What We Do: Craniosacral Therapy
by Cintain Quintana
Imagine the Ocean — wider and deeper than anything, teeming with aliveness and potential, yet serene. Some people with more creative and cooperative imaginations than most ‘modern’ folk conceptualise the ocean as a mother. Poetic, perhaps, but also profoundly true. Life began in the ocean. It is still very much there, overfishing and climate change notwithstanding. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that in some ways, it never really left. All of us terrestrial beings carry the ocean around with us. Our own private little oceans, sloshing around and keeping us as alive as the primordial one we all initially came from.
The body is about two-thirds water. There is a bit more to this than proportions, tho. What allows us to move about and retain shape are the bits that are not water, but what gives depth and form and function to it all is the organization of the components. We are highly organised pockets of sea water, full of salts and minerals and electrically-charged particles, endlessly folded over ourselves into layers that either let water through or block and divert its passage, deftly and flawlessly sending their informational contents in mechanical, chemical and electrical pulses, precisely when and where they are needed to keep things on the move.
We’ve talked about circulation in this space before. However, consider the body’s circulation not just in terms of arteries and veins, lymph and blood. Remember, the body is a landscape. It follows that the water should be everywhere, not just on the pathways that one can see. In a very real sense it is. Everything in the body is liquid, even the densest, hardest-to-the-touch parts. Bones are liquid, too. It is one of the miracles of this universe how the same fundamental, basic components of matter can be organised so variously, giving rise to endless diversity of form and function.
Particles form into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into more complex compounds. Even at such infinitesimal scales, shape is important. A molecule of a compound has orientation in space, and from it derives its function. And perhaps most mind-blowingly, each and every one of these bits is vibrating, pulsing at a frequency that is unique to its shape, size, and energetic potential. The Universe isn’t just alive in the bits that we see moving — it is moving, so that we can see. The movement allows there to be observer and response.
Hold that thought. Now, let’s talk about something serious.
Craniosacral therapy has a bad rap. Of all the kinds of work we do, it is probably the hardest one to talk about with a straight face in polite conversation to people who haven’t drunk the proverbial Kool-aid. Craniosacral therapy toes the line at the furthest edge of what one could conceivably call medicine, and frequently wanders into territory that is best described, for lack of a better term, as “woo-woo”. It’s hip, it’s weird, and it’s ‘out there’.
The most difficult thing to negotiate in one’s mind about craniosacral therapy is this: nobody knows what it’s doing, exactly. Or how. Or why.
It was probably always going to be this way. Craniosacral therapy was proposed and developed by Andrew Taylor Still, the father of osteopathy. Now that guy, well… Let’s just say that AT Still believed in many things that are just not ok to talk about in polite, serious, scientific company. If the stories of his life are to be believed, AT Still was less doctor than shaman, more in tune with the “woo-woo” than interested in scientific proof. Heck, some people say he claimed all his life that he learned his stuff from the Shawnee Indians, out in the Wild Wild West. Hoboy.
Craniosacral therapy was one of those things that AT Still did and tried to teach his students, but not very many of them could make the leap. He also wasn’t very interested in writing down his stuff, so we only have secondhand accounts of his life, thinking, and work. It was William Garner Sutherland, one of AT’s students, who conceptualised craniosacral therapy in its original form. That guy’s ideas were at least intelligible, but still off in weirdland. See, he posited that the cranial bones move.
This is where this crazy concept started running afoul Established Medical Wisdom (™). Of course, everyone knows that the bones of the cranium don’t move — they are fused, don’t be daft. But for a while, the effectiveness of the manipulations and techniques that Sutherland taught had osteopaths wondering, and trying it out. Some of them might even have taken it seriously for a while. Unfortunately, as people do, Sutherland had the bad sense to die eventually, and the people who followed after him became obsessed with obtaining scientific proof that what their teacher had taught them was as he’d said, and the osteopathic gang divided into those who ‘believed’ in this stuff and those who didn’t, and thus it’s been ever since. Osteopathy as a profession is peppered with stories of people who were thoroughly ostracised and discredited for openly teaching… energy work. The Horror.
Fortunately, those industrious, scientific proof types eventually prevailed and demonstrated, with numerous experiments, some their own and some borrowed, that the cranial bones didn’t in fact, move. Phew. That was scary, but now the whole messy business can be put behind us. No movement, no reason to make a fuss. The skull is fused and that’s that. The woo-woo people are just doing that. End of story. Science prevails once again and we can all go back to what we were doing before.
Before you click away, though, just indulge me for a couple more paragraphs here. We were talking about vibrating molecules and the ocean, back where we started. Let’s finish that one and see where we end up. Maybe we’ll even raise from the grave some questions that osteopaths would prefer remain stolidly in the ground, dead and unmoving — like the bones of their skulls.
I’ll tell you one thing straight tho. I don’t know what happens in a craniosacral therapy session. I’ve studied and practised this stuff for ten years, and I really, honestly, truly do not know. I like to think that the one thing I have in common with old AT Still and WG Sutherland is that, if I’m doing anything remotely similar to what they did, I believe that it works.
What I do know is that human bodies are not special in the sense of being composed of something entirely other than every other being and object in the Universe. We are the same stuff, organised slightly differently. Highly organised sea water, kept in shape by organisation and a certain persistence of form. Every tiny component bit pulsating at its own frequency, all of them together, aggregating their vibrations to the larger song of who each of us is. Atoms into molecules, molecules into compounds, compounds into cells, cells into tissues, tissues into systems, bodies, and so on. Some people call that consciousness.
When touching someone’s head (or sacrum, hence the name) does it really matter if what we feel under our fingers is the actual flexing and extending of the bone around the fulcrum of its joint? Some craniosacral therapists claim that what they are feeling is not the movement of the bones but the pulsation of the cerebrospinal fluid, that rarest of forms of sea water that the brain and nerves swim in to remind themselves of the ocean they came from, but this has also been “proven” to be “not true” by “science.” So there’s another explanation, out the window. Ah, well.
Someone I respect very much (one of my teachers, but I can’t say whom) once said within my earshot something to the effect that a truly holistic fascia therapy would address the three compartments of the body (myofascial, visceral, and craniosacral) as one thing, inseparable parts of an indivisible whole, each with different rules and different purpose. Understanding how the tissues behave in each of these, what characteristics and functions they share and what is different, would give the therapist a broader, more complete understanding of the role of connective tissue in the body, and the potential for change and healing that working from that level can bring. Of course I was hooked on this idea. It’s what brought me into studying visceral manipulation (I was already studying the other two).
Germane to this conversation, I know one other thing: we are incredibly sensitive beings. Most of us don’t remember or like thinking about it, but this is true. We are not independent from our surroundings — we are embedded in them, part of them as much as they are part of us. We need to feel what is going on around us. This isn’t because it’s ‘important to our survival’, but because it is part of who we are. We all have superpowers of hearing and vision and intuition — we just don’t use them because we use the biggest power of all, our minds, to block it all out so we can look at cute cats on the internet.
This means that the therapist can feel and parse out all of those subtle vibrations happening at the various levels of organisation of the patient under their fingers, a sampling of the symphony of that person’s emergent self.
But, more importantly, it also means that the patient can feel the subtlest of touches, and his or her whole system cannot remain unaffected by the presence and attention of a consciousness mirroring its own paying attention, holding space, witnessing, waiting… and respond.
This is what I think happens in a craniosacral therapy session. Two intelligent systems, talking to each other, and hopefully changing in a positive way in response.
