Successful CSTea taster event
July 2024
What a delightful afternoon I had, with Craniosacral Therapist colleagues Vlad Hasiu and Lynn McFadyen, sharing what we do with an enthusiastic bunch of people at the Salisbury Centre, Edinburgh. We were kept busy with tasters all through the event, answering questions, chatting over a cup of tea and watching Vlad do an excellent demo treatment.
And it turns out that even a 15 minute taster can make quite a difference! Here’s some lovely feedback from one of our attendees: “The taster session was a powerful experience for me… It created a lot of flow and seems to have shifted/released some things… In fact it was quite amazing how much my body surrendered to the experience”.
CSTea taster event featuring new Upledger Institute film
June 2024
I’m excited to be co-hosting the above CST discovery and meet-up event with my colleague Vlad Hasiu http://www.qcmassageandcst.co.uk. Maybe see you there! And very happy to be featuring the new Upledger Institute film “The Missing Piece” at the event, and on my homepage.
CST introductory course in Prestwick
March 2024
I’m really looking forward to assisting at Francesca McCluskie’s Craniosacral Therapy introductory course in Prestwick on 23rd and 24th March:
Training — CoreHealth Chiropractic
Trauma and the body: the Craniosacral model
February 2024
The body “walls off” trauma in non-vital areas. This is a survival mechanism, to enable us to keep functioning without being seriously impacted, and to keep more vital areas safe. However, it takes energy to do this, and to keep maintaining it, and this affects our energy and vitality, particularly as we get older. Eventually, it can also cause recurrent or persistent dysfunction, pain, and physical problems that just never seem to properly heal.
In Craniosacral Therapy, one aspect of our work is focused on locating these areas of walled-off trauma and enabling our clients to become consciously aware of what they are unconsciously holding. With awareness comes spontaneous release and relief. This is always a process, and we may need to open up the walls very gradually brick by brick, especially if the trauma has been there for a long time, and/or is associated with a particularly painful past experience.
Mulberry House
May 2023
Very excited to be joining the team at Mulberry House • Edinburgh’s Mind + Body Health Centre, a lovely, comfortable clinic in the West End of Edinburgh, as of the 5th of June. I’ll be seeing clients there on a Monday. Contact the clinic or myself to book in.
Counselling for the body
February 2023
Lots of people don’t know what Craniosacral Therapy is, and I’ve been thinking of different ways to describe it. One of the simplest might be “counselling for the body”. If you’re familiar with talk therapy, you’ll know how healing it is to express how you’re feeling. If you give your body a chance to do this too, it can help to release all sorts of long-held tensions and restrictions. This process can be very relaxing – the body likes its story to be heard.
Letting go
June 2023
I recently found myself in a situation where there was something in my life that I needed to let go of, but for a while I felt “trapped in limbo”, unsure which direction to go in, and unable to make the choice.
I felt anxious, physically uncomfortable, something just felt ‘off’, and from previous experience, I knew that it’s important to trust that. If there’s something in your life that you feel you might need to let go of (e.g. a relationship, a job), but your mind is telling you “Yes, but…” and giving you all sorts of very good reasons why it might be sensible to hold onto it, I’ve found a method that I use to help me. I’d like to share it in case it can help you too. It’s a way to enable your mind to help you rather than keep going round in circles that keep you in a state of anxiety.
To make the decision, allow yourself to feel into your body while you project into the future in your imagination and ask yourself (in the present tense): “How do I feel now that I’m no longer in this relationship, job etc.?” Then try the opposite: “How do I feel now that I’ve decided to stay in this relationship, job etc.?”
Be aware that what may be the sticking point for you is not the state of being out of the situation, but how to make that transition, i.e. how to tell the person/people that you want to leave and how they will react. So you can try asking yourself: “How do I feel now that I’ve decided to tell this person that I want to leave?” This might feel like a very anxious place. Then again: “How do I feel now that I’m no longer in this relationship/situation etc.?” This, by contrast, might feel like a calm place. In which case, you have your answer. You are afraid of making the break, so you want to skip the hard bit and be in the calm place. Don’t worry – trust that all will be well for both you and the other person if you follow your body’s inner wisdom.
Your mind might still do the “Yes but…” thing and its arguments may still be very compelling. If it does, say gently to your mind something along the lines of “That’s OK, I hear you, but I’ve got this”, and go ahead and trust your body. If you use this method, or anything along these lines that works for you, it cuts out a lot of the worry and doubt not just for you, but also for the other person or people in the situation. It is far better and kinder to others to be honest if you realise that something isn’t right for you.
February 2023
Is Craniosacral Therapy “pseudoscience and quackery”?
A response to the disparaging and dismissive description of Craniosacral Therapy on Wikipedia
Those who describe Craniosacral Therapy (CST) as pseudoscience and quackery are missing the point. They are using scientific quantifiers to define and evaluate something that cannot be defined and evaluated in this way. Craniosacral Therapy is akin to “counselling for the body” and the term “manipulation” used by Wikipedia is misleading. CST uses a type of palpation which is light, gentle and which we describe as a “listening touch”. Much of what we do involves listening to and following the natural physiological movements of the body which means that, contrary to what the Wikipedia article says, it is not harmful when practised responsibly as taught by the Upledger Institute.
CST is designed to support and boost the body’s innate healing mechanisms, which is why it can potentially help with so many conditions. This is not the same as claiming that it is a “cure all”, as Wikipedia so dismissively puts it.
CST is not, as Wikipedia defines it, “fringe medicine”, but rather “complementary therapy”, in other words, to be used as a complement to medical treatment. No one is suggesting you should get CST for a broken leg or a heart attack – go to A&E! – but you might find it very helpful to assist you in your recovery. Where CST can help is by plugging some of the gaps in the Western medical approach: especially healing touch, which is widely recognised as essential to the health of babies and infants, and is important for our wellbeing at every stage of our lives. CST takes a holistic approach, taking into account the relationships between our body, our mind and our emotions. The way these relationships influence healing and physical health are being increasingly recognised by medical practitioners, but they often simply do not have time to do more than try and cure a patient’s symptoms. CST regards symptoms as the body’s way of flagging up something up that needs attention, and explores ways to support the healing of the whole individual. This takes time and patience – and time is something that we as complementary therapists can offer, and which overworked healthcare professionals unfortunately often cannot.
If you just want something to take the symptoms away, then CST is probably not your thing. Those who are looking for that may well report in a study that CST did not help them. CST doesn’t offer a cure, it offers an exploration to locate underlying causes. The body will only truly stop giving you symptoms when you become aware of and start to address those causes. This is what a Craniosacral Therapist will support you to do, and it can be a long and winding journey, but also a fascinating and enlightening one, with some surprising ‘aha’ moments along the way. Whether you are willing to stay on that journey even though it may be a bumpy ride at times, and whether you want to look at those causes or just keep treating the symptoms – those choices are up to you. If the causes of your symptoms turn out to be things that require you to make lifestyle or attitude changes (e.g. exercise, diet, letting go of resentment or anger about the past) in order to heal, are you ready and willing to do this? If you are not, will you blame the therapy/therapist and say it didn’t work? In a study regarding the efficacy of the therapy, that could certainly skew the results!
Like counselling, or other forms of complementary therapy, it is hard to quantify “results”, “success rate” or whatever other terms people like to use from the worlds of business or science. Clients might gradually feel brighter, more optimistic, in less pain, and the healing process can have a few ups and downs along the way – that’s only normal, and you’d expect that with other therapies too, including those regarded as more “orthodox”, such as physiotherapy.
Coming back to the question of whether CST can be harmful, I reiterate that it is completely safe when practised correctly and responsibly. In any given field – allopathic medicine included – there are always a few people who do not behave responsibly. And there are also cases where people make mistakes. In the vast majority of cases, an irresponsible CST practitioner or a CST technique performed incorrectly can still do far less damage than an irresponsible medical practitioner or a medical error.
CST may in some ways view the body differently to allopathic medicine, but this does not mean that its view of how the body works is “pseudoscience”. CST is based on a sound knowledge of anatomy, and we use exactly the same anatomical reference books as doctors do. The body is so phenomenally complex that even modern medicine does not fully understand it. The Western medical view is based on a purely scientific approach that often shies away from aspects of our selves that are harder to define, label and quantify.
At the heart of our practice is palpation of the craniosacral rhythm. This is a very subtle body rhythm, and it is measurable (Craniosacral Rhythm Research-Published Scientific Paper Presentation (upledger.com)). In the experience of countless practitioners over many years, palpating the craniosacral system and “tuning into” and “amplifying” this rhythm with the hands has been found to have profound healing effects on the body as a whole. This experience can be verified by countless clients too. We can speculate about how and why this works exactly, but we do not claim to fully know. As with many aspects of healthcare and approaches to treatment in both allopathic and complementary fields, research is ongoing. What we do know is that palpating the craniosacral rhythm definitely does not cause our patients harm, or have any negative side-effects.
Physical health is inextricably linked to psychological, emotional and spiritual health, and no one has an exact answer as to how these relationships work. Indeed, the very nature of these relationships means that a precise answer, in an intellectual/scientific sense, is probably neither possible nor useful. CST treads lightly along the edge where science and medicine meet philosophy and spirituality. In our experience as CST practitioners, the craniosacral system seems to be the physical intersection between these worlds. CST is an exploration, a deep listening to subtle rhythms and inner wisdom. It does not offer a solution or a fix, but instead the far more deeply healing process of helping people to find the answers within themselves.