October 2 -2008

Questions and comments for this issue:

+ Shunts?
+ 2 cases from Australia.
+ The wonders of entrainment.

Hello,

I’m delighted to report that the Boikarabelo Children’s
eco village in Johannesburg, South Africa have begun to use
my training materials on Open Source Cranio in the training
3 of their careers. Which is great. All I have to do now is
finish putting all the training material up.. yikes!!!

Which reminds me if you haven’t had a chance to look at
‘The Visible Body’ definitely have a look – it is awesome.

http://www.visiblebody.com/

Because it doesn’t work on Apple computers I couldn’t get
a decent look at it so I snaffled my wife’s laptop one night
and four hours later I was still at it.

I don’t care where you are in your cranial career you can’t
but find this useful. To be able to look at these structures
from whatever angle you like, to peel off layers and see how
one structure relates to another. It just helps so much.

If you haven’t already done so have a look
and let me know what you think.

Speaking of visuals I want to tell you about the beautiful
cranial artwork of Ray Lacy.  As you know I used to work in
animation before I became a cranio sacral therapist so I
got to work with lots of first rate artists and I can tell
you Ray is right up there. He has produced see beautiful
drawings of the structures we work with. Have a look
then if you feel so moved, write a review and send it to Ray.

http://www.craniosacral-art.com/index.php

Anyhu, on with the mailbag.

***QUESTION***

Hi John

Your newsletter’s archive is fantastic.  Very easy to use
(much better than mine). Thanks.
My question today is about treating people with a shunt
in the head. Do you(or anyone else) has experience with that?
Is there a risk of having the shunt come out of place
(and causing big problems to the personn) when working
on the personn? I was wondering because of the movements of
the bones and membranes in the head (things coming back
in place).
Any comments will be much appreciated.
Odile. Brisbane.

>>>MY COMMENTS:

Hello Odile,
I’m glad you find the newsletter archive useful.
I’m hoping the ‘search’ function makes it easier for
people to find what they are looking for across the
whole site.

I have treated quite a few people with shunts.
I’ll just explain what they are for any of the other
readers who don’t know.

A shunt is tube that is fitted surgically to relieve
cerebrospinal fluid pressure. There is a one way valve
in the shunt that stops the cerebrospinal fluid coming
back up the tube.  They are usually fitted in people
who have prolonged or extreme hydrocephalus.

The types of shunts I have treated have fallen into
two categories.  Cranio shunts and spinal shunts.
Spinal shunts go from the drural tube and drain into
the stomach. Cranial shunts drain from the cranium into
the heart.

From my experience they are pretty robust arrangements
and I have never got the feeling that they would dislodge
with treatment. The main thing I have felt when treating
people with shunts is how the fluid dynamics of their
cerebrospinal fluid is screwed up. Their cranio sacral
rhythm is usually confused.

Most of my work has been firstly dealing with the
underlying cause of the hydrocephalus and then helping
the person’s system come to terms with the foreignness
of the shunt.

This is similar to any kind of work where there is a
foreign object in a person’s body be it a pin or a screw
or a pacemaker.

***QUESTION***

Dear John

From reading your emails its great to see that the world
of cranio is opening up.. I have to say the enquiry coming
in to the clinic for treatment for complicated cases from
all over Australia is amazing. And hence I am in need of
some guidance with a couple of troubled young lads..

The first is 15…born with a large head that expanded
from the parietals but little frontal growth, at 12 months
his head was so heavy he carried it on the side…at 8 had
a head on collision on a jet ski into a tree an acquired a
compressed skull fracture and brain injury
…although the extent of that is not clear as they suspected
ADD anyway…has learning difficulties, class clown and
recently attempted to throw himself off the tallest building
at school. He has 5 steel plates in his head holding the
parietals and frontal together…his system is very
sensitive and flexion, extension inhibited by the plates..

The second boy is 14, a difficult birth resulting in
emergency c section, swallowed blood and meconium has
chronic asthma, seems ok at school but suffers anxiety
especially separation from mother… she bought him
because 3 separate clairvoyants told her he died in birth and
came back and that there were issues for him to sort out.

Both these boys seem to have a space or separation in their
system from which they are operating that does not seem to
belong to them but is quite a definite separate space…then
there is a pretend who I am and a big hole to the other…
where do I start…seeing that both these boys are seeming
in a serious situation for themselves..

Your pearls of great wisdoms will be greatly appreciated
as usual!!!

LK
Brisbane

>>>MY COMMENTS:

Well these certainly are serious cases and my response
has to be based on what you have written only. Which is
another way of saying I could be completely wrong.

I had to read the part about the sense of space or
separation you were feeling quite a few times to get an
idea of what was going on.  The main thing that it sounds
like to me is the detachment that comes from shock.

If I am right it should resolve like any other trauma.
I suggest you don’t treat it any differently to any other
kind of trauma even though it may feel more intense to you.

With the first chap, the 15 year old, it sounds like
you are dealing with 3 separate issues.

The first sounds like a developmental problem. Why didn’t
his frontal develop in tandem with the rest of the bones in
his skull? Why did his head become so full?

My guess would be some problem with his embryonic
development and if that’s the case then it will probably by
a problem with his blueprint.
I’ve written about this before so won’t bore you with it again.
If you need a refresher go here

http://www.open-source-cranio.com/sacral-training/

and search for blueprint.

Love that ‘search’ function.

The next thing be has going on is the head trauma he
received from the jet ski accident. So  now you have a
system with underlying blueprint problems, so its healing
response is compromised to begin with, trying to deal
with a major trauma.

The the third layer is all the surgery and the ensuing
plates in his head.

It’s enough to make someone detach. .hmmmm. . .

It would be nice to deal with each thing separately but
in practice it probably won’t work out like that. It will
probably be a bit of a mash up of all three layers.

Probably the best way to deal with this is to see it as
whatever arises is what needs attention at that moment.

So in any given session the blueprint issue may come up,
then the head trauma, then the plates in his head, then the
head trauma again and so on.

The second chap sounds like a straightforward case of
birth trauma, if you can call any case of birth trauma
straight forward.

It sounds like he is stuck in chronic alarm as a result
of his birth.  I have found that issues relating to Mother
can often end up in the lungs and chest area.
I suggest you focus your treatment on the birth trauma
first, then as the separation anxiety begins to ease you
can focus on what remains of the asthma.

***QUESTION***

Hello John

I have been practicing CST for two years, but have the most
amazing results since switching to the biodynamic style of
work.  I am always enthralled by the intelligence of the body,
as it guides the healing process. Clients are just as
captivated, felling me remaining absolutely still while the
Breath of Life takes over within them.

Recently I have seen two people with head injuries, one
from a surfboard blow, the other from a fall backwards onto
the occiput. The first man was blown away, exclaiming that
his head had completely changed shape over our three sessions,
and that he could sleep at night, something rare in his
experience. During a large part of his session time his body
chose to work on trauma from ear surgery 3 years ago, for
which he was relieved and grateful. The second client, a woman,
felt as though a veil was lifted from her head after the first
session, she almost needed to wear sunglasses, the world looked
so bright and clear. She still had some nausea and dizziness
but was well enough to drive herself to the second session.

Sometimes I feel in my own body what is happening with the
client, and other times I sense directly what they are
experiencing. Can you shed any light on this?

Christine Whitelaw

Moruya NSW
Australia

>>>MY COMMENTS:

Hello Christine,
Thanks for sharing your stories. It sounds like you are
doing great work.

Now to your question. When you are treating someone your
system becomes entrained with theirs.  Entrainment is a
multi-spectrum connection that includes a lot more than
just your cranio sacral rhythms coming into sync.

Once entrainment happens the persons system will show
you everything you need for the session.  Sometimes this
is a strong sense of what the person is feeling.  At other
times you might feel what they are feeling directly in
your own body.

Feeling things in your own body is fine in small doses
but if it is persistent it can be tiring.
If you can’t stop feeling things in your body and it
becomes a problem you might want to look at your boundaries.

So that’s it for this issue.

Till the next time.

Your Mate,

John D.

<< Back to Basics 1 syllabus

Fundamentally Cranio Sacral Therapy helps remove trauma from the body. This can be physical trauma, like a car accident, a fall on the back steps or a difficult birth.

Trauma can also be emotional like a deep shock, prolonged unhappiness or witnessing violence. Trauma leaves an imprint in the body, which over time can inhibit normal function and cause pain.

In the example of a car accident, the broken bones and lacerations caused by the accident will heal within a matter of months, but the physical after-effects can go on for years. This is because the crash leaves a deep but subtle imprint in the body. Over time these imprinted patterns of restriction can inhibit the body’s natural function causing an array of symptoms, which progressively worsen.

The body tries to release these patterns of restriction from the moment they are imprinted. Under the right circumstances it can spontaneously free itself of these restrictive patterns, but if the imprint is too intense it overwhelms the body’s ability to effect a release.
Cranio Sacral therapy works with this naturally occurring release mechanism, inducing the ‘right’ circumstances under which a natural release occurs.

With emotional trauma, the process of imprinting a restriction pattern happens in the same way. An intense emotional trauma can be imprinted in the body leaving restrictions, which can cause significant physical problems.

Treatment

There are two aspects to the process of Cranio Sacral treatment. The first is to locate the primary restriction causing the problem. The second is to encourage this restriction to release.

We use highly refined palpatory skills to perceive areas of restriction. Palpation is defined as ‘examining by touch’ or ‘listening with the hands’. It relates to how things feel with your hands.

Rather than pushing or manipulating the body into a set or ‘correct’ position, we use techniques to assist the body to release its own restrictions.
When restrictions are released in this way they are gone for good. Once a treatment program is complete there are no follow up or maintenance programs.

<< Back to Basics 1 syllabus

+ Why does the body return to the position of injury in order to release? – November 05

Hi John
I have a question. In SER the body often returns
to the position of injury either emotional or
physical in order to release the disease (energy
cyst) held there.  This fits perfectly with the
founding law of Homoeopathy “like cures like’ or
similia similibus curentur.  But I can find no
written explanation for why this law is a law!
What is your experience of why the body holds to
this?. Or does it always?
Thank you.

Lorraine Archer
County Roscommon.
Ireland.

>>>MY COMMENTS:

The principal of ‘like curing like’ is the same
in cranio sacral therapy and homoeopathy but the
mechanics of how the ‘curing’ happens are
different for each.

During cranio sacral therapy the body goes to
the position it was in when the trauma occurred so
that it can reconnect with its underlying
energetic blueprint.

But hang on, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s talk about the blueprint for a minute.

Why do plants, trees, animals etc. grow into
the shape they do?   How do the cells in a bone
know to become bone cells?
Currently we are told that the answers to these
questions lie in the mysteries of DNA.

DNA is very cool stuff and remarkable in its
own right. But in time, the limitations of DNA
will reveal themselves.  The genome will be mapped
better than Manhattan and these questions will
remain unanswered.

What has yet to be proven is that when a seed
is planted it starts to unfold an energetic
outline or blueprint of the shape it will grow
into and the cells migrate in accordance to the
blueprint.  DNA is the executive of this process
and responds to the blueprint.

Think iron fillings, magnet, paper.  The magnet
(Blueprint) influences the iron filling (Cells) to
form into a particular shape, the shape of the
magnet.  You may not be able to see the magnet
because it is hidden behind the paper but you know
what shape it is by the shape the iron filing are
forming.

Most of the older traditions have identified
different expressions of the blueprint and
represent it in different ways.

In traditional Chinese medicine there are the
meridians. In Ayurvedic medicine there are the
charkas.  In Toltec or Mexican shamanism there
are what are called the feathers of the eagle.

The botanist, Rupert Sheldrake has been talking
about this kind of stuff for years, he describes
it in terms of morphic fields.

When a person’s system gets traumatised, the
cells may be displaced but they return to their
original position under the influence of the
underlying blueprint.

As they do this, they have a particular
movement which thankfully for us, is palpable.
The whole process goes to make up the auto repair
mechanism we call a release.

When the trauma won’t release it’s because the
blueprint itself has been bent out of shape.

We learned early on, that given the right
support a body will start to move of it’s own
volition.  If we can follow this movement and
know when to hold it, we may be able to facilitate
a release.

That initial movement is the cells of the body
looking for the blue print.  When the persons body
returns to the position where the trauma occurred,
the cells and the blueprint reconnect.  It’s at
this point that all the different manifestations
of release can occur, pulsations, trembling,
shaking, sweating, crying, laughing and that’s not
to mention what goes on for the patient.

Couldn’t resist.

Once the cells and blueprint reconnect then the
whole system, cells and blueprint, come back into
alignment and harmony.

So as I said it’s a process of re-collection.

Not all bodies need to go into the traumatic
position to release.  Sometimes restriction
patterns are very ripe for release and need very
little support to complete the process.

I’ve also found over the years that as I’ve
gotten better at working with the blueprint,
deeper subtleties have revealed themselves.
I find more releases are happening at deeper
levels and require less gross movements on the
surface.

Back to the homoeopathic question.  As you know,
I’m not a homoeopath but I do know some great ones.
So I went and checked with one of them to see if my
suspicions about how the mechanics of ‘like curing
like’ are different between cranio sacral and homoeopathy,
and she confirmed what I thought.

With homoeopathy, the remedy caries an
energetic signature that causes the whole
energetic structure in the system to change.

So going back to the magnet and iron filings
analogy, I’ll explain the difference in mechanics
that I spoke about in the beginning.

If a square shaped magnet gets bent out of
shape on one side.  What cranio sacral does is
collect all the iron filings on that side and help
them to ‘find’ the bent shape and collect it,
allowing it to return to its original state of
squareness.

With homeopathy a magnet that is normally red
has become blue.  The homeopath identifies the
remedy the magnet needs.  Blue.  They know this
because in the proving of the remedy many healthy
red magnets were given this remedy and they all
started demonstrating blue symptoms.  So the blue
magnet is given the blue remedy and the whole
composition of the magnet starts to change.
Eventually the magnet returns to its natural state
of red.

Who said two wrongs don’t make a right.

<< Back to Basics 1 syllabus

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.

<< Back to Basics 1 syllabus