“Take turns feeling your partner’s craniosacral rhythm!” called Teacher brightly.
It was Day 1, Craniosacral Therapy I. And we were terrified.
“You are all looking at me in disbelief,” she continued. “But you really will feel the rhythm. And if you don’t,” she advised, “Just INVITE the craniosacral rhythm into your hands and say ‘PLEEEEASE, I’m new at this! Please make the craniosacral rhythm REALLY BIG so I can notice it!'”
To Teacher’s credit, we did all feel the craniosacral rhythm. Tuning in, the rhythm felt as large as a giant jump rope game in which a kid at each end raises the rope up and down in a huge sine-wave.
And once you can feel the craniosacral rhythm, you can diagnose. Body parts with a strong, clear rhythm are fine. Parts with no rhythm are blocked and need help. We learned the 10 Step Protocol to release blocks. But something extra was also at work….
“When you test the sphenoid bone,” added Teacher, “REQUEST the sphenoid to lower itself to its full range.” We did.
“When you listen to the body,” Teacher explained, “the body says, ‘FINALLY! Someone’s FINALLY listening to me!’ and it starts to self-correct and heal on its own….” We practiced feeling the body self-correct.
But I had a huge question. “Invite” the craniosacral rhythm into your hands? “Ask” it to be REALLY BIG? “Request” the sphenoid to lower itself? Watch the body “self-correct on its own”?…. My hand shot up.
“What’s the difference between this and energy healing?” I asked. Teacher didn’t answer me (although she didn’t kick me out of class either). But I noticed that what cured my clients was not how well I had memorized the cranial bones, soft tissues, other anatomy, nor the 10 Step Protocol. What cured my patients was that I LISTENED. I followed their self-correcting with my hands–and where there was resistance or lack of instruction, I asked the body or neshama (soul) what it wanted.
Soon a strange Hijacking Protocol replaced the 10 Step Protocol. “On your way here,” I tell clients, “Your body made a laundry list of what it REALLY wants to work on–and in what order. It did this because it knows I listen.
“Now if I were a chiropractor, and you came to me with some vertebra out of place, I might correct the vertebra and send you home. But maybe the correction would hold only a day or two because your spine was responding to a hidden foot imbalance linked to a muscle strain in your lower back, which caused pressure on your head–which I didn’t correct. Even if I knew exactly what to correct, I might not know in which order to correct it. So I let your body tell me!
“We will begin the standard 10 Step Protocol but at some point your body will show me where it really wants my hands and what it really wants to work on. I call this ‘hijacking.'”
Hijacking may feel like the body is magnetically drawing your hands to a certain place. Or it will illuminate, or draw your attention to, a problem-area. Or you may feel your hands being asked to air-massage a certain blockage or push on some acupuncture point.
And the opposite is true. Teacher told us that when done at a certain location, you may feel the body “push” your hand away. Or I may sense that the urgent request for my hands has evaporated. And so I ask the body for its next instructions.
However the body chooses to communicate, the body wants this: not only someone to listen to it (“finally”); the body wants a friend to walk its walk. Together. Sometimes clients’ bodies tell me to just sit quietly by their side, maybe give a light touch here or there, and to wave stuck energy to the correct places or to their release sites, and wait. And wait. Sometimes I have spent 45 minutes sitting quietly by a body as it self-corrects. I am often asked not to touch the body at all, because the self-correction is moving so fast that my touch would slow it down. This technique effects remarkable cures in just one or two sessions.
In order to hear the body, I ask the client not to tell me anything. “If I can’t tell YOU what is wrong, I am not doing my job!” I say. The stories on my Craniosacral page unfolded with no client input.
We work in the dark much of the time, trusting the Unseen. Often the healing’s depth will be recognized only weeks or months later (see Energy Healing: Tip of the Iceberg?). And most of my clients I will not see again, because when we listen and get to the problem’s root the first or second visit, there is no need for a third or fourth visit.
Is Craniosacral Therapy a physical healing or an energetic healing? I say both. The body knows when to emphasize the physical or energetic side for each stage of its healing. All we do is listen.