Jul
02
Posted by John Dalton on
July 2, 2008
+ What I feel with my hands, am I making it up? - September 05
Mr Dalton.
I feel I am at a crossroads in my craniosacral
training. I have been studying CST for six months.
I have listened carefully to my trainers.
I have read books on CST. I understand the fluid
mechanics of what is happening, in theory.
When I tune into the system I begin to feel things.
Then I begin to wonder am I feeling the rhythm
because I expect to feel it. I wonder if I am
not imagining the whole thing. What I feel with
my hands is so tenuous that I could very well
be making it up.
My trainers say that the feeling will become
clearer with time and practice.
It has been six months now. While I can feel more
than I could at the beginning it is nowhere
as clear as I expected.
I understand that with your experience and in
your position you have a strong vested interest
in ‘believing’ in what you do.
I would appreciate it if you could answer me as
honestly as possible.
Do we make it up?
Regards.
M.S.
Somerset.
>>>MY COMMENTS
Let me tell you right now, it’s not going
to get any easier.. . .
What you are looking for is a kind of certainty.
Where you put your hands on someone’s body and
it lights up like a Christmas tree and you can
see EVERYTHING, every restriction pattern,
every cause.
And the road to health for that person looking
like a well lit highway.
And all this without that awful squirmy feeling
like you are groping around in the dark not really
sure of anything.
I feel for you, but it’s never going to
happen. There is something about this work that
always keeps you at the limit of yourself.
I’ll explain.
When you started to learn six months ago and you
heard about flexion and extension, it probably
all made sense.
Then you put your hands on someone and you tried
to feel it and all you could feel was NOTHING!
And it felt awful.
You trusted your trainers and you persevered.
As time passed you learned new things like feeling
lesion patterns in the sphenoid or some such
and when you tried to feel them, all you could
feel was NOTHING!
And it felt awful.
You looked forward to the day when you wouldn’t
feel that awful feeling.
You didn’t notice two important things.
1) Your palpatory skill was improving and
changing. You were actually feeling more. When
you were struggling to feel whether the sphenoid
had a flexion or extension lesion, you failed to
notice that you were feeling flexion and extension
with relative ease.
2) The awful feeling wasn’t changing. It was the
same awful feeling six month ago that you are
feeling now.
As good as your palpatory skills get,
as good as your diagnostic skills get,
as good as you perceptive skills get,
you will still have that voice in the back of
your head wondering, ‘Am I making this up?’
Outstanding cranio sacral therapists haven’t
eradicated uncertainty, they have mastered it.
It’s not like you get it sorted and never have
to deal with it again. It’s something that goes
on every time you treat someone. It’s one of the
most difficult aspects of cranio sacral work.
I know all this because I went/go through it myself
and I have seen ALL the people I have trained go
through it in one way or another.
Here’s what I suggest: put the question on hold for
another six months. Make a deal with yourself that
for the next six months you are not going to ask
yourself that question. For the next six months
you are just going to take it that what you are
feeling is true. It’s not forever, its just for six
months.
I’m not talking about kidding yourself.
You need to understand what you are trying to do.
You haven’t been conditioned to think in the way
that you’re trying to think when you do cranial work.
Your neuronal pathways are formed in a different way.
Continually asking yourself if you are making it
up won’t allow new neuronal pathways to form.
We are not MRI machines. This is science, but not as we
know it, Jim.
Asking if we are making it up is a question from
another approach.
Because we are not machines we have the capacity
to go far beyond our own expectations and pull miracles
out of the bag. It also means we have the capacity to
have an off day and get it wrong.
To answer your very specific question.
Do we make it up?
Sometimes.
Mostly in the beginning of training.
With experience, 1-2 years minimum, you can begin to
discern when you are making it up? You can spot it
and in time it too becomes another thing to note,
along with the multitude of other things you are
registering as you work.
‘The rhythm is changing, I wonder what that means?
The patient is feeling sadness, I wonder what that
means? Now they are angry, I wonder what that means?
I just made that bit up, I wonder what that means?
Now they are about to release this bit, I wonder what
that means? The sadness is still there. .’ and so on.
Have a good look at what I’ve written. Talk it out with
people who know you and care about you. Cranio sacral
therapy may not be the thing for you. It doesn’t suit
everyone. There are lots of modalities that offer
much more of the certainty you are looking for.
Having said that, I encourage you to persevere.
The rewards far outweigh the difficulties.
And the weird thing is as you become familiar with
and master uncertainty, it permeates your whole life
and it becomes more . . well . . fluid.
Jun
19
Posted by John Dalton on
June 19, 2008
You are in the fruit and veg department of the supermarket.
You pull a bag from the roll provided. You are talking to your
friend as you try to open the bag. You rub the end of the bag
between your thumb and finger. After a couple of attempts you
realise that you are trying to open the wrong end of the bag.
If you look closely at where you have been trying to open the bag,
you will see that your thumb and finger have left an imprint in the
bag. You could say there is a pattern of restriction in the bag.
If you smoothed out the imprint as best you could, you would
still not be able to get the fine creases out of the plastic.
This is similar to the way restriction patterns are formed.
The body undergoes a trauma of some kind. Let us say a car
accident. The impact of the steering wheel on the body puts a
large pattern of trauma in the body. Broken bones, lacerations etc.
The body can release much of the pattern of restriction but it may
not be able to release the entire pattern (the fine creases in the plastic).
The residual pattern of restriction is what causes the symptoms
that the person comes to you for help with.
You might wonder why these patterns of restriction are not
detected and treated with expensive machinery, like MRI machines.
Also how could such small residual patterns of restriction be so
devastating?
To get an idea of what goes on in the body think of fascia as being
like 20 layers of glad wrap one on top of another with a thin layer
of fluid between each layer. When your body is functioning normally
each layer glides over the next. If you poked your finger into the
middle of those layers the imprint left by your finger would totally
compromise the glad wrap’s ability to move one layer over the other.
Take the above small analogy and multiply it by 1,000 and you will
begin to get an idea of the effect patterns of restriction can have
in the body. The machines are good but they are not looking for
widespread minute restrictions.
Patterns of restriction are often wide spread but like anything that
is creased, some parts are more creased than others. They are called
focal points, trauma focuses or energy cysts.
Patterns of trauma are usually complex because the body moves
as it is impacted. So in the example above the person would not
have a steering wheel shaped pattern of restriction imprinted in
the area of their body where they struck the steering wheel. The
pattern of restriction will include the way their body moved as it
was thrown around in the accident.
If you have ever seen crash simulations using dummies you will
know that they move around a lot during the impact.
Also to be considered is the depth the pattern is imprinted in the body.
You have a large bowl of jelly and a ball bearing. You hold the ball
bearing 5cms above the surface of the jelly and let it fall. It hardly
breaks the surface of the jelly. You retrieve the ball bearing and drop
it into the jelly from a height of 1 meter.
The ball bearing has now embedded itself into the jelly to quite a depth.
With patterns of restriction the greater the force of the trauma the
deeper into the body it is imprinted.
EMOTIONS
Emotional trauma also lodges in the body and can cause restrictions
equal in severity to patterns of restriction formed in a purely physical way.
You are six years old. You are walking past a building site. A brick
falls off the scaffold and hits you on the shoulder breaking your clavicle.
40 years later you have frozen shoulder.
You are six years old. Your father is angrily telling you that you are stupid.
As he does this he taps you on the shoulder with his finger to make the point.
40 years later you have frozen shoulder.
The memory of these events may not be in the conscious mind, but
stored in the cells of our bodies. In the course of a Cranio Sacral
session these memories can spring into the conscious mind as
patterns of restriction are releasing.
TISSUE MEMORY
If you find the notion of ‘Tissue Memory’ difficult to accept, think
of it this way; videotape is made of plastic with iron filings stuck
on its surface. There is nothing too amazing about that, yet when
the videotape is played through the VCR and we watch the film,
we laugh and cry and become emotionally engaged. The cells in
our bodies are a lot more complex than videotape. They store an
incredible amount of information and perform a mind boggling
number of tasks every second, it is very plausible that they can
also store individual memory.
TRAUMA RELEASE
Patterns of restriction release when the body returns to the position
it was in when the trauma was imprinted. For example if a person’s
frozen shoulder was caused years before by their arm being
violently. Then the pattern of restriction resulting from that trauma
will release when the arm is in the exact position it was in when the
trauma occurred, in this case bent backwards.
When the body returns to the exact position that the trauma occurred
in, a spontaneous release occurs.
It would be practically impossible for the therapist to find the exact
body position a particular trauma occurred in based on the person’s
memory and external guesswork. Luckily for us we don’t need to
work it out because the body remembers. The cranio sacral therapist
tunes into the body and allows it to move. With skillful following the
body will lead the therapist to the point where the trauma occurred.
The cranio sacral therapist uses the body’s memory of the trauma and
follows it knowing that with timely and appropriate assistance it will
release it’s own restrictions.
We will go into patterns of restriction in great depth as your training
progresses. For now, knowledge of patterns of restriction will give an
appreciation of what you have at your fingertips as you practice.
