lambs were put into a barrel in all the difficult positions that lambs can twist themselves into in the womb and our task was to disentagle them and get them out through a sheep's pelvis fixed at the entrance to the
barrel.
(I am sorry about the graphic details, but there is very little about sheep which is not a bit gritty, except, of course, the lambs playing king of the castle in the evening.)
I was amazed to discover that I was really good at it. My hands seemed like two magical beings giving me detailed feedback about what was going on out of sight.
I remember when I got home, holding them out in amazement and joy. “My hands! They know things” I said to my partner.
Without hesitation, or any mention of sheep, her reply was: “You should do a massage training”.
So I did.
I enjoyed massage very much, but after a while, I noticed that if I held my hands still and attentive, things happened elsewhere in my client’s body which enabled the place I was holding to make changes.
One day, my daughter brought a friend home from school. She had just moved to the area. When her mum came to pick her up, I discovered that she too practiced massage.
“Have you noticed that if you keep your hands still, the body changes and adjusts so that the tense area can release?”
She had. “I think that is Craniosacral Therapy,” she told me, ”and I am just going to start training.”
I had never heard of craniosacral therapy, never met an osteopath, but I knew I was hearing something very important for my future.
The therapist and her daughter moved away and I didn't see her again, but I researched craniosacral therapy and in the absence of any local practitioner, went to have some treatments from a cranial osteopath. I was a bit peeved that, after years of massage, my intermittent back pain responded to one session with the cranial osteopath. Not only that, but she didn't seem to do anything at all.
So I went to train in London. I had a feeling of coming home. Finding the place where I belonged.
In the first session, we were introduced to the motility of the skull, the amazing miniscule dance that all the bones are making all the time.
I was both enchanted and surprisingly angry. I had been taught that the bones of the skull are like a pudding basin, all fused together and the only skulls I had met were the sheep skulls dried and empty on the moors. I wondered how differently I would have inhabited my body if I had known about and given attention to this beautiful rhythmic dance.
There were a lot of profound changes to my view of the world over the course of the training. Often painful.
I would lie and cry on the sofa because the body was so beautiful.
I remember one occasion when we were asked to track the skeleton of our colleague by holding their feet. It seemed an unlikely thing to be able to do, but to my surprise, I could feel the bones easily until I got to the lumbar vertebrae in the small of the back.
“I can track as far as L3” I told my partner on the couch.
She sat up in surprise.
“Who told you?” she asked. “Told me what?”
It turned out that L3/L4 had been fused after an accident and this was what I had unknowingly perceived.
We both took some time to process what had happened and I learned a lesson that I had to learn again and again.
“If you can’t feel it, it is not because you don’t have the skill, it is because what you are feeling, is, for some reason not able to express itself.”
And so, some 30 years ago, I became a craniosacral therapist. I have loved it consistently. I have learned from it and been shaped by it and received many blessings from the practice.
