What is CranioSacral Therapy (CST)? The Short Version
CST is a modality of restoring wholeness and vitality.
As a holistic therapy CST combines the science of anatomical models with the intuitive awareness of more subtle phenomena such as polyrhythmic tides.
A gentle touch is used allowing the client's own innate intelligence to guide the treatment.
Treatments may take many forms and will rarely repeat themselves as the approach used responds to the needs and focus of the client in that moment.
What can CST help with?
The ability to address issues in a holistic manner allows CST to be helpful in a wide variety of circumstances for anything from physical problems & emotional troubles to energetic issues, psychological complaints and even those on a path of deep transformation.
Specific areas CST is known to be helpful with include:
- Back & Neck Pain
- Anxiety, Depression & other psychological difficulties
- Trauma & its effects
- Accidents - physical injuries, letting go of shock & fear, re-finding sense of safety & capability
- Recovery from Dental or Surgical procedures, including childhood Orthodontics
- Migraines, headaches & sinus issues
- Stress - acute or chronic
- Insomnia
- A felt sense of being ungrounded, uncentered or overwhelmed
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Emotional difficulties
- Recovery from Viral Infection
- Concussion or Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI)
- Dissociation - reintegrating conscious awareness & re-finding agency
- Birth Trauma for babies - see below
- Birth process recovery for Mothers, including miscarriages - the depth of impact that these experiences can have often goes unacknowledged in our current culture - see below
Call or text Mark to book or with any questions at all
What happens in a treatment?
During the treatment you rest fully clothed, face-up on a massage table and I make gentle contact, tuning into your system with my hands.
There is no set routine as the session is entirely led by what you come in asking for help with and what your system presents to me - at times I may ask questions or invite you to bring awareness to certain areas or phenomena.
Experiences of the treatment itself will vary from person to person and from session to session depending on what is being worked on - common experiences include states of deep relaxation, periods of conscious dreaming, life insights occurring, stories of the past being seen from a different perspective, forgotten memories & associated feelings arising, tensions unwinding, imbalances resolving and so on.
Likewise after one or more treatments feelings will also vary greatly - people often report their symptoms have reduced or disappeared entirely, feeling more energised & present, more playfulness and creativity, feeling more at home in themselves, less moved about by the daily stresses and strains of life, or perhaps something as simple as being in better relationship with their pain.
Interested in the Sciencey stuff? The Long Version
There are many models or ways of looking at the Cranio-Sacral system, but a good starting point is usually the classical anatomical model:
The Cranio-Sacral system encompasses the bones of the skull (cranium) at the top, the spine in the middle and the big sacrum bone at the bottom. All around the inside of this bony system is a membrane which forms the boundary of a fluid world where cerebrospinal fluid is produced, flows and is reabsorbed. The brain and spinal chord essentially float inside this fluid world and the membrane surrounding it is attached or anchored to various bones, ligaments and even muscles of the body, most notably to the bones of the skull.
Under normal circumstances the whole system moves in a fluid, rhythmic, wavelike manner much like the slow undulation of a jellyfish moving in water. Continuing with the anatomical model then, cerebrospinal fluid is produced in the center of the brain, washes down the inside of the spine in a wave to a cistern of fluid in the large lumbar vertebrae before the wave moves back up and the fluid is reabsorbed at the top of the brain. With such a tide-like motion the central nervous system can be thought of as essentially breathing - in CST we call this the body's Primary Respiration.
Side-note: In other models the physical body is encompassed by a rhythmically moving fluid field, a 'tidal body' within which the embryo first developed and which maintains order throughout life. The movement of the bones, tissues & fluid then is a response to this field, much like a cork bobbing in water or fronds of seaweed just below the water's surface slowly washing back and forth with the tide.
In a body totally at ease this system will breathe fluidly & effortlessly and this wavelike motion will roll out through the fascial network to every cell in the body. However, much like how our lung breathing moves up into our chests and gets short and tight when we are anxious or tense, the same occurs within the Cranio-Sacral system - when there is a shock, an accident, an illness, an emotional stress, a trauma, overwhelm, or simply due to a buildup of the daily stresses & strains of life, parts of the Cranio-Sacral system can become tight and out of balance as these experiences essentially get stored in the body until we meet them or flush them out. In daily life this might mean going for a walk or a run to let go of stress, however for deeper sources of imbalance such as accidents, illness, chronic stress, childhood trauma, depression and so on a more thorough meeting of the pattern may be required.
Using CST we can tune into this system in various ways, bringing these stored patterns into awareness and helping them to come back into balance. By engaging with the person and listening to the system's own innate intelligence the manner is presented in which each layer must be addressed before moving layer by layer toward the primary source of the imbalance.
Examples
Whiplash
An example of this listening may be if someone comes in presenting with whiplash - before working with CST I might have suggested to treat the muscles & tissues of the neck, upper thorax & head. Allowing the body itself to present the true scope of the imbalance, however, may reveal that along with the obvious neck pain the whiplash has also created shock & tension in the membranes and jammed the sacrum, which in turn has led to a subtle change in posture & breathing pattern along with a compression of the sphenoid bone in the middle of the skull. And so it may be, as is often the case, that the treatment will begin at the bottom of the spine to correct imbalances in this area first - and failure to do so may result in a half-baked outcome where the neck pain is gone but the person's posture and sense of safety, capability and playfulness in the world remains somewhat tentative and taut.
Anxiety
An example of more subtle work would be where someone presents with a constant low level anxiety that affects their daily life and which gets exacerbated whenever there are simple deadlines to meet or decisions to make. Allowing the system to lead the sessions may result in tracing this anxiety right back to the person's birth where they were chemically induced. This may have been experienced as a trauma by the vulnerable fetuses' nervous system, setting up an unconscious pattern of anxiety around being on time & decision-making. Although they may not retain an episodic memory of the event, an emotional memory can be palpated through the Cranio-Sacral system, brought into the client's awareness and held or titrated allowing the now conscious awareness to make peace with the event and release the pattern.
