What is Crainosacral Therapy?
Craniosacral therapy (CST) originally began as Cranial Osteopathy (CO).
The basic philosophy of CO was applied to the whole body along with a selection of other compatible approaches by John Upledger to form a complete, safe and effective package of clinical skills for his own practice. He then started to teach this set of skills to other people, and founded the Upledger Institute, based in Florida, USA. Several other people (e.g. Franklyn Sills, Hugh Milne) have since taken the philosophical and technical roots of CST and adapted them to their own particular view of health. CST is therefore a somewhat diverse, multifaceted and rapidly evolving therapy which is quite hard to describe in just a few words. CST is not massage, use of pressure points, or manipulation – it is “something else”. Neither is it focussed on pathology, but rather tends to place far more emphasis on health and the individual’s self-healing.
How does it work?
This idea of the body healing itself is becoming almost foreign to a popular medical culture that focuses on operations, drugs and a highly specialised and technologically-based medical profession. However, we have evolved for several hundred million years, and one reason that humans are still a viable species on Earth is that our bodies have evolved to have a very powerful self-healing capability. It is a fact that many of the attitudes to health/illness/body in our modern culture get in the way of these internal self-healing forces. On the other hand, CST has been devised around the simple but powerful idea of working cooperatively with the body (rather than trying to “fix it” as if it were a car).
This cooperation is fundamental to the method of touch used in CST – the initial touch is very very light, so that the physical body recognises it as being friendly. This might sound strange – but it is important to realise that there is a physical body that works more or less independently of the mind for much of the time, and has many functions that have absolutely no relation to what goes on in the cortex of the brain. Once a contact has been made, the CST practitioner senses how your body is attempting to respond to the particular “problem”, and deliberately helps that self-healing response to become more effective. The external form of how this is done is quite varied, from (apparently) simply sitting still, through to some quite spectacular whole-body repositioning and stretches. In essence, exactly the same thing is being done in both these two extremes – “listening” to the needs of the body, and assuming that the body fundamentally knows how to heal itself, and simply needs the right form of help. The fundamental basis for all touch – whatever the circumstance – is respect for the body and a willingness to assist it in the way that it wants to be assisted (rather than forcing it back into place).
Of course, it is impossible to completely abandon techniques, and movement is a fundamental way that life expresses its wellness. So there are a wide range of techniques in CST for detecting movement or absence of movement, and for increasing the ability for various parts of the body to move. CST is called “cranio-sacral” because part of the training includes some very specific techniques for remobilising the vault and base of the skull, the bones of the face, spine and sacrum and coccyx. And there are also other ways of remobilising all other parts of the body, no matter how deep and inaccessible they may appear to be. The gentleness of touch allows movements to carry through to the very core of the body, whereas more forceful pressure often is stopped by the superficial muscles.
An easily understood example of one of the techniques used in CST is “Fascial unwinding”. One important effect of this approach is to exactly neutralise (in both magnitude and direction) internal tension patterns in muscles and connective tissue. Once these tensions are neutralised, the body will internally unwind itself into a position of increased health. A useful analogy is to think of an intelligent rope that has become knotted. If you pull on the ends of the rope, the knot just gets tighter. On the other hand, if you push the ends of the rope so that they throw slack in the knot, then, given enough slack, the rope is able to untie itself. Bodies are fundamentally intelligent, and if they are treated as if they are intelligent, they respond in an intelligent manner.
CST is intended to find root causes of any problem and deal with them as directly as possible. The effects of treatment tend to be cumulative. You will therefore find that it does not need to be “topped up” to maintain health, but rather, every session will ideally increase the body’s capacity for health.
What happens during a treatment?
Between 5 and 45 minutes of the first treatment session is used for taking a case history, after which treatment begins. You only have to remove shoes, jewellery, hair grips and belts – otherwise the treatment is carried out fully clothed.
The one (optional) exception to this is where work is required on the soft tissue of the abdomen (e.g. for scars or helping the digestive system to work more effectively). Your posture may be tested while you are in a standing position – you then usually lie down in a comfortable position, and initial contact is at the feet and legs. The practitioner will then go to wherever is the most appropriate place to address whatever condition you wish to be treated. Pressure is usually light, sometimes as light as the weight of a 20p piece. However, this pressure is often varied to neutralise and assist tension patterns in the body, so from this initial light contact almost any pressure is possible – always with your consent and within your range of comfort. There is no manipulation or fast movement of head, neck or joints, and the treatment is usually very comfortable, relaxing and enjoyable. Some “dialoguing” is used in about 50% of treatments to increase the effectiveness of the treatment session.
What is it good for?
It is quite difficult to define exactly what CST is useful for in terms of standard medical pathology. Many cases of “no hope” medical problems are surprisingly responsive to CST treatment, and the response is very individual and personal rather than being dependent on a doctors’ prognosis or diagnosis. In practice, the only way to tell whether CST is going to be suitable is to have one treatment – this will give both yourself and the practitioner a sense of how your body responds and what a programme of treatment might involve. If you are uncertain as to whether CST might help you, please call the clinic and ask to talk to our Craniosacral practitioner.
CST has been used to help a very wide range of conditions. It excels at helping distressed babies, helping all kinds of neurological pain and nerve damage, and in speeding up the healing of any injury or surgery. Most people who come for CST treatment have suffered with their particular condition for decades, and despite this, there is a very high rate of “success”. CST is also useful for helping with many kinds of stress, and is particularly useful for complex emotional-physical problems, such as those found in any kind of accident or injury in which shock or trauma was a factor. The respectful form of touch used in CST also makes it useful for “personal development” work, and many people use it as an adjunct to psychotherapy – it often will release patterns which have been dealt with psychologically, but which still repeat because they are held in physical patterns of the body. Many spinal problems such as stenosis, sciatica, whiplash, scoliosis and kyphosis respond quite quickly to CST. It has also been found to be suitable for people who are suffering from more serious spinal nerve damage, epilepsy and post-meiningeal syndrome and even the after-effects of brain surgery. Asthma often responds well to CST, as do some cases of dyslexia, cerebral palsy and dyspraxia. CST is often used by people who have symptoms of ME/CFS and MS, and can be very helpful in reducing symptoms or stabilising the condition. It is also often used to speed the recovery of people who have just received treatment for cancer or other major illnesses. Another area in which CST is often successful is the treatment of headaches, migraines, TMJ syndrome and sinusitis. CST is also extremely effective for the reduction of pain and secondary problems arising from areas of scar tissue. It is surprising how many cases of headache, bowel problems and sciatica are caused by abdominal scar tissue, and in these instances, sometimes only one treatment is enough to have a very substantial effect.
How can a treatment affect you?
This varies enormously between treatments and individuals. People often feel slightly light headed for a few minutes. After that, there is usually some decrease in pain and an increased sense of wellbeing. Like most other complementary therapies, a healing reaction occasionally occurs, where symptoms increase slightly for 24 to 48 hours followed by a noticeable decrease in symptoms.
For more information before your first treatment, please see http://www.hummingbird-one.co.uk/pdf/NewClientNotes.pdf
10 commonly treated conditions include:
• Colicky or distressed babies
Due to the very gentle touch, CST is extremely safe, and so is suitable for treatment of babies. Many cases of colic or distress can be resolved in just a few CST treatments. It is usual to treat the mother as well as the baby, because if the mother is feeling OK, the baby can sense that and is more likely to be reassured and settle down.
• Migraine & headaches (including cluster headaches)
There are many different types of headache, and (from the point of view of CST) many different possible causes of headaches and migraines. The main aim in a CST treatment is to identify the cause of the migraine/headache, so that it can be addressed directly. Successful treatment of migraines and headaches suggests that they can be caused by such diverse factors as local tensions in the head, TMJ problems, pelvic misalignment, dehydration, food intolerances or even abdominal scar tissue.
• Scar tissue pain
This pain or numbness can be local, or can cause all kinds of strange symptoms in other parts of the body. Scar tissues – even ones many years old – often respond very quickly to CST treatment, and feel more comfortable and “normal”
• Whiplash
This can affect the spinal nerves as far down as the mid-thoracic area, and the residual pain of whiplash is sometimes caused by damage to the stabilising ligaments between the spinal dura and the bony vertebral canal. The very gentle techniques employed in CST allow a usually painless and very relaxing treatment to result in a substantial reduction in whiplash symptoms. Many whiplash problems respond in just a few CST sessions.
• TMJ problems
TMJ syndrome, or TMD (Temporomandibular Disorder) can be very painful locally and cause all kinds of other symptoms, as varied as depression, anxiety, sciatica, shoulder and neck pain, tooth grinding, reflux, etc. CST provides one way of stabilising the structures of the face, jaw, neck and shoulders and often results in substantially reduced symptoms.
• Post-meningeal syndrome
There are techniques in CST which (on the basis of treatment results) appear to be capable of remobilising the meninges and reducing internal inflammation of the tissues and nerves.
• Trapped or damaged nerves
Many years of experience applying CST suggests that it may assist the body to repair some degree of nerve damage. The Upledger Institute in Florida even uses CST to treat cases of serious spinal nerve damage and paralysis. This often requires a team of therapists, but less serious cases can sometimes be helped in local one-to-one treatment sessions.
• Stress
CST treatments are well known for their ability to help people relax and be more centred and calm. The nature of the treatment means that this effect is often long lasting, and improvement tends to be cumulative. Successful treatment of stress-related physical symptoms requires some willingness to acknowledge the more mental-emotional factors that have triggered the physical problems.
• Complex combinations of shock and physical injury
The very light and respectful touch employed in CST means that it can be used very effectively as true “mind-body medicine”. Clinical experience suggests that many memories are held in body tissue rather than the brain. Also, the body has survival responses which have to complete a specific sequence of actions before the response will switch itself off, and if these are truncated before they complete, the physical injury may take a very long time to repair, or shock can be locked in the body and create a permanent state of anxiety or hyperalertness or extreme drowsiness and numbness. CST provides a way of working with these problems through the body.
• Spinal stenosis and disk damage
When the bony spinal canal is narrowed by bone overgrowth or damaged spinal discs, this can cause a lot of pain and other problems such as incontinence, bowel problems and impotence. It is possible to feel tide-like movements in the spine, and these are called “Craniosacral Rhythms” – experience shows that working to strengthen these rhythms often has very beneficial effects in cases of spinal narrowing and nerve compression.
