What Does CranioSacral Therapy Mean?
cRANIO = HEAD | sACRAL = BASE OF SPINE
“Cranio” refers to the cranium (head), and “sacral” refers to the sacrum, the bone at the base of your spine. In CranioSacral Therapy, we often work between these two areas. Why? Because everything is connected through the nervous system, fascia, vessels, and other tissues.
Why We May Work Beyond the Head and Sacrum?
Though the name focuses on the head and sacrum, we may treat anywhere in the body. The body is an interconnected system. Spinal cord nerves, connective tissues and fascia create links from head to toe.
How Does CranioSacral Therapy Work?
We use gentle touch to encourage subtle movement and fluid flow in the body.It’s like gently flushing a sticky pipe or unwinding a twist in fabric. Sometimes it’s active, like straightening a wrinkled sleeve. Other times, our hands simply hold still and support whatever the body needs to do. We listen with our hands and respond to the body’s signals.
The Body’s Inner Wisdom
A key principle of CranioSacral Therapy is the body’s ability to self-heal. This idea comes from our osteopathic roots and other bodywork traditions. We often call it the “inner physician” or “inner wisdom.”
It’s the part of you that knows what’s needed for healing. We don’t aim to fix or diagnose in the traditional sense. Instead, we listen closely and follow what the body is showing us. Our job is to create space and trust the body’s process.
DAVID WILSON EXPLAINS CRANIOSACRAL THERAPY:
WHAT IS CRANIOSACRAL THERAPY?
Craniosacral therapy is, in reality, a system of medicine, not merely a quick-fix for musculoskeletal problems.
Craniosacral therapy is grounded in hard science and shares many of the views and principles of orthodox Western medicine from which it sprang. But the founders of craniosacral therapy looked farther than the constrained boundaries of narrow medical specialties and viewed the human body as a whole with all its systems working together inseparably and to this they added mind and spirit.
Subsequent scientific research has proven just how far-sighted and correct this view was, not only in the fields of physiology, the neuroendocrine system and the microbiome but even into the realms of particle physics and quantum theory.
Sadly, Western medicine appears to be mired in a bygone age of Newtonian physics and it is only by virtue of a great deal of postgraduate training that one can overcome this handicap and explore craniosacral therapy’s full potential.
Those of us who have had such a training are now enabled to treat a much wider range of our patients’ problems.
One of the precepts of craniosacral therapy is that the body possesses the innate ability to heal itself at a very profound level and it is only when this ability becomes blocked or compromised that we develop an illness (pathology). It is the job of the therapist to remove the impediments to this self-healing process.
For those with sufficient training and clinical experience, craniosacral therapy stands far above any other therapeutic modality as the treatment of choice.
The craniosacral system was discovered only in the 1950’s and is still being researched, although a mountain of solid scientific evidence presently exists to support and guide its use as a clinical therapeutic tool. This system is the primary system of the human body, even more fundamental then the central nervous system, and the rhythmic craniosacral movement can often be palpated up to six hours after clinical brain death.
HOW IT WORKS
The brain and spinal cord exist in a fluid-filled bag of membrane as a semi-closed hydraulic system.
In this cerebrospinal fluid there is a slow pulse, like a tide, at a rate of 6 to 11 cycles per minute.
This causes a rhythmic pulling and pushing on the membrane, which attaches to various points on the inside of the cranial bones of the skull (which are not fused in life), to the vertebrae at the top of the neck and to the sacrum (tail bone).
This rhythmic motion is then propagated out through the nerve sleeves and fascia. Fascia is the connective tissue that connects absolutely everything to absolutely everything, right down to individual cells.
This means that these movements can be felt anywhere on the body and every structure and organ in the body has its own particular movement during this rhythmic cycle. Problems in the body (or mind) often manifest as localised restrictions in this rhythmic movement, which the therapist feels as pulls.
The movements themselves are extremely subtle but, with a great deal of training, one can use them to both diagnose and treat. This means that a craniosacral therapist can treat organs, viscera, endocrine glands, nerves, even the brain itself! It also means that problems in one part of the body can have their origin very far from the site of pain or other symptoms.
The only problem we seem to come across is that the craniosacral movements themselves are so subtle, it often appears to the patient that we are doing very little!
It really is an extraordinarily gentle form of treatment and, paradoxically, the most profound and effective treatment available to the human race.
