Lately I have had various conversations with craniosacral clients that are on the lines of: I don’t understand what this is – “did you put something in my water?” – and I don’t know how it works. The next part is either: but I like it and I feel something good is happening so I would like to come back; or, I don’t understand it so I can’t see how it can help me.
I wanted to address this not-knowing as it comes up so often, and because dialogue and communication is so important in healing work. Education about the ideas and approaches involved needs to be articulated and agreed upon for the work to progress, because often it can be a radical shift to what we are accustomed to. It can be confusing or too far-out as it may not fit with our ordinary understanding.
I cannot teach you here the process of craniosacral work nor any other models I find helpful. What I can say is that the body – physical, emotional, energetic – holds many mysteries, and different ways of approaching it will yield different results. Sometimes we are so accustomed to our suffering – stress, fear, tightness, exhaustion, overwhelm, illness – that this feels ‘normal’ and to be settled and rested and actually healthy feels odd and ‘out of this world’. It is not. Feeling well in the body is a birthright that longs to be recovered. To get out of our heads and into our bodies may feel strange, but is a gateway to health, and, I would argue, also more intelligent thought.
We are so out of touch with our inner resources (and often also our injuries), numbing or denying them, that if we wish to reconnect we have to give it time and skilled help, make a decision to find what is good for us and stay with this. Usually it is illness and discontent that forces us to pay attention, opening new doorways that we did not know were there, to places we did not know existed.
Years ago when I thought of myself as a bookish academic – with chronic pain, mind you – I thought all this touchy-feely body stuff is too hippy for my attention. I wanted to engage with ideas only, as if that were separate from my bodily lived experience, as if my body were an apparatus that needed to just work so I can think my thoughts and it would follow instructions. This was crazy. Body is the place of all experience, we ignore our ground at our peril.
Some ways of approaching our body will open experiences we are not familiar with, this can be unsettling sometimes and it is important to take care of ourselves at those edges. In craniosacral work, people will often have experiences that feel like floating on water or on light, going into very deep relaxation, feeling body parts as larger or smaller than usual or moving by themselves. There may be sensations like buzzing, pulsing, movement, heat or coolness. There may be contact with hidden emotions and anxieties, and with hidden supports like space, softness and compassion. This can be strange for some people, so it is important to stay in dialogue; often just naming and sharing any strangeness dissolves its charge, and helps find a way forward that feels good.
In this work there is a necessary trust in the inherent strength and capacity of the body-mind system, a focus on growing and establishing this, instead of trying to bat away each symptom and problematic memory as it appears. In this process of reconnecting to our intelligent inner life-force, through the body, there is a degree of strangeness we may have to face, if we wish to go there. The paradox is that in the process of emphasising health and not disease, the symptoms dissolve. What we give attention to grows. Not necessarily magically overnight, but with time and patience, within a trustworthy relationship, with the appropriate skills.
It is also true that many times people have come to me with a sore neck or bad back and when I ask them the next time how that is, they say ‘oh that, its gone, I forgot about it’. What people come to sessions with is often not what they really come for. What brings us to body, in this way, time and place, with this person, is another mystery that we cannot resolve with the ordinary mind.