I remember hearing Venus return when I first heard ‘venous return’.

My unconscious mind likes these kinds of free associations, and I’m always thankful for those apparent mistakes because they open the door to blessed imaginal places.

Blood Flow

The complex circular dependability of blood flowing to and from the heart is such an amazing Love story.

The formation of the heart around week three of our embryonic life is so wonderfully fascinating.

We place the heart at the centre of love with good reason for it is the middle of our tiny form when the pericardium (the fascial sheath of the heart) begins to take shape thanks to the pulsing movements of blood, like clockwork, going up and down the primal streak, the primeval midline of an up to then bilaminar (two-layered) embryoblast delicately connected to a trophoblast (our future placenta), a ravenous body of multiplying cells implanting in our mother’s womb.

Our embryonic blood spiralling through tiny capillaries around this connective stalk feeds our unfettered desire for internality, for a third dimension, for volume, rhythm and breath.

This blood orchestrates the making of our heart to the tune of stem cells becoming instruments. 

The thought of this rhythmic flow of vital blood, this connective tissue reaching and leaving the future heart to nourish it like a loving mother, also feeds my whole being right now, as I write, because it is still happening, every second of every day.

From the moment our hearts ignite, all that wishes to sing of our aliveness in us thickens, sculpts, and swirls at an incredible pace and with mesmerising, remarkable precision and knowing. 

Call it magical if you wish, I also call it pure unadulterated drive. 

Not only does Love power this drive, I feel it could be the force itself.

The magnitude and quality of this knowing, moving Intelligence is what biodynamic craniosacral therapists name potency.

I keep returning to this primeval rhythm because it is where lies our original “commonage consciousness” as Irish philosopher John Moriarty termed it. All that sings in the natural world play in unison to pulse and rhythm, whether they beat a physiological heart or not, be they rivers, mountains, heather, foxes, or fungi. Comings and goings, expansions and contractions, inhalations and exhalations animate the whole constantly.

Venous return, the gently determined de-oxygenated blood coming back to our lungs and heart to enrich itself with oxygen and gush back out into our arteries, is also Venus return, especially at this time of year, the time of Brigid in the Irish Celtic tradition, when Love stirs all back to life, with an igniting inhalation.

Credit: Woman Rising by Christian Schloe

I return to this original flow of blood creating our heart as moments we all shared no matter where, what social class, colour, creed, gender…This circular flow of blood around our hearts underlies our aliveness and connects us all to this unknowable drive, this formidable Intelligence that loves life so much everywhere on Earth. 

I return to it each time I hold a body in a craniosacral session, and I breathe with relief and awe at the sheer creative determination of this universal indomitable force manifesting a unique healing expression within every one of us. 

I return to it when, in tragic times of disconnection, division, destruction, and wars, I despair and wonder: how can we re-orient to this hyphen-like life that unites us all? How can we re-humanise ourselves immersed in the sacredness of other lives? How can we tend to all that makes us marvellously more than human, this ‘commonage consciousness’?

John Moriarty tells a story (1) of a shepherd in Britain quietly knitting himself a scarf when he sees a hare and then another. As he stands up to get a better view, his ball of thread falls off his lap and rolls down the hill. He follows it to an opening in the rock wall he had never noticed before. He enters and “finds himself in a huge grotto. It is like a hollow mountain”. There is a bed at the end of it and he recognises King Arthur asleep. Beside the king lie a great horn and a sword on an oak table. The shepherd pulls the sword and “crashes it down” on the table stirring King Arthur awake: “Had you blown the horn I would have come back among my people to restore the Arthurian world”. Instead, King Arthur returns to sleep for thousands of years, and the shepherd steps back out never to find the door in the rock wall again.

John then asks how can we blow that horn and awaken King Arthur in us, “the genius of the universe in us”, so that we would have “new minds and new eyes for the universe, and be in it in a new way”.

In an interview in Celtic Threads John exclaims, “We must be originally creative.”

This story points me to our hearts with our veins like this ball of thread returning to what can bring us back to life, to original enchantment (literally meaning sing us alive), what can awaken the “genius of the universe in us”, this primeval Love infusing us all.

In Dreamtime John despairs that we are, “fugitives from our own natures, refugees who take refuge from awareness of self in the self forgetfulness of objective preoccupation”.

Severed from our connective stalks to earth and her rich metabolism at a young age in the modern western world, we're in exile from our home, from what sustains us. “We have lost the metabolic literacies necessary to notice and sense how we are entangled with everything else.” (Machado de Oliveira, 2021)

Stemming from the trophoblast, the three-week embryo with its budding spine and ‘spiralling’ heart resembles a mushroom.

Mytho-poetic storyteller and author Martin Shaw said: “At the end of my forties, I visited a forest for 101 days. I needed to stop talking. I was bushed. Every day I lay a gift down at the roots of a hazel bush. At the end of this extended spiritual pummelling, 

I was given just nine words:

Inhabit the time and genesis of your original home.”

What if a process of ‘walking into oneself’, of re-enchanting “our original home” could bring us back to connection with the land, could 'blow the horn' and spin those umbilical cords back into metabolic magicians, back to sing in unison with the wild?

I hold the land of bodies for a living and from the windows on this first floor I see the branches of trees like extended blood vessels reaching up, down, and through. My hands listen to connective tissues gently loosen, flow and breathe while leaves slowly massage the air in the still morning. 

(1) Celtic Spirituality, John Moriarty, Cd 1 track 1 and 2

I settled into my midline, my sit bones anchored in a comfortable chair, my back supported by a cushion, feet aware of contact with the ground. My whole body notices the air, and the qualities of the field more than my conscious cognitive self does. It knows when to make contact because of a palpable readiness resulting from this client's response to my invitation to drop in and resource.

This liminal relational knowing is essential to biodynamic craniosacral work. There is always much more than bodies in touch with each other through light practitioner hand contact.  Our knowing matches that which our aliveness inherently expresses and could be called “metatactile”(beyond touch) to borrow a word coined by DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark. It is multidimensional and multi-relational, not centred on our cognitive selves but suspended everywhere instead, fully allowing, through the deep listening of a multi-sensorial holding. Craniosacral practitioner and author Mike Boxhall spoke of becoming “the empty chair”: stepping out of the way as much as possible to become a vessel through which 'we' can perceive and surrender to what is.

By the time I make contact with this client’s ankles, my fluid body is in tune and will keep attuning while Health Intelligence reveals itself. In this case, I feel it arising out of their right hip, knee, and shoulder from the first moment of contact. This pattern of expression or ‘conditioning’ makes itself known not just to my hands but to my whole body. 

I sway and follow, syncing in an act of dynamic balance between my body and a biodynamic force that flows between and around our fluid bodies, way beyond both our corporeal selves.

Biodynamic craniosacral therapists tap into this “fluid field” to perceive through and with movement. We witness a slowing down and amplification of movement as more spaciousness and ease emerge but nothing ever stops still. Even when we hold a stillpoint, a pause between inhalation and exhalation, even when we bow in awe to the buoyancy of whole body stillness that does not begin or end with the body, motion is always there, pregnant, ready to give birth anew.

Stillness is a dynamic process and so is the constant adjustment of the body towards balance or a coherent equilibrium. Homeostasis is a bit of a misnomer as life is constantly re-appraising and re-positioning itself in relationship with all motilities expressed. Although we tend towards equilibrium, it is never actually static: stasis (stability) and the Greek prefix homeo meaning ‘likeness; resemblance; constant unchanging state’ do not apply in a world in constant flux.    

Kinaesthesia means the sensory perception of movement: kinein means movement in Greek and the primary meaning of ‘aesthetics’ is perception through the senses, not appreciation of beauty, a 19th-century interpretation. 

Our craniosacral knowing pertains to kinaesthesia but is not brain-centred. It relates and dances with the myriad dances at play in our perceptive field. 

Dancing is a kinaesthetic art form. Kinaesthesia is also how a child learns to relate with the world, and it accompanies and evolves with each new type of sensory motility, from crawling to walking to running, cycling…

It begins in the womb because the embryo ‘moves into form’ in constant relationship with the uterine, maternal, and mother’s environmental surrounds. The embryo ‘sees’ without eyes (sealed shut during most of the pregnancy) in the relative darkness of the amniotic fluid. This full-body sensory perception, this inherent living dynamic process remains with us all our lives. Yet our kinaesthetic and synaesthetic (the prefix syn means 'with' or 'together', synaesthesia is perceiving through a combination of senses) perception is developmentally ‘pruned’ and educated away from a whole body ‘feeling-with’ into a fenced-out sensory approach restrictively led by what we call the five senses and the predominance of an internal centre as opposed to dynamically immersed dancing relationships.

Our inherent mode of embryonic perception is synaesthetic. Birth psychologist and author David Chamberlain tells us that the embryo has at least 12 senses. I cannot resist pasting his list:

“(1) Touch (receiving touch, and reaching out to touch) is the first sense to develop.

(2) Thermal sensing of hot and cold is indeed real, but usually ignored

(3) Pain sensing (now termed nociception) involves crushing and nerve damage. The reality of pain was tragically overlooked in creating the protocols of modern obstetrics.

(4) Hearing begins as early as 14 weeks after conception, then improves greatly in ten weeks with cochlear resources and full growth of the external ear.

(5) Balance, gravity, and orientation in space develops from week 7 to 12.

(6) The chemosensors of smell operate in close association with the chemosensors of

(7) taste as both are bathed by amniotic fluids passing through the nasal area.

(8) “Mouthing” is used to explore texture, hardness, and contours of objects; this sense is not about food and eating.

(9) Sucking and licking in the womb are mouth-related pleasure senses. The sucking of fingers and toes is not nutritive. Male thumb sucking, seen as early as 13 weeks, is often paired with erections, suggesting sexual sensations. Ultrasound reveals prenates licking the placenta and twins licking each other, suggesting pleasure in bodily contact.

(10) Vision in utero is paradoxical because limited by eyelids being fused shut for about six months, yet it seems functional in hitting targets like needles during amniocentesis at 14 to 16 weeks of age. Some form of vision seems to facilitate twins boxing, kicking, kissing, and playing together in the womb.

(11) Although prenates have never been acknowledged for their psychic gifts, they do demonstrate clairvoyance and telepathic sensing of things clearly out of reach; womb babies know whether they are wanted or not, and discern the character of their parents.

(12) Finally, prenates also demonstrate transcendent sensing during near-death and out-of-body experiences. When out-of-body, no senses should work for either babies or adults, but they do. In transcendent states, even immature senses function well and events are stored in memory--as can be demonstrated years later. Contrary to popular belief, babies in the womb are richly equipped for sensing!”

Interesting to note that most if not all of these senses have to do with some form of body contact with fluid, airwaves, chemicals, nourishment...with which the prenate feels.

Canadian professor Erin Manning writes about touch as a way of “feeling-with” and “worlding”, making felt sense of the world and experiencing in neurodiverse modes of knowing.

“Neurodiverse sociality lives in and through the force of the shaping, a shaping so deeply alive with the world it continuously activates new fields of resonance in the edging into existence of body-worldings.”

I’d argue that as an intrinsic part of this neurodiverse mappemonde BCST senses in shapes, sees with much more than eyes, and listens with hands, nose, mouth, and heart to the smell of anesthetics dispersing, or the tobacco fumes inhaled as an embryo. It also mirrors movements through a kind of 'virtual body' that is not limited to its outline.

This neurodiverse practice shows time and again that bodies are not above all individual, they are inseparable from a collective community of human and non-human beings, things, architectures, histories, stories, and emotions.  We constantly participate in this tumultuous interweaving whether we’re aware of all we perceive without our eyes or ears, the dominant senses in our Western modernity. Our nose, taste buds, and skin but also our heart, gut, and all nerve plexi intercept and interlace with what our lives land, experience, and contact.

We’re simply unable to consciously notice everything because consciousness inevitably filters what we perceive. However, we can broaden the scope of our consciousness as well as its scale, the quality of its engagement, and vantage points to shape much richer sensory experiences.

A BCST session is an opportunity to plug into the vastness of our sensorium and rekindle our inherent synaesthesia. Just to add here there are no ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ ways of perceiving, just a spectrum of possibilities formatted by different grids. A dissociated or partly embodied perception is as valid as a fully embodied one (if such a thing exists). We are all moulded by culture and education but also imprinted by different wounds and life events. 

BCST helps to gradually lift these grids, enriching our inner and outer perceptive fields. Some clients speak of feeling more spacious, lighter, taller, more alive, fuller, more at ease, grounded, receptive, softer…

What would happen if you stopped reading now and closed your eyes? Where do you see with your eyes closed? What is the first thing your awareness notices?

When I close my eyes at this moment in time, I feel my belly in contact with the edge of the table and I listen in to the ripples of this conversation. My breath expands and enjoys the solidity of this rhythmic support. My lower back opens and feels into the space that separates it from the door… I could go on but you get what I mean: the first things I notice are relational touch and movements.

 Erin Manning argues that a neurotypical formatted —and pruned— perception or mapping of the world is unable to cope with the hyper-sensitive awareness of whole bodies’“feeling-with” the world with which autistic and DeafBlind people perceive and communicate.

She explains that ‘mirror-touch’ or “vision-touch” (witnessing someone’s stroking their arm for example as a sensuous experience of contact in one’s own body: “you touch yourself and I feel it because I see it” ) synaesthesia experienced by autistic people is seen as a loss of bodily integrity in neurotypically-formatted studies. 

“The deficit model of sensation begins with the presupposition that senses are fixed and located, working with a pre-constituted body schema whose ‘sense of agency,’ it is said, is fractured by the increase in sensation.”

She continues: “Bodies are only properly bodies when they can fully distinguish themselves from the world, the implication being always that bodies are separate entities that have dominance over their sensations, and, by extension, over their movements. The deficit model perceives any deviation from this norm to be a lack.”

My hands often involuntarily move ever so slightly away from contact sometimes, to hover above an area. I ‘see’ it happen but do not always cognitively know why, only my hands do and that’s fine by me. I surrender to their 'agency' and whatever guides their movement.

BCST in its emphasis on the experience of bodies in contact within the fluid field belongs to this wide spectrum of neurodivergence or neurodiversity, a more all-encompassing term. It very much deviates from the established norm in the way it initiates and encourages awareness to free itself from restrictive formatting so that our inner Health Intelligence, our life force itself feels freer to roam, invest, inform, and fulfill its many roles.

Far from being seen as a deficiency, the more bodies sense and “feel the touch of the world” the better in a BCST model.

Touch alters the “feel of the space” and bodies are shaped by this spatial agency, by these meetings.

This poem called ‘Clamor’ by John Lee Clarke (DeafBlind author previously mentioned), evokes just that:

“All things living and dead cry out to me

when I touch them. The dog, gasping for air,

is drowning in ecstasy, its neck shouting

Dig in, dig in. Slam me, slam me,

demands one door while another asks to remain

open. My wife again asks me

how did I know just where and how

to caress her. I can be too eager to listen:

The scar here on my thumb is a gift

from a cracked bowl that begged to be broken.”

Can you feel how this affects you, how your body responds to the words’ sensuous strokes, not only the images conjured in your mind’s eye but also how your fascia or your organs move and apprehend or are apprehended by the fluid space around them? Do you feel the tugging and sweet melting motion of your tissues surrendering? The curve of my abdomen, on the right, as it meets the iliac crest is heaving with delight as I read these lines.

John Lee Clark begins an essay called Metatactile Knowledge like this:

"How did you know?"

"That's a response I often get when I interact with people. How did I know that their shoulder needed a massage, or that they were hungry or sad, or a spot on their arm was itchy? The owners of pets I meet are also amazed. Almost immediately I've found their pets' sweet spots. "That's right! She loves that. But how did you know?"

On one of our first dates, my future wife asked, "How did you know?" Without realizing what I was doing, I had pressed her Melt Button. (She wishes me to inform my readers, lest their imaginations run away, that it was nothing naughty.)

When our twin sons were born prematurely (now a happily meaningless fact), the nurses in the NICU were impressed by what I did. I felt right away that my sons' skins were too sensitive to stroke. I just held them or squeezed their arms and legs, even firmly, but I knew not to stroke. The nurses were going to give instructions to that effect, but there was no need.

I wasn't conscious of it. It was natural. So natural, in fact, that I didn't have a name for it, this skill that goes beyond just feeling texture, heft, shape, and temperature. I'd like to call it metatactile knowledge. It involves feeling being felt, being able to read people like open Braille books, and seeing through our hands and the antennae of and within our bodies. It involves many senses, senses that we all have but which are almost never mentioned—the axial, locomotive, kinesthetic, vestibular…. All "tactile" to some extent, but going beyond touch."

“going beyond touch”

As I resonate with John’s words and feel them through my familiar craniosacral prism, I ‘translate’ that contact could be seen as a simple way in —if we wish to operate in a binary narrative of internal/external — or as one strand in a rich conversation immersed within the fluid fields where our bodies and everything else relate.

As John says, “We all are in continuous conversation. Except that not everyone is as engaged in conversation as they could be”.

I would add in turn that BCST helps us to remember this whole body sensory blueprint knowing experienced by our embryo, and more actively engage with the conversations of life.

A knowing that is beyond intuition, intellect, or instinct.

Kinaesthetically and Synaesthetically.

The ‘lightness’ felt by clients during sessions belongs to this blueprint memory imprint of levity experienced while we basked in the amniotic fluid for nine months to shape a human form.  

I have personally noticed that this ‘lightness’, this renewed ease comes with greater sensory immersion and perception and I wonder whether what was ‘pruned’ is in fact just silenced and can be awakened given the ‘right’ circumstances.

When I enjoy a contemporary dance show, my whole body dances with the dancers and my skin ripples with their fluid touch. It’s as if their vibrant life force rocks mine more alive, to fill me up with the deep pleasure sensual bodies display when they are danced by movement, when their bodies ply with lithe abandon, interweave, and create together. I walk on air out of such shows. I experience so much levity and lightness, I could climb a mountain and have, on many occasions, danced or jumped this soft, supple vibrancy in the streets!

I wonder whether this sensory siloing, discounted from 12 (or more) to 5 shies us away from our natural capacity towards ecstasy. The bliss of sentient oneness with the surround that the embryo experiences and that spiritual mysticism endeavours to restore.

A bliss that poetry also sparks up. French author Christian Bobin writes:

“L’homme-joie (The joy-man) 

La douceur de ce poème était si grande qu’à la fin de ma lecture je n’avais plus de corps

The softness of this poem was so great that by the end of reading I had no body anymore.”

Such a gorgeous ‘feeling-with’ ode to immersive surrender.

JLC calls the arbitrary separation of bodies from the world in neurotypical perception “distantism”. He is at the forefront of a new tactile language that bridges the distance between communicating DeafBlind bodies. Called Pro-tactile, this linguistic and cultural movement was created in 2005 by Jelica Nuccio.

Watching Pro-tactile conversations brings embodied listening to a whole new level, “allowing all co-composing bodily senses—including the kinaesthetic, the proprioceptive, the vestibular— to connect to the incipiencies of a welling environment.”

Movement and touch are at the centre of this metatactile, whole-body-sensing language. “Making movement primary by itself shatters distant- ism, for distantism requires position.” (Manning)

JLC talks about “tactile freeze”, a learned condition impeding our sense of knowing through touch and denoting how ‘anti-tactile’ Western societies are. He quotes a fellow Pro-Tactile trainer, "Tactile freeze is learned. It is natural for us to explore everything tactilely. But when I was a kid, they hit my hands for touching.”

“Reinventing what it might mean to communicate is key to this practice, and this includes communication with the more-than, engagement with what else the world carries, and what else a body-world relation can be.”(Manning)

My vitality feels so invigorated by this form of engagement with the world, this 'world-bodying' because it points to something familiar, that we lost along the way: a sense of immersive participation with all that is. Metatactile knowledge returns us to our essential biodynamics.

JLC asks:

"Shouldn't we be thankful for the diversity that evolves among us, instead of arbitrarily deciding that one thing is normal and another is not?”

“It [this diversity] may even be vital to the human race.”

If we were to re-write Syn and Kin aesthesia, like I did in the title of this piece, it would literally mean perception through the senses together and in familiar relationship, or a communion of sensuous relatedness and togetherness in how the world shapes our perception and how we shape it in return. A participative reciprocity, “a shaping so deeply alive with the world” (Manning).

“We all stand to learn from a modality of feeling that is so ecstatically more-than-human.” says Erin Manning.

A way of relating intimating to us that all is potentially kin and together/syn, intertwined.

“In a philosophy of pure feeling (as opposed to one of pure reason), the world is alive with feeling, and it is this feeling that moves through us, creating the lures that orient our experience.” (Manning)

Such new and ancient ways of communicating, being in, and feeling with the world can teach us so much. Watching how each body relates with spatial configurations in Pro-Tactile conversations I am reminded of the murmuration of starlings or the swarming of bees.

All windows, portals to a broadened integrated perception and chances to heal our wounded relationships. 

At the dawn of this new year I am left with questions around which I wish to orient: what else can a body-world relationship feel like? How can we participate more fully in this world-bodying? How can we nurture this feeling with the touch of the world?

On this occasion the orienting midline of creative formation was my last blog post The Crucible and the Wandering Line in which I explored the role of BCST in re-making or restoring Relationship (to borrow Rollin Becker’s habit of placing capital letters in front of words to enhance their scope and essence) in the troubled and challenging times we live.

At least this is what the responses I gratefully received reflected back to me in various ways.

My previous blog post discussed how BCST wanders away from our dominant cultural and societal paradigm, to awaken us back to our “human nature” as Scott Zamurut(1) says. For indeed, “The dominant paradigm has wandered away from the natural world.”

So it explored a number of layers, each pertaining to “a variety of fields. (…) Primarily the field around the body and the relational field co-created between client and practitioner that creates the protected and negotiated space within which the session occurs. Ray Castellino and others have expanded this field concept to the concentric circles of our various relationships and influences, such as the family field, the ancestral field, the cultural field and on and on.” says Margaret Rosenau (2)

I particularly like this image, borrowed from this Pre and Perinatal pioneer, of embedded widening circles nestled into one another. Within these formative and informative fields, various “layers of support” (one of Ray Castellino's principles) line the cradle from which we make or shrink from relationship.

Susan Raffo (3) hones in on this intertwinement, “string theory and spiderwoman know the same thing, we are patterns that experience ourselves, that we are always connected...

(...) It helps me to remember that full aliveness, full embodiment is about connection - with ourselves, with the world of wildness and spirit, and with our kin. Connection with our kin is about those whose names we call with poetry and those who we avoid, who we are afraid of, don't understand, or don't see or don't want to engage with. All of this is the full relational field.”

All these fields, energetic as well as corporeal could also be called bodies. We speak of a body of work so why not extend this word to the cultural, artistic, ancestral, societal spheres?

I feel it helps to 'enliven' fields into the complex, metabolic, forever transforming containers they are. It also helps to encompass our bodies within the larger breathing collective body that is "the full relational field" to which Raffo refers. Indeed our bodies' aliveness interacts and evolves within a dynamic context, a space/time dimension, shaped and affected by a limitless number of influences, conditions. “Life is all about communication and relationship, and as that idea is followed further, it is absolutely inevitable that Life is BOTH never one but many, and never many but one (or to quote [Chilean biologist and philosopher Francisco] Varela, "not one, not two"). It's a mistake to think of the human body as a single entity. That idea (of an isolatable undivided human entity) removes it from the ecosystem that it requires to even exist; and also gives a very poor sense of the diversity and variability of the internal ecosystem - the collection of cells, biota, limbs, organs, and so on that intelligently cooperate with each other to make a viable and responsive organism," explains Andrew Cook (4).

(...) "In the Talmud there is a line that goes something like "beside every blade of grass is an angel that whispers 'Grow! Grow!'". If you then consider a clump of grass or a field or a savanna what happens to the angels? I believe that Varela's "not one, not two" answers that. If you look at something at one scale, you see an identity because the modern way of seeing is to id-entify and separate "things" into separateness-es. A small field of grass may be part of a bigger landscape - it has a separable field identity and is also part of something greater (and also has individual blades of grass). In the same way the body and the human being can be viewed in different contexts and different scales, each of which is true.”

What is life if not this constant enlisting of relationships experienced from our bodies hosting other bodies within the greater contextual historical collective body? BCST mediates a “conversation”(3) with this wildly dynamic Life, with an aliveness we share alongside many other kinds and kin. It invites and ignites an awareness of what Dan Siegel calls “Mwe” (Me+We), or "intraconnection" as a path towards integration, towards a dynamic relational whole. Tanya Desfontaines(5) writes that, “Throughout my ongoing journey with BCST I have been challenged as a therapist to ‘reverse the polarity’ of my conditioned way of operating, so that rather than observing, measuring and analysing information from the physiology of my client, processing it with logic and reasoning and then producing a plan for treatment, I have learned to hold a much more open, receptive space for the Intelligence of the Breath of Life to work through the field, through me, and through my hands in relationship with the body of the client. Thus the work happens from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.”

Returning to the body as the primer, the blueprint, the essence of being. “We begin our listening with an inherent rhythm, a natural rhythm. Our physical body is a respiratory system so we begin with the breath, “not the breath of air but the Breath of Life.” Our listening is not random, our listening is directed to the rhythms of primary respiration that we have learned to perceive by learning to synchronize our attention to specific rhythms.

In this quality of listening to inherent movement within a living body we can begin to see natural and aberrant motion, and through this witnessing the magic of inherent healing arises. Not because we conjure up a special state within ourselves or because we’ve learned a special theory of one kind or another. The magic of inherent healing comes about through listening to the natural activity of the Breath of Life.” (1)

BCST 'messages' us back into the vast crucible of aliveness that we all naturally are. It always begins in the relational field as BCST is about “entering a conversation” as Andrew Cook says. “My Qigong teacher talked of “gesture-response" (…). In CST we gesture towards the idea of health and something waves back. That relationship with "health" requires that we believe in something (whatever "heath" might represent) that also has different scales, timeframes, meanings. It seems that a certain degree of the right kind of clarity of what we are looking at (the gesture) then invokes something (the response).”

A mostly non-verbal conversation which supports an unfolding of our essential nature held within the cultural, societal, ancestral backdrops of each of our porous individualities. Like all conversations it works both from inside out and outside in, and in a multitude of other mysterious ways and directions too.

“There are endless possibilities of new awareness that can arise from recognizing which fields are preferences for a particular client; noting in which field their resources are most accessible and in which field most challenges arise.” explains Margaret Rosenau.

A “new awareness” that often feels like a freshly opened window where before there was what we sometimes call inertia, or opacity, absence, often caused by trauma.

“Our body has the capacity to encounter, process, and dissipate the forces from which trauma originates. In the same way that our body can encounter, process, and dissipate the air we bring into our lungs, the water we drink, and the food we eat, we are equipped to meet the conditions we encounter during our incarnation with a natural capacity to respond to these conditions.” says Scott Zamurut.

Indeed the forces that made us possible drive a session and create space for awareness to emerge, for what could be called health or Health to fill us alive, for parts or fragments that were disconnected to return to relationship. This is the core of our BCST training, how we approach trauma and 'touch' the affects of this collective body's embedded layering at an individual level.

Which means that each body is uniquely navigating its own fluid self and that the context, the ‘outside’ that conditioned who we are also informs the 'voyage' during, and between each session.

From the inside out or the centre to the periphery and back to the centre again. Like a conversation, each session sways or flows in between concomitantly.

How can these multiple peripheral stories burden our internal dynamics and actually sever our vital connection with the ground, with the land of our bodies within the larger body of Earth?

Margaret Rosenau writes, “I spoke recently at the North American Breath of Life Conference about how we who live in “Western” cultures, under the restrictions of the Dominant cultural paradigm, are living in a cultural field that has so long been separated from the natural world or biosphere that it sees this separation as normal. As always. It is not. It is a recent (in the context of human history) and remarkable aberration from the rest of the living world.

As my long-time teacher Martín Prechtel says “the land doesn’t go away from us, we go away from it”.

He is speaking of the forced or necessary removal that most Indo-European peoples remember in their bones. Memories that caused them to displace others upon their arrival to “new” lands. The vast majority of humans in North America where I live, carry with them the history of displacement or displacing or both. This makes forming relationships with the ground grief-stricken. When we experience a sense of belonging, we also touch what has been lost or taken from us.”

A restoration of what was lost, forgotten can arise, to recall, regain and reclaim the fuller spectrum of our bodies as sensuous perceptive relational presences able to engage with a larger and more alive periphery.

A“ re-membering process that is a retrieval process. A deep dive for lost jewels. A spinning of threads from the clouds of wooly forgotten beings. A drop spindle into the waters of now. On the way to wholeness we find all the fragments, all the ripped out and torn up places. The pain of not being able to live within the dynamic aliveness in my body and the world. The family heirlooms left behind to be plundered. The relationships to ancestral land we had to run from.(…) What is true for me is that my body and every body remembers its wholeness. What is true for me is that my body and mind are accustomed to being experienced in parts. I am a dynamic part of a dynamic whole, living most days in a small familiar corner of the vast landscape of life’s possibilities. The beauty of BCST is that we orient to wholeness and aliveness in the body as a timeless presence that cannot be diseased or removed.”(2)

At least this is what can unfold if we are privileged enough to see this process through as this requires long term personal commitment as well as resources of different kinds.

This gradually wider and wilder perceptive lens means our awarenesses can interact more with all that is around us, whether we live in New York City or the Amazon rainforest, because we are nature. We are and breathe with nature.

As I asked the question ‘How can BCST become even more of a wandering line away from the dominant paradigm?’ I hear Susan Raffo reply “I look at my fellow biodynamic craniosacral therapists and think, it is not hard for so many of us "to share my sense of wonder and awe for our body and its mysterious complexities," as Sophie names. I don't know what the descriptive language is for what I am trying to talk about - English is too burdened by binary judgements - but I was thinking of your words, Sophie, when I was sitting on the street near where I live. There are a lot of people who hang out on my corner, people who are using substances to make life more tolerable or because it is pleasurable or a thousand other reasons; people who are looking for ways to get by, people who are people. I often see the daughter of one of my friends who lives on the streets and the cousin of someone else I know who also lives on the streets. Sometimes the space where they are is ugly to look at, ugly in the old sense of the word - something which brings apprehension, dread. That is what I sometimes feel in my own body and witness in the bodies of many driving/walking by, those calling 911; those voting for clearance measures that are all about making the ones experienced as dirty and raging or just lying across the sidewalk, the fact of the plastic and pee piled and seeping right there where others wait for the bus, most of those living nearby are looking for ways to make them all go away. Ugly = apprehension and dread, fear."

How can we include everything? Fear, dread, fury, grief, shame...grace, joy, love, courage...? How can we be present with all our vulnerabilities and let them change us so deeply that "the possibility of living differently from here on out" (2) is inevitable?

I sing the wonders of our inner wild selves, and Raffo names the wider, wilder context: “The scores of people living where I live, where you live, whose lives have been disrupted due to climate change, to economic chaos, who are living where and how they can live in ways that don't always conform with ideas of private property and public space. To those of us longing desperately for something that is connected and filled with belonging, filled with our dreams of a kind of wildness that we try to talk about, I keep remembering our kin who are wild right now. Not in the way of being a collective body that moves with the rhythm of clay rather than capitalism, but wild in the way of living right this second, separated from the rules and regulations of domesticated city life.”

Can BCST intermingle the pared down reality of textbooks learnt at BCST practitioner schools, the awe-inspiring felt sense of primary respiration slowly unfurling in a body, with the every day reality experienced in the streets, and the depleted breaths of our ever more ravaged landscapes? This is where BCST, which works on individual bodies, can meet the collective body but is also limited because the 'conversation' is skewed by what it bounces against.

Tanya Desfontaines says that for her, "the context of Biodynamics invites a way of understanding our material bodies as a part of the earth, a natural landscape which is not separate from the outer landscape."

Another word for 'indigenous' is autochthones (used in French for example) which means "people sprung from earth itself" in ancient Greek.

For Desfontaines, the "wander lines" walked by neurodivergent children in Fernand Deligny's research (as quoted in my previous blog post) conjure Aboriginal "Songlines", the Dreaming of the land sprung through its people.

Aboriginal author Tyson Yunkaporta defines "songlines"(without a capital 'S' in his book) as "ancient paths of Dreaming etched into the landscape in song and story and mapped into our minds and bodies and relationships with everything around us: knowledge stored in every waterway and every rock."(Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 2019)

The fields and context mentioned before but as an animated land and cosmos "etched" within one's body and mind in actively alive collective multidimensional relationships through totemic kin each clan is responsible for and deeply connected to, with rituals, songs and stories and so much more I cannot begin to do justice to here. I strongly recommend Yunkaporta's book as one exploration of a radically different way of engaging and being at one with land that is felt as fully alive and sentient.

From the periphery to the centre and back to the periphery: in this worldview the land dreams its people's storied lives and they honour the land through each of their relationships collectively.

Each practitioner's response speaks of our modern western cultural paradigm's deep partition or departure from the land. They also refer to the set of fields, or contexts within which BCST practitioners and clients function.

As BCST's reach and scope itself is impacted by this economic social cultural landscape, can this work from "inside out" bridge the contextual conditioning of the profoundly sick container within which it unwinds and allow for change so deep that it would loosen or "dissipate"(1) its grip and gradually land us back in conscious relationship with the wild?

BCST may be confined or framed by the very conditions imposed by the container in which it operates but is limitless when it comes to unveiling our inner potentialities and possibilities.

As Margaret Rosenau says, BCST can be experienced as a 're-membering', a return to a blueprint, an inherent knowing, which could also be called 'indigenous' Intelligence..

But because each person receiving a session returns to the dominant hyper individuation of our modern world, the illusion of separateness permeating the spaces in which we function can limit and condition this work. As previously mentioned it takes time and financial commitment to untether and re-member.

I guess my wish to take the deeply connective practice of BCST and herbal medicine to communal spaces within the land is one response to these limitations.

There too we can hit the restrictive frames set by socio political economic deleterious forces, for as we listen more deeply, we individually meet the pain of a land less and less biodiverse. However this pain acknowledged and shared, held collectively can heal and allow our creative aliveness to actively engage in the paradigm shift that is already unfolding.

I concur with spiritual teacher and author Thomas Huebl and Richard C Schwartz, creator of Internal Family Systems therapy when they talk about the need to unburden and heal our past collective wounding within collective spaces, in order to face and truly meet, be present to the current ecological and social upheavals.

This holds true for the land or collective body of BCST too, we have only begun to remember and acknowledge the trauma of its indigenous origins: "What does it mean to deeply honor the origin of our field in ways that we mostly don't yet know how to do - to not just name something but to become different from who we are?" Susan Raffo asks.

She continues, “What are the origins of our field, including the ways that non-indigenous people imagine indigeneity? It is also this... what is the present moment version of what it must have been like to have survived countless epidemics and lost so many of your kin to settlers with guns, what is the present moment version of that as I watch so many different bodies, so many different beloveds who are trying to find a small bit of breathing room after being forced out of their homes by lithium mining and political strife, by an ever increasing lack of water and safety. What does it mean to honor the origins of our field, those who shared what they had, in this case the knowledge of hand-touch healing, with those who were spirit-poor, what does it mean to honor those origins?”

I read this and I feel my gut and heart filling up with gratitude for her clear and forceful articulation of what is too rarely spoken to in our field.

I notice how each practitioner’s response to my gesture hinges their own distinct relationship with the biodynamic craniosacral field on a particular midline, an axis of orientation around which parts move, like a foundation which underlies their perceptive field.

All views serve to expand our perspective and are equally valid. I was, as in previous such 'compilations', in awe of the 'layered land' and commons that emerged. As usual in such conversations language fails to really convey, really deliver but the questions arising resonate and ripple.

I loved receiving and reading each response. I am left with so much gratitude at the quality, the grace, the courage, the wisdom, the honesty, integrity, the beauty, the force, the patience and impatience…I am left with a sense of our vibrant collective community.

Thank you so much Andrew Cook, Tanya Desfontaines, Susan Raffo, Margaret Rosenau and Scott Zamurut.

I'd like to end with Susan Raffo's lines from her book Liberated to the Bone as they summarise well the questioning that emerged in this post.

"Self-transformation requires social transformation.

Social transformation requires self-transformation."

1- Scott Zamurut is a BCST teacher and practitioner based in New Mexico www.scottzamurut.com

2- Margaret Rosenau is the founder director of the School of Inner Health in Denver, Colorado, where she teaches BCST.

www.schoolofinnerhealth.com

3- Susan Raffo is a writer, cultural worker, and bodyworker. She is part of the Healing Histories Project, which focuses on transforming the medical-industrial complex and confronting eugenic legacies. She lives in Minneapolis, a few blocks from where George Floyd was murdered. Her book Liberated to the Bone: Histories, Bodies, Futures was published in 2022. www.susanraffo.com

4- Andrew Cook is a teacher and CST practitioner based in Norfolk, UK

https://www.body-mind.co.uk

5- Tanya Desfontaines is a BCST teacher and practitioner based in Devon, UK

www.fifthworldcranial.co.uk

BCST is a deep listening through gentle hand contact which supports and facilitates the natural expression of our bodies' inherent wisdom or Intelligence. This statement alone defies our habitual temporal and spatial boundaries. How do we listen to bodies? What is this wisdom at play in our organisms and how do we access it never mind support and facilitate it?

Surrendering to what is often intangible and invisible deeply challenges the common perception of the body as a defined ‘machine’ controlled by a computer-like brain.

As I journey with BCST, the perceptive walls restricting my senses continue to tumble down while I venture further and further into the wild of our bodies held within the wild of the land and the cosmos. I use the word 'wild' to mean what is untamed, true, vital, and the manifestation of this wisdom or natural Intelligence in and around us. It refers to rocks, rivers, oceans, mountains...as much as plants, animals, and fungi.

As one of Earth’s incarnated extensions, our human body is inhabited, some say haunted, by many, many other forms of life. Organelles, like ancestral memories, are microorganisms that symbiotically transformed into the constituents of plant and animal (including humans) cellular cytoplasms for example (Lynn Margulis,1998).

Mammals could not survive without the billions of bacterial, fungal and other microbial organisms that help us metabolise.

As I listen with my hands on your ankles, as I tune into the tissues and rhythms in your fluid body, this ancestral microbial legacy dances with a vast network of allegiances in the world outside your skin.

For these microscopic life forms ‘more-than-humanising’ our bodies share their spacious existence across many terrains and ‘bodies’ (human and non human). Their presence and impact affecting and affected by the food we ingest, the air we breathe, the water we drink, but also the insects, the weather, the birds, the people, the land... One could say we metabolise and are metabolised by many unknown intricacies, by many mysterious interdependences.

Words like rhizome, mycelium, microbiome cloud, and biota invite us away and beyond epithelial boundaries and the singling out of humans as separate, independent entities in the natural world. We never were enclosed territories, distinctly fleshed-out apparatus operating as impermeable insular isolated parties within bordered lands. We are naturally nestled within multiple interconnected nests mostly invisible to our perceptive lenses used to man-made corporeal containers like houses, cars, offices, factories, planes etc…In many ways the story of our restricted perception evolved with the rise of this materiality/materialism surrounding and embedding our bodies, tethering them to these new concrete gods or masters to which we are in our own individual ways enslaved and devoted.

The more I practise BCST the more my awareness untethers from its trappings and wanders away from pre-set definitions of reality. Each session is a fresh exploration of this wild life Intelligence as it expresses through the subtle, complex, and intricate relationships in a human body.

Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe asks this urgent question: “How do I hack my own sensorial systems so that I can perceive and respond to the world differently?”

I experience BCST as such a “hacking”, except it is not ‘forceful’, it allows a gentle surrender that unlocks portals of perception. I witness and hold your body lying on the altar of forces that have created and re-created us since and even before conception, as well as plants, and other living creatures.

Bodies are fluid-filled fluid fields, which is why I also appreciate Bayo’s image of the body as a “raft”. It evokes a fluid structure adjusting to and in constant relationship with what holds, moves, and breathes it.

But I also see the cracks in a “raft”, the wounds, and how they condition who we are. Bayo invites us to stay in the personal and societal "cracks”, in what he calls “the fault lines”, “the failures”, not to fix them as if they were illnesses or problems that require solutions but as gestating loci of many possibilities.

Biodynamic craniosacral practitioners orient towards Health and ease, not disease. So we do not focus on what is wounded but instead hold the whole. We invite our clients to find and connect with their sense of well-being, of 'okayness' wherever it may be in their bodies, and/or to what helps them feel well or at least okay in their lives so that what is wounded, tightly contained in tissues or fluids can be held from a place of resourced relatedness. This expansive permissive facilitating allows whatever wishes to arise from these 'cracks' and can safely welcome grief or any other emotion. With time, our perception and relationship with our wounds can evolve from a place of "what is wrong with me?" to a more spacious and comfortable understanding and embracing of the whole of who we are. What lies beneath or is entangled with trauma is our blueprint (Anna Chitty). Our wounds become portals to our essence.

Bayo Akomolafe, a self-confessed “recovering psychotherapist” calls out on a tendency in the therapeutic world to pathologise trauma, the most frequently-used word of the last decade apparently. He wonders whether this negative emphasis on trauma actually reflects the formatting of a reductionist neoliberal system: 'we will make sure your trauma does not get in the way of your performance within the dominant paradigm.'

Our clients understandably wish to 'unburden' themselves of what has often crippled their lives and scarred them emotionally and physiologically. So it is tempting as a practitioner to wish to fix the consequences of trauma and offer coping strategies. Without "dismissing pain or suffering", Bayo invites us to "stay with the trouble of what has been lost in how we think about trauma."

As a craniosacral therapist, I cannot fix your trauma and make it disappear. I consider the crises of trauma as they are held in your tissues and fluids as yet another expression of your body's wisdom.

We stand at many crossroads during a craniosacral session, and our perception of our edges, our liminalities keeps shifting. This chimes with Bayo’s “We ought to cultivate bewilderment” as a practice to meet crises and envisage a different “cartography” in a deeply troubled world.

As our perception and relationship with our bodies and all their stories change, we enter many portals and become closer to the forces that made us possible, what I called earlier our blueprint or essence. This progressive freeing reveals that our wounds can birth many potentialities and that we are much more than our traumas.

Perceived as tricksters or portals, our wounds lead us on a journey of self-discovery that deepens our connection with ourselves and the world around us. I see and feel your body orient differently to your surroundings and drop further into its original home through postural adjustments, facial expressions, kinaesthetic interoception, and the dynamics in the relational field.

This ripples out to our families and communities in the broadest possible sense as this process does not begin and end with one’s body or the clinical setting. Our everyday, with or without our awareness, is touched and moved by so many knowns and unknowns. I notice that the rhythmic whistle of a nearby Dunnock has gently rocked this writing session and no doubt set its flow, its tempo. But what about the temperature and degree of humidity in the air, the amount of invisible microbes ‘partying’ in and around me, the podcast I listened to earlier, the news, the texts, the emails, the people, plants and other animals I met or who met me …

Our bodies live in broad communities of being and mutual exchange we often arbitrarily shrink to fit into a reductionist narrative.

Indigenous traditions look at the Health (seen as a force of organisation and integration) of the whole ‘village’ when approaching an individual’s disease. An illness is the embodied manifestation of a wider ‘malaise’ or the physical sign of an overall imbalance in the community(See Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, Martin Prechtel, 1998).

Bayo mentions that when someone “hears voices” in a Yoruba village in Nigeria the local medicine person asks ‘what are the ancestors saying?’ In a western psychiatric setting, this person would probably be clinically labelled, institutionalised, and prescribed pills.

As Bayo suggests in many of his writings and talks, our modern western world has enslaved us into the same uniformising ‘monocultural’ system mired in crises of its own making. So one way back to Health, to the natural expression of our wild selves is to fail to respond to these systemic disabling demands and re-engage in the whole spectrum of life differently. Surrender to the cracks that arise when we stop cooperating with what conforms and confines us by “bending the paradigms of scarcity”(Bayo Akomolafe), by “staying with the trouble” (Donna Haraway), by following “wander lines” or “lignes d’erre” (Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean, and other texts).

I started this piece by positing that BCST is a ‘wandering line’. The image speaks for itself but I wish to clarify where this phrase comes from. Fernand Deligny, a visionary, worked with children with autism and other forms of what would be seen nowadays as neurodivergence in Les Cévennes in the South of France, from the sixties onward, at a time when such children were locked in psychiatric hospitals or delinquency centres and deeply medicalised. Instead of pathologising their difference, he let them express themselves freely and drew maps of their ways of moving, what he called their ’wander lines’, their wandering gestures.

Deligny saw himself as a spider weaving her web (hence the title the Arachnean for his book). Through this “network as a mode of being”, Deligny and his team followed, traced and filmed the children’s movements in the forests and mountains of les Cévennes “making rudimentary line drawings to indicate their direction of movement across the rural encampment and the surrounding wilderness.”

These drawings became the centrepiece of research that witnessed and diligently recorded the children's wanderings as a pre-verbal process unfolding itself.

While patterns repeatedly appeared Deligny noticed that the trajectories seemed to match a network of underground waterways. Other words he used for these lines of errance were vaguer (wave as a verb) rooted in the French word vague or wave, and can be translated as drifting, flowing.

Could these maps be seen as cartographies of the children's fluid Intelligence?

I first heard of this fascinating research through Bayo Akomolafe. He used this process of staying with and recording relationships between bodies and their surroundings to illustrate the rich potentiality of ‘cracks’, the ‘failures’ previously mentioned.

Which brings me to this enquiry: in what ways can BCST become even more of a ‘wandering line’ away from the dominant paradigm?

As this body of work is itself deeply rooted in indigenous wisdom and medicine I feel we hold a responsibility as practitioners towards the 'village' at large.

How can I root this modality more explicitly within the wider ecological community? How can I include this awareness as part of the relational field within my sessions?

I feel called to more consciously and verbally engage my clients with this vaster field of awareness. I’m not alone. Some of us bring stones and plants that participate in their holding process. Others make offerings, ceremonies in relationship to the land and the living…but do we tell our clients about them?

So how about offering a different perceptive lens within the client-practitioner relationship? I have often invited the nearby forest, river, or ocean to assist me in my holding. I have often encouraged my clients to include their favourite tree, flower, or animal within the field.

Animals and plants have spontaneously emerged in my clients’ bodies within sessions and I have very much welcomed them.

I have long felt it was incumbent on me as a space holder and facilitator of Health in people’s organisms, to share my sense of wonder and awe for our body and its mysterious complexities. However, as our human forms are themselves portals to a much wider world and are, as Bayo says, “tentacular” in their interdependent webs of belonging and behaving, healing must include our multidimensional relationships within this vaster ecological context.

For millennia, our ailments and traumas, our ‘inner turmoils’ befriended plants, animals, bacteria, fungi to cooperate, associate, transform and seek, test pathways through crises.

I have just qualified as a community herbalist and wish to bring BCST out in the wild to encourage people to honour their bodies within the body of the land, allowing and celebrating what Irish philosopher John Moriarty called "commonage consciousness" to naturally arise; what made us all, the living on Earth, possible. Our wounded selves reclaiming a lost intimacy with the wild, we can weave ourselves back into the fabric of life.

As Merlin Sheldrake says in Entangled Life, “In difficult times, organisms find new symbiotic relationships in order to expand their reach. Crisis is the crucible of new relationships.”

We always place freedom within a very strictly human container in our discourses, don't we? Our freedom of expression is inscribed in social, economic, cultural, and political confines that limit them.

Yet the chaotic collapsing of much vaster, borderless ecologies forces us to revisit the biodynamics of freedom, to re-introduce them within the world of interdependent domains, from the micro to the macro, thus ushering us back into Earth's super organism.

Our consciousness hasn't yet caught up with the liberating force of this massive ecological transformation. But what most of us currently, and understandably, only perceive as a formidable force of destruction born of human excessive extractive hubris is also an invitation to dig deeper and build a way out of the walls with which we fenced ourselves.

Wandering away from these confines we can envisage freedom as a constantly creative ecological entanglement.

Freedom can then morph into action and container at the same time as it turns into its own becoming, in constant relationship with the wild alive.

This nesting engages us toward a deep time memory recall of our original cohesive participation within the greater metabolic cycles of biosphere Earth.

Freedom of expression has traditionally been associated with words like democracy, which means, etymologically at least, 'people power’.

But climate breakdown invites us to step outside worlds and words centring on and defined solely by people. It calls for new words but first and foremost a new orientation around the axis of our primary life matrix, the land, and all that it has animated for eons.

Our bodies show us the way of the wild. A biodynamic craniosacral practitioner constantly returns to this embryological axis of formation or midline, the energetic signature left by our primal streak and notochord which have appeared by the third week of our lives as vital furrows of implantation for our future spine to grow.

Our cells differentiate to the tune of metabolic fields around this organising midline, moved by the same life Intelligence that breathes the land.

We need to turn the incarcerated freedom our social constructs delineated into a fully incarnated one in related enmeshment with all that is animated on earth.

We must liberate freedom to magnify the 'champ des possibles', or field of possibilities.

The kind I enter when I listen to Sam Lee sing with Nightingales. Our bodies are these constant creative symbioses, these vital mutual associations with the wild.

We could not survive without the overwhelming presence of bacteria, and other microbes communicating with our human cells.

"Our bodies are tentacular," says philosopher Bayo Akomolafe.

This notion of interwoven co-creation with other lives is not a 'hippie' dream. This intraspecies song is an every-second-of-everyday occurrence that our consciousness forgot under the disorienting influences of our modern capitalist reductionist frameworks.

Irish philosopher John Moriarty coined this reorientation, this remembering “Slí na Firinne", or the Way of Truth in Irish.

Moriarty recurrently refers to how our dualistic view of life has formatted a consciousness that has socially and culturally shackled us into "Cartesian captivity" (after 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes).

It is sadly dispiriting to ponder that by considering all matter as inanimate after the likes of René Descartes and Francis Bacon 'enlightened' us, we effectively turned the lights off all that actually interweaves, supports, and welcomes us within the wider, wilder tapestry of the natural world.

Yet we have also always intuited that this was not true. Every preschool child knows that all that surrounds them is animated, and characters like Bran (Game of Thrones), Harry Potter, and so-called fantasy stories like Narnia or the Lord of the Rings narrate

this childlike perception to adults longing to remember its truth.

In fact, these therianthropic immersive tales singing our capacity for polymorphic shapeshifting and associations are how myths and lore have always told us what science keeps confirming: we are much more than human!

I perceive Slí na Firinne, in our past, present, and future, as deconstructing the human conditioning, de-inhabiting the human-only, de-centring anthropos (human in Greek):

"Being human is a habit. It can be broken..." says Moriarty in Invoking Ireland

"How can we sing our song in a strange land?" he asks in Dreamtime.

Listening to our bodies as the portals of incommensurable perception they are, we can "empty our mind and allow the universe to see through our eyes." (Arkan Lushwalla, Deer and Thunder)

We carry this earth's memory of our evolutionary shapeshifting from minerals, prokaryotes, eukaryotes to plants and animals with us as embryos. There lies our primal terrestrial blueprint.

We have always been immersed in the intermingling multiform. Just like our cellular memory is imprinted within our grandmothers' womb surrounds so we are shaped and spiritually charged with deep time Earth Intelligence, the womb of Life, since the first spark, the first signs of chemistry, of universal love-in-the-making.

Our mind itself could be seen as an extension of Earth's mind or "Eairth's mind" as ecophilosopher David Abram chants in Becoming Animal.

We actually can reclaim so much of our lost humanity by tuning out of our comforting, sleep-inducing modern routines and into the wild alive earth matrix.

We created myths as our own projections of what's possible, as thresholds to the mysterious and numinous. The land of Ireland is filled with these ‘otherworldly’ passages, caves, and gateways (Listen to the Land Speak, Manchán Magan).

Ultimately, these creative ‘projections’ are outward expressions of our inner land, what's always been dancing and forming us because the embryo is a polymorphic god in the making, the Intelligence of the wild made flesh.

There is very little difference between the constituents of plant and human cells. But the distinctive plant partner, the chloroplast is what we lack to enable us to directly transform sun energy into food.

However, like us, plants are in relationship and associate with other species and elements for a living: with wind, water, and pollinators, with fungi and bacteria, with the arcana of subsoil life, a kind of placenta to their embryonic seeds in constant emergence and convergence.

These ecological crises bestow upon us the responsibility to once again become ingenious commensals cooperatively, respectfully creating with the rest of Earth's wild creatures.

My experience as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist and herbal medicine student keeps whispering to me: the embryonic forces still expressing and co-creating us are earth's living templates for us to follow. We don't need to search far and wide for solutions, our and other creatures' organisms are the models we've been looking for, if only we could really slow down, deeply listen, and perceive differently, with the sensitivity of earth-centred lenses.

But to do this as John Moriarty invites, we need to re-ignite our "bush soul".

Story-teller Martin Shaw referred to Moriarty's words in a recent chat with comedian Tommy Tiernan: “… many aboriginal cultures would believe that an enormous part of our soul dwelt outside your body. It wasn’t contained in this strange little neurotic interior that I tend to associate with soul. That’s why you’d go out on a hill for four days and nights. You’d go out to bump into weather patterns, you’d go to find a bigger world.”

Now lies an opportunity to find ourselves again in the bigger world, the more-than-human terrestrial matrix, Slí na Firinne.

Have you ever felt you were?

I was unplanned, a ‘surprise’, an unwanted gift. Both my parents were studying at the time and I could not have come at a more potent yet uncertain time. I feel I wished to incarnate, not as a whirlwind tumbling into the world of flesh but as a determined sentience invited to the conception dance hall.

I really like how Dutch embryologist Jaap van der Wal tells the story of the pre-conception circle of life dance between egg and sperm. Swinging sperm swarm around the egg wagging their tail in unison until their constant movement entrains the egg to spin on itself like a wheel or like our planet (in my version). During this entrancing courtship, the egg selects one sperm and a dialogue ensues that will prepare this singled-out sperm to be introduced to a more welcoming egg.

Like plant medicine man and author Stephen Harrod Buhner, van der Wal talks of what is coarsely called the “penetration” of the egg by the sperm (a patriarchal tale of conquest and victory in the dominant medical paradigm) as a “pollination”, where both parties attract each other, intimately bind and eventually fuse, merging into one. A convergence and emergence.

I reflect on this little talked-about time of our lives because the more I listen and read about the embryo the more I am fascinated. The pre and perinatal field of research arose relatively recently. What the likes of Ray Castellino, Anna Chitty, Matthew Appleton, William Emerson, Cherionna Menzam Sills, Kate White, Mia Kalef, and many others have written about and taught for many years has become more visible thanks to books, articles, podcasts, and conferences pointing our attention to this wondrous yet mysterious spacetime.

The very first prenatal sciences global congress took place last October and had no less than 126 international speakers.

The chief premise of pre and perinatal work is that adverse circumstances and incidents (loss, separation, accidents, illnesses, chemicals or drugs intake, wars, wildfires, floods…) before and during our conception, at implantation, discovery (when a mother finds out she is pregnant) and during our intrauterine growth leave ‘imprints’ (affects that impact and skew the forces of organisation) in our fluids and tissues, adding a certain signature to how we relate, how we metabolise (digest, transform) emotionally and physiologically, how we behave sociologically, culturally, economically…

These patterns can enhance or deplete our lives. They can often prevent us from being the more fully conscious and potent presences we could be. They also flavour and co-create a developmental mix, an entanglement that can be reaped and harvested as we become aware of the threading of this web, and can comfortably spin in and out of it.

In my personal pre-conception and conception scenario, both father and mother are young healthy students, living in a council flat, struggling to make ends meet. Father chain-smokes while he studies for his final medical exams and mother is understandably stressed and worried. I sense her isolated, distraught, and resentful at the lack of support from her father and her future in-laws.

My parents married hurriedly to make things right soon after the famous May 68 student and union marches and strikes had plowed France’s social, cultural, and political ground and attempted to sow something radically new, different, some said utopian. What an ebullient cauldron to have fallen into!

Voilà just some of the tangled threads that spun the web of who I am: a lot of potential affects there that would impress their ‘meaning’ onto a conceptus and a growing embryo.

I have compassionately and challengingly revisited this part of my journey thanks to Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), pioneer Ray Castellino’s Womb Surround Process, and workshops with Castellino-trained Pre and Perinatal authors, teachers, and practitioners Cherionna Menzam Sills, Kate White, and Mia Kalef.

But I know this exploration has just begun. Kate says that “Ray spoke of a minimum of 10 years” to integrate the ‘territory’ of pre and perinatal imprints.

This personal process work also helps to keep strong boundaries and maintain a more powerfully anchored hold in my BCST practice as new clients and their stories challenge me to meet my yet unnoticed ‘memories’ or imprinted layers.

The fact that I am able to witness very difficult, sometimes profoundly harrowing stories does not mean they do not affect me. I have learned to differentiate and stay grounded within the clinical spatial boundaries but I also know that I must tend to the imprinted material sparked during certain sessions.

My ‘inner embryo’ can still activate unspoken memories because each time I am about to attend a pre and perinatal course my body goes into a form of dissociative shutdown where my energy levels suddenly drop and I can barely function. I have to pause, kindly listen and palpate, learn to enter into compassionate dialogue with these very early layers. I write, cook, clean …and walk too. My adaptive sequences (my go-to coping mechanisms or resourcing processes) unroll.

Eventually, during the first session of said workshops, usually covering pre-conception and conception, my body comes gradually back online and I feel present and vital again.

My initial reaction was so strong I thought I was ill and luckily was able to talk it out with a colleague, a friend, and my supervisor. The next occasions were more ‘manageable’ because I knew the tell-tale signs and was able to ‘walk’ myself through them, discerning between the adult present-time ‘me’ and the memories.

Each time I became more conscious of the ‘grammar’ of my prenatal, nonverbal affective language orchestrated chiefly by my autonomic nervous system—simply put, the part of us that metabolises, breathes, sleeps, and pulses our hearts and blood…all the ‘amazing and mysterious stuff’ that keep us going while we direct our attention elsewhere. As the word ‘autonomic’ signals, we do not control this part of our nervous system.

Hence once my activating sequence had begun, there was precious nothing I could do except allow the impacts of these non-integrated ‘memories’ to run through me with as much detached awareness as I could muster. I learned and am still learning to apply the biodynamic craniosacral holding skills to my embryonic and fetal self.

As Kate White repeated during her recent Our Birth Journey course, Prenatal and perinatal healing happens in layers, “the ANS is the map, the first map of fluency” to which we first need to apprentice ourselves. What is “home away from home? Where do you go first when you feel unsafe?” She asks.

Are you a fight/flight kind of person or do you shut down and freeze, numb as a protective mechanism in the face of what you perceive as a danger? Do you go into a “limbic spin”, “agitated, buzzy, prickly, chaotic”? What do you notice within yourself as these states unfold?

Imprints are what Peter Levine calls "implicit memories" , “hot and powerfully compelling memories” that arise spontaneously. Another way Kate frames it is by inviting us to ask this potent question when, for example, our reaction is unusually defensive, edging towards overwhelm, “Am I living in a memory, or am I really present?”

"Pre and perinatal work is like archeology, digging and finding what’s under the layers”, track and recognise, “identify what happens in each layer,” she adds.

Atacama desert, Chile. Photo courtesy of Adrien Rieu

These many conditioning layers can powerfully inscribe embryonic development because embryos and fetuses perform their own creation 24/7 in relationship with their placenta and their mother’s “surround”: all that happens to and around her.

The resulting patterns of behaviour can rule our lives unless we wake them to our awareness.

What dynamics emerged in your "surround" before and at conception, implantation, discovery, and during the remainder of the pregnancy? What was birth like? How did this radically new environment welcome and care for you as you landed?

Kate says that separation at birth is a major affect for newborns. There are many others that I will not list here as each incident and event bear multifaceted ‘personalities’ and impact differently on each individual.

Conditioning circumstances continue to shape us throughout our lives but such early imprints affect the ways in which we greet life and meet adversity.

My ongoing personal process has certainly validated the crucial importance of this archeological work. Early imprints DO orient our lives in ways that range from truly beautiful to quite tragic.

This fantastically rich yet little-known field (I know of only one PPN practitioner in Ireland for example) challenges the bounds of our mainly rational understanding of memory and remembering. Pre and perinatal journeying reveals our somatic memory, the meaning of our gestures, our inner tremors and the rhythm of our oscillations, our whole body sensory syntax just as we were when our fully sentient embryos creatively unfurled themselves.

In a world overly led by the brain, in which the limited world of words prevails over the infinite expressiveness of sounds, smells, tastes, and movements, this style of remembering is a radically different exploration of an incommensurably rich in potential yet barely known territory.

How could the time when we became form not be the most compelling experience of our lives? When our “blueprint” —a term used by Polarity therapy founder Randolph Stone, Jim Jealous DO, Ray Castellino, Anna Chitty, and many others in the holistic field to mean the inherently benevolent organising force that unravels its signature within us at every level of our being— combines with other influences we can call imprints, to birth who we are.

The primary orientation around our midline that I can feel during a biodynamic craniosacral session is the expression of this embryonic organisational force, the Health blueprint. It keeps breathing through us and throughout Earth. We performatively participate in the symphony of the living through this intermingling matrix.

One could argue that our ancestral healing begins there, before and at the threshold of conception, when this non-material con-fusion with Earth’s and other universal dynamics pulls or pushes us to take form. What are the forces and presences at play as we opt for a material life in the flesh?

A Womb Surround can answer such questions or offer insight primarily from and with the body through postures, gestures, sounds, motions, and emotions. Words are secondary. Similarly, the verb merely interprets or introduces the soma in biodynamic craniosacral sessions.

As a practitioner or a recipient of BCST, I notice the expression of what breathes through layers of embodiment, moving laterally or longitudinally between metabolic fields as if to review restrictively held patterns and slowly, gradually negotiate a potent unwinding release and reorganising process.

Ultimately I know that I wish to further explore the embryo in me because of a longing to come ever closer to this divine association of spirit with flesh in constant relationship with billions of other life forms. Maybe a “divine home sickness” (William Emerson) moves this life quest of mine.

But beyond what personally animates this search, the embryo’s teachings matter more than ever because they tell us about our participation with the “surround”. They inform our relationships as a holobiont (an assemblage of a host and the multitude of other species living in or around it) on Mother and Lover Earth.

The questions the embryo asks of us constantly are not only what nourishes you, what nurtures you but also how? How do I relate with other species, with the land that I extend from? Do I act from an extractive, exploitative imprint, or from an embracing, humble, curious, eager-to-learn, and welcoming of the different, blueprint?

I realise that I am simplifying what is fundamentally quite complex but the dominant layers of expression of our modern western lifestyles are completely at odds with aboriginal ways of embodying and singing the land for example, in their exquisite tradition of Dreamtime.

Photo courtesy of Adrien Rieu

Interestingly Kate White says, “One of the ways that I think about imprints is: if you can drain the charge that’s driving the imprint, the world view, the outlook, the perception … and that person has the power to choose as opposed to being driven by something unconsciously, then these early challenges can become gifts, or works of art, something that can give us a je ne sais quoi that makes us who we are here on planet Earth.”

Following on from all this I see pre and perinatal work as a breaking of bonds with an enslaving dominant paradigm (centred on extraction, perpetual profitable growth, and consumerism) to return to the land, to the songs of the wild that nourish me as I sing them. I know that this is the blueprint I am digging for.

I began this blog post over a month ago at the threshold of Samhain, a potent passage in the medicinal and ritualistic Celtic wheel when the veil between the world of spirits and the world of flesh is at its thinnest, when seeds return to soil, when leaves fall to decay and create another layer of humus, a time of endings and openings allowing us to honour and make contact with our ancestors, with the power of conception and gestation in its inception. What came before as a question and contemplation, a grounding.

I finish writing as we approach the Winter Solstice, a time of darkness into light and light in the darkness, a precursor of new growth, new gestures, new layerings, and embodiments.

In between these cyclical seasonal portals I was ill twice: affecting first my gut then my lungs, heart, breath and sinuses. On both occasions I connected more deeply with my formattive layers, and with a terribly heavy heaving grief that owns me, that has taken hold of me and mingles with my own as yet unexpressed profound sadness.

As we return to our ancestors our somatic remembering weaves us within the wild incarnations of a universal embryonic force that keeps calling us, inviting us to participate more consciously and harmoniously in its creativity.

Beneath our tangled thoughts lies the poetry of what mystics call divine truth, which could be another word for health, but also for blueprint. There lies the heartful Joy, the Ecstasy Sufis spin and that reignited me when she last danced me as I last danced it.

NB: I welcome words and logos, reason and the reasoning mind but they, like us, must associate with other forms of expression in order to speak the whole.

Ushuaïa, photo courtesy of Adrien Rieu

My body remembers being held wholly under the sacrum and the brainstem in a way it craved to be held, in a way it had never been held before under the circumstances that pervaded the field at the time.

The fourth biodynamic craniosacral session at the end of a three-day workshop at the Elmfield Institute broke me open. It laid me down truly at the feet of surrender, grief; to release the final waves of shock still in my tissues. These ripples resonated with my birth trauma and sorrow that felt buried deep in my inner well sprung out like a blessing, like an “aaaaah at last I am set free”!

Three days before, I was steadily driving on the motorway, elated after a few days of foraging, walking, and swimming in the gorgeous wilds of Donegal, in the North West of Ireland, when someone bashed into the side of my camper van. I saw her in my rearview mirror and panic set within me as she was clearly ‘aiming’ for me. My fight or flight response soared into full throttle, my eyes went from the metallic fence in the middle of the road to her fast-approaching, menacing car. When the shock took place, the van and I rattled, but I was relieved I could continue to drive, I did not crash in the middle fence and kept stern at the ‘helm’ of my ship until I pulled to the side of the road.

Every part of me was like jelly when I got out to talk to the other driver. I was a fascial mass uncontrollably shaking, livid and senseless. My first question was “how could you not see me?” but I did not get a chance to even ask as she promptly and forcefully accused me of hitting her. I could feel my legs going from under me when I heard my inner wild animal roar back at her. She did not back down, she kept to her story so I took a picture of her registration plate and left.

I was due to meet a friend that afternoon and we reported the whole thing to the police, who were kind and helpful. Both contributed to settling down my nerves, and luckily the following day I was in the biodynamic craniosacral container, generously held by Jane Shaw and my colleagues.

It took the whole three days for me to feel myself again, although I had to hold the part of me scared of going back out on the road; who restlessly and somewhat irrationally wondered: “What if I meet her again?”

My body remembers that hold still. The words ‘vessel of my body’ came to mind as I laid between Erica McKeen’s skilled hands and strong anchored presence. I recall another powerful hold: her hand gently above and below my sternum where my heart could open wide again, where my blood could flow with more ease, where my breath could fill my lungs and belly.

(Image courtesy of CSTA, Craniosacral Therapy Association)

I was back within this holy “vessel” and I felt such grateful relief at this falling down, this trusting in the holds mapping my way home. I could truly lean back, let go, travel more deeply to release, and eventually drop into a beautiful dynamic stillness.

I know that the other three sessions I received prepared me for this one. I am also aware that the circumstances created this particular container and presided over the way I reacted to these particular holds. The secret key was that Erica knew to pick them intuitively. And they actually felt like her own holds, they were unique to her in the way that she used them and embodied them. And it was not just her hands that held me, her whole compassionate presence wrapped itself around me. We were both in that concomitant ‘bubble’ or biosphere surrounding our two personal 'bubbles', in awe and in beauty. It was a spiritual experience too. I knew then that I wanted to write about one of the most exquisite parts of our practice: the way we hold.

For in that healing communion, in this common biosphere, something much more potent than the both of us held us. As Michael Shea puts it when he refers to Dr James Jealous’ teachings, “we are accessing the forces of creation as they were at the time of our origin as an embryo”.

A few weeks later I attended a workshop hosted by ehealthlearning (https://ehealthliving.org/courses/rules-vascular-tree/)

and led by Michael Shea, a renowned and revered figure in our field. I had long wished to attend one of his workshops but the subject was particularly apt at the time: The Rules of the Vascular Tree, our blood system seen as a tree of life rooted in the cosmic origins of existence.

Each class featured a long demonstration with Michael’s wife who had just had a hip operation and generously gave of her time and body. I became fascinated by the originality and specificity of Michael’s holds. This added much fodder to my exploration, and I decided to ask Michael as well as other BCST practitioners some questions about the importance and role of holds but also the evolution of their relationship with holds over time.

Those of you familiar with my blog posts know that it is not the first time I glean views and experiences from different perspectives in our biodynamic craniosacral field. Well, once again I sat in wonder at the diversity of responses to my questions, reflecting the width and richness of our holding.

Michael Shea has evolved constantly during his 40 years career. He explains that “In many ways the moment I became familiar with the various protocols I was learning from numerous teachers early in my career, mainly osteopaths, I came to realize that my hands could be more effective if I tried placing them somewhere different based on my own instincts and mindfulness of the moment in the therapeutic encounter. That gradually evolved into creating a network of teachers mainly in Europe and discussing the evolution of handholds.”

This evolution ran parallel with the needs of his clients over time. At present, Michael concentrates on what Covid showed up in the field: a prevalence of illnesses connected to the breakdown of our metabolism, itself I’d add, a reflection of the ecological collapse, the seriously disrupted collective metabolism of Earth. He quotes some staggering figures: “88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and 80% of Americans have an unhealthy heart.”

I appreciate how Michael’s exploration is this sophisticated and candid dance between the macro and the micro, between what is happening in the wider field and his personal life experiences. His practice has always encompassed spiritual elements from ancient traditions. He mentions being inspired by and applying the teachings of Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine also for the last 40 years but his focus on the cardiovascular system came a bit later when he met the Dalai Lama in 2004, at a very difficult time in his life, soon after his mother died: “I went to see him and it was life-changing as I felt his presence and his mind love me in a way that only a mother could do and I began following his teachings and going through various levels of initiation with him. He encouraged his students to develop “Centers for the Study of the Human Heart.” So, that's what I did. I switched my teaching and practice towards the application of biodynamic cranial sacral therapy to the cardiovascular system.”

Each individual is met on a personal and collective level thanks to this allowing and wide open ‘container’, the qualities of a holding that is aware and self-exploratory as well as anchored in an ancient now, the now of geological, deep time formation, which is also a future 'now', pregnant with infinite possibility.

(Image courtesy of CSTA)

Michael reminded us of what cranial osteopath Dr James Jealous called the “original matrix”, the return to an “Originality” we were gifted with at conception through the craniosacral holding. What we were witnessing in his class was this skilled and effortless integration of different ‘memories’, different ‘rememberings’ of past traditions, a recalling of origins in terms of primordial medicinal and spiritual practices: “When I create new handholds especially in the past several years it has to do with my career-long 40 years of study of Tibetan medicine which I am now involved with more frequently. (...) For me, it's easy to integrate the five elements as Dr. Jealous clearly alluded to them and it provides a bridge into the body's metabolism that formerly I had no access to.”

He talks with fascination about his favourite handhold: “I love the subclavian artery because of its support for the heart and breathing and stabilizing physiological changes between the heart and brain.”

I borrowed some of his holds and found them very useful indeed; particularly the three fingers lightly placed above and below the umbilicus. This personal selection also resulted from a dance between the personal, the relational, and the collective. I am often ‘called’ by this area because of my pre and peri-natal stories but I also ‘know’ to apply it intuitively when it ‘feels’ appropriate, and I have noticed from my eight years of experience with a wide range of clients that it is often a powerful centre of organisation or of inertia. Even without any practice or BCST training, it makes sense that the very portal of connection between us and the placenta, this nourishing, protecting metabolic ‘body extension’ for nine months, would be a potent receptacle and conveyor of imprints and affects.

So what is a hold? Why is it so important in our practice?

Teacher and BCST Scott Zamurut replies, “ In simple terms a hold is the manner in which we practice Biodynamics by making physical contact with our client, without applying force to their system, to perceive the activity of the Breath of Life unfolding the Inherent Healing Process.

In less simple terms a hold is a hand contact with the body physiology of our client used to perceive the interaction of the BoL, expressed as Primary Respiration (aka. The Tide), with their body physiology- the tissues and fluids within the skin, and the on-going physiological processes of life within the body.”

It is also “a perceptual platform for the various energies operating as part of life processes- the activity of the blueprint pattern energy, the movement of Chi within Meridians, the activity of the Chakra System, and so forth.”

You will have noticed not only the reference to other traditions there as well but also how our hands, and much more than our hands, hold much more than what they actually touch.

There is a distinction to be made between making light contact with the “anatomicophysiology” (Scott Zamurut's term) of the body through our hands and actually holding, bringing presence, perceptive acuity, spaciousness and still grounding to what turns touch into a hold.

And here is an interesting debate around one particularly 'famous' hold in the world of BCST.: the vault hold, “in which our hands," explains Scott, "are placed on a client’s cranium to perceive the layers of anatomy and activity present within their head: the CSF[Cerebrospinal fluid], the neural tube, the reciprocal tension membranes, and the osseous structures. That our hands can generally contact each of the protective bones around the brain can be seen as an indicator of the inherent appropriateness of our healing art.”

As Scott hints at through the use of ‘generally’, this is not always the case as it very much depends on the size of one’s hands. Fellow BCST and teacher Margaret Rosenau writes: “ My hands are small. Though I know and can teach the vault hold, I can't demonstrate it or maintain it comfortably on most heads. When I was a student this made me feel like I "couldn't do it" -- and apparently part of me still feels that way! I know that my experience as a student is not unusual, in that learning the "right" way to do something bumps us into the worry or experience of doing it "wrong". This can happen in so many aspects of our work, not just holds, and it is part of what we navigate as practitioners, our unique dance between doubt and knowing. I want my students and clients to spend as much time in their knowing as possible, and to support that I need to be in my knowing as well. If the hold is making me unsure or taking too much of my focus, I change it. Comfort and knowing are bigger priorities for me than the specific hold. “

There are quite a number of interesting points in both Scott’s and Margaret’s contributions. There is fascination and awe and one can feel how he ‘owns’ this hold, how satisfyingly easy it is for him to ground and settle in this particular whole cranium encompassing holding. Margaret and many others like her (I have small hands too) could not settle comfortably into this hold and would either choose another one or change how ‘inadequate’ they felt around it. Comfort and knowing go hand in hand.

Indeed if we do not feel at ease with a hold, either through lack of self-confidence or are uncomfortable while holding because of the poor positioning of our body and the lack of support of our arms after holding for a certain length of time, our discomfort, aches, and the resulting poor presence will impact in many ways on the quality of the session. For example, we will act as centres of inertia or dis-ease around which our clients’ organisms will orient creating patterns, inertial fulcrums etc…

I remember one of my tutors Colin Perrow, who also had small hands, pressing this point to us many times as well as emphasising the possibility of using an alternative way to contact the bones of the cranium: Becker’s hold (the vault hold has long been associated with William Garner Sutherland, the founder of cranial osteopathy and is often called Sutherland’s hold)

(Image courtesy of CSTA)

I particularly like Becker’s hold (named after Dr Rollin Becker, another DO and a ‘disciple’ of Sutherland’s) because it connects with the sphenoid, the temporal, parietal and occipital bones, the mastoid process, and it will also ‘access’ the fourth ventricle, the CSF, the vagus nerve…, and through the many other bones, joints, organs, and tissues that these ‘parts’ are in contact with, we reach the whole cranium and the rest of the body.

I must add that we do, in any case, reach the whole through each hold because this is what biodynamics is about: an awareness of what is happening in each moment in relationship with the whole, so that we can perceive what our client’s organism wishes to show to us and seek support for.

Therefore there are no protocols in our practice, ie there are no pre-set series of holds one goes through in each session. Every biodynamic craniosacral treatment is different and it is the body itself as well as the particular relational container (and I’d argue collective container too) that decides the tone and nature of the holding and holds used.

Margaret’s concern around “Doing it ‘wrong’” sheds light on her reaction to my queries: "oh, I can't write on this. I don't do holds.”

But then she explained why she initially reacted this way: “Like you and all of us trained in this field, I learned holds and I teach holds to my students. But I don't rely on them and sometimes that feels like I don't "do" them. I teach my students to catch themselves if they are focusing too much on doing the hold right or being in the right location -- rather than the listening it facilitates. I believe HOW we place our hands is more important than WHERE we place them. Every contact is a window to the whole and the specifics. Our role as Biodynamic practitioners is to ever more skilfully maintain -- "hold" -- this dual awareness.

So her journey was between the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ of ‘doing holds’ and feeling into this holding, perceiving through holds. We’re going back to Scott’s “perceptive platform”.

Margaret adds: “what we do is hold space and how we do that matters.

And where we put our hands matters.”

So she too created holds that ‘fitted’ better or that appeared more ‘effective’ and easeful: “I have created new holds that I use more commonly than some of the ones I was taught in my original training. One of the places this is most true for me is with intraoral work. Several years ago, one of my students was very pregnant and couldn't lie on her back to receive intraoral work in class. In modifying the holds for her, my co-teacher Vanessa Lillie and I discovered that doing intraoral work from the side was much less intimidating and much more comfortable for the students. So now we teach how to approach the mouth when someone is supine and also when they are side-lying, and again emphasize comfort, ease, and quality of perception and support.”

Scott Zamurut uses the ‘window’ image too: “Physical contact affords a detailed window into the activity of our anatomicophysiology, a term coined by Rollin Becker, DO, to articulate the refinement of perception possible in relation to body physiology.”

For Michael Shea, the word “window” seems to mean a recording system as well a perceptive tool: “I originally called hand positions windows. And for many years created windows documents. And that's what hand positions and palpation are really about. They are simply a window and sometimes the window needs to be polished and cleaned and sometimes looking inside the window can be obtrusive and so we maintain an attunement with a wider universe or zone D as Jim Jealous called it”

In a paper entitled Rules of the Embryo - The Emergence of a Clinical Biodynamic Metabolic Model (2022) Michael explains what he means about this "attunement" that precedes 'palpation' and is crucial to establishing the ground for our perception. Other teachers may refer to tuning into our 'baseline'.

"Cycles of attunement" are "the movement of attention towards one’s hands and one’s own soma and the environment. Dr Jealous refers to this as moving attention through the Zones of Perception (A-D) until the Zones homogenize as a single unified continuum of self-knowing panoramic awareness. Zone A is from the center of the body to the skin, B is from the center of the body through the shared biosphere of client and therapist, C is from the center of the body through the office space and D is from the center of the body through the natural world outside the office extending to the horizon. This is evenly suspended attention free of conceptualizing about its meaning."

‘Palpation’ is an interesting word for Michael’s style of contact. During his demonstrations, he would indeed gently ‘press’ on an artery and even invite us to gently let our fingers follow its subtle rotation. It was quite mesmerising to witness and feel how my organism responded to this acuity of morphological perception and attention.

Another practitioner and teacher, Andrew Cook, views handholds as “starting points” and is not “a great fan of fancy holds for every occasion”.

Andrew also has a particular way of holding his fingers in a hold: “I quite like curling my fingers round into a loose fist so that the thenar eminences support the occiput and the backs of my fingers support the neck.”

There is a ritualistic side to the recurrence of some holds in our sessions that I resonate with when Andrew explains: “Cradling the sides of each knee in turn for a few seconds with both my hands seems to be a useful start in quite a few treatments.”

He adds, “Quite often I will work from the feet - particularly if there are large rotational off-body vectors round the head and upper body (rather than putting myself in the middle of them)”

I often begin at the feet as well, a place where I can sense the whole in a spacious manner, including the fluid field, the wider field in the room, and the natural world outside. I could easily stay there for most of the session some time and support change from this great wide open perceptive ‘window’.

BCST and teacher Tanya Desfontaines speaks in similar terms: “I think that although I have often felt that I could happily conduct an entire session from just one hold, e.g. the feet or sacrum, more usually I begin from a relatively neutral hold (often at the feet, sometimes the shoulders or a midline hold from the side of the table) I then allow myself to be led through the session according to whatever is revealed or how my client’s process unfolds. For most sessions, I would use 3 or 4 different holds.”

The importance of where and how we place our hands and fingers morphologically is very much at the heart of Michael’s touch/‘palpation’ and others’ too. I have noticed that on many occasions, the more anatomically correct my perceptive hand ‘window’, the more my client’s body relaxes and trusts the hold. This repeats in a different wording what was mentioned before: the more our hands are ‘knowing’ the more a body settles, goes deeper, and reorganises.

A client recently said she was “amazed” at how her body “trusted the hold” and let go to depths she would have previously found too “overpowering”.

So as I review what I have read from practitioners and how diverse their practice is I notice that precisely because our biodynamic craniosacral practice does not ‘do’ protocols’, it leaves room for much ‘innovation’ and creativity, allowing us to evolve and add from other traditions that resonate with our work.

I know that since I practise Tsa Lung Tibetan breathing I sometimes ‘see’ the breathing meridians around the midline of my clients for example. I have integrated this seamlessly as a perceptive tool or ‘window’ that adds rather than takes away.

The features in the room itself also play a part in our holding. When I went to receive a session with Tanya Desfontaines in gorgeous Dartington, (Devon, UK) last month, I also felt held by the beautiful stones with which she adorns her therapeutic space. Their powerful mineral presence was a great addition to the beautifully ‘knowing’ treatment I received.

Similarly, some of my clients have spoken their appreciation of all the plants that enliven my practice room, or of the birdsongs accompanying our sessions as I often leave the windows open.

About holds and the width of her perceptive holding, Tanya says, “For me, touch also constitutes an important aspect of the relationship between practitioner and client. The negotiation of a quality of touch which meets the tissues in an appropriate way can support a sense of safety, which in turn invites the nervous system to settle. Through the hands, it is possible to convey all manner of qualities such as acceptance, non-judgment, reassurance, gentleness and presence. The hands also make relationship with the tissues directly, bringing a grounded quality and giving information about the structures, local expression of primary respiration and healing processes. I literally have a sense of ‘earthing’ through my hands, feet and midline when I work, allowing bioelectric forces to move through both my own and my client’s body, like a lightning conductor bringing a charge to earth. My hands move from out of the wider field of my awareness and contact the client’s body from there, providing grounding as well as the relational qualities described above.”

She touches on another dimension about holds, "the gift of structure" which as we are non-manipulative helps clients to orient towards depth and "enhance the client’s awareness of their own body".

Tanya gives this useful example to illustrate her words: “I remember giving a demo in Prague, where I was teaching a post-graduate seminar on Trauma work. I was demonstrating with a participant, showing the negotiation of the relational field, and moving towards contact. I paused to listen for a settling in the field, and said something like, “his system knows that I won’t do anything until he is ready” and immediately felt the model’s system relax and the field start to settle, whereas previously there had been a level of hyperarousal and hyper vigilance observable in his body and palpable through my attunement. I could then approach the table and negotiate the physical contact.”

She brings up the ‘no’ we sometimes feel when holding clients and describes an interesting ‘way’ around it: “Working with a client who had a history of CSA [Central Sleep Apnea], I was drawn to work at her belly, which felt quite inertial, cold and blank. I asked if ok to bring my hands there and she said, ‘yes, fine’ but I felt a ’NO’ from her body, again through attunement of the relational field. I respected the NO and went instead to her shoulders, which felt ok for her and ok from her body. This client taught me that there can sometimes be this kind of mixed message, so I sometimes silently offer my hands to hold different places on a person’s body, picturing them in my mind’s eye and offering several options until I get a ‘YES’ from that Intelligence which guides the session.”

When working with babies and children, I sometimes ask where they’d like to be held before making contact and invariably they ‘know’ and point to a particular place.

Tanya resonates with this and adds: “I often find that babies and children are especially clear about where they want or don’t want the contact of my hands, they will sometimes place my hand on their body, or remove a hand or move away when they’ve had enough.”

Her final reflections wrap up well this exploration of holds:

“I think it’s great to begin with a repertoire of basic /generic holds - feet, shoulders, sacrum, midline holds, cranial vault holds, occipital cradle, side lying holds - getting comfortable with them, learning how to adapt them for different body shapes and sizes, how to optimise the comfort and postural support for both practitioner and client. And then to allow your hands to 'go where they want to go’ - in this way I often find myself working with some invented hold or combination of holds. It fascinates me how the autobiographical information held in particular areas of the body can be so specific, finely nuanced through multiple channels of perception ie. visual imagery, kinaesthetic felt-sense, auditory, emotional feeling tones, and how this changes through the course of a session and when listening from different hand holds, affording a different perspective of the detail within the whole."

We work "with all kinds of people" as Tanya says, and what greatly matters is that we trust and 'own' our holds intuitively so that the bodies we contact with our knowing hands, landing receptively and lightly like a "feather on the breath of God" (Michael Shea, 1997)

entrust the creative Intelligence within to do what it wishes to do with our support.

This trusting often unfurls when there is a meeting and a completion of what laid dormant behind the patterns.

Two personal 'stories' imprinted in my organism were 'hit' during the road accident: the failure/inability to be heard and the terror of a 'no way out' experienced in the birth canal. Both came through gradually, clearly through the four craniosacral sessions I received. This allowed me to meet them at a deeper level, to grieve and feel compassion towards them.

Trusting the holds returned me back to Health.

Deep gratitude for the time and the invaluable experience shared by Michael Shea, Scott Zamurut, Margaret Rosenau, Tanya Desfontaines, and Andrew Cook.

Here are their respective websites for more information:

https://www.sheaheart.com/ Michael Shea just published

The Biodynamics of the Immune System

https://www.scottzamurut.com/

https://www.schoolofinnerhealth.org/

https://fifthworldcranial.co.uk/

https://www.body-mind.co.uk/

Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance would support the latter, more dynamic view of memory as the enmeshment of fields nestled within other fields of presence/resonance (1988, 2nd edition 2011).

(Lilly pond, Sophie Rieu)

In my experience as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist, these stories arise within what BCS practitioner and teacher Scott Zamurut calls the ‘Embodiment Tide’, the unfurling of our primary respiration as it breathes throughout our organism, like the ebbing and flowing of oceanic tides. Stories emerge from the ground of our beings and from the fields supporting them. They can be resourcing or overwhelming, processed or raw. Our grounded and spacious therapeutic holding allows for a gentle apprehension of whatever wishes to be spoken verbally and non-verbally.

In many ways, a craniosacral session is a ceremony that switches on and unlocks what our organisms are willing and ready to sense in the field.

A ceremony that ritualises the remembrance of our ancestral memory as it expresses in our physiology and our biosphere/biofield.

The word ancestral comes from the Latin ‘ante’ which means ‘before’ and ‘cedere’ meaning ‘go’. Ancestral is what has gone before. I use it in its widest etymological scope to encompass our own past nestled within the past of our maternal and paternal lineages, nestled within our communities’ fields (where we have lived), nestled within our cultural and societal fields, nestled within our ecological fields: in this last broad commingling, I include all other species in all kingdoms of life but also all geological deep time beings such as rocks, rivers, mountains, sea…The nestling layers continue ad infinitum into the cosmos.

These are constantly interacting and intermingling within and around us to influence at varying degrees how we behave and process who we are at any given time. We are only conscious of a fraction of these innumerable factors, all kin, all family.

(Viper’s Bugloss, Sophie Rieu)

During a craniosacral session, we become more present with what is stored in our tissues and fluids. This ritual of coming into presence with the past unrolls in three parts: a relational introduction through verbal contact, a featherlight hands-on journey to process, settle and reorganise, and an after-chat to transition between the session and the ‘outside world’. In practice, this linear division is not so neatly cut and includes many subparts whose nature varies depending on each person, but it sets a container within which we can immerse safely.

From the standpoint of morphic resonance and BCST when someone comes into my clinic room, I do not just greet this one person but many other presences and influences within their whole biosphere.

With over eight years of experience, I consider BCST as an ancestral teacher set ever more deeply within my biofield. A major transformative force in my life, it has profoundly changed how I perceive. What my perception selects for me to sense and interpret through my grid of awareness has tremendously broadened both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Where I used to feel overwhelmed and tended towards numbing through dissociation, I (which is really ‘we’ if we are to apply what was written before) can now enjoy a more generous and grounded holding presence in social and therapeutic settings. This means we/I allow more to emerge to be met compassionately and with total acceptance. What often feels surprising to people experiencing BCST for the first time has become the norm. I notice the astounding manifestation of the numinous in each session I give and receive with more detachment and surrender, with awe and reverence, like yet another reason to bow lower to the mysterious languages of this ancient wisdom imbuing us all.

The borders of each being have shifted to include what’s invisible to the naked eyes; an abundant non-verbal conversation reveals itself endlessly as I, the non-doing practitioner have also learned to become more invisible; Mike Boxhalll’s ‘Empty chair' comes to mind (2012).

I noticed on my recent return to Auvergne in the heart of France, where I lived until I was 24, that I connected in a much deeper and broader way with the woodlands, the plants, the river and pond, my mother’s vegetable garden, the birds and wildlife, and my family than ever before. When I say ‘broader’, I mean my biosphere, or field of awareness or biofield, felt like it extended much further than previously experienced. Memories of my maternal grandfather emerged from his own nestling in his ancestral land: how he stood with the land beneath and around him. How he clearly sprung from her and was woven effortlessly within the weft and warp of her canvas.

(Pré l’étang, Auvergne, Sophie Rieu)

He was indigenous to his land. He spoke the local Patois (dialect) before learning to speak French and always greeted the wild sentient presence of the trees, birds, river, fishes, and plants… in his long letters before launching into family news.

I had never perceived my grandfather and grandmother quite this way. Through them, the land would have deeply moulded my mother and me too. Not only did I inhabit my grandmother’s womb as one of my mother’s eggs, but I also was brought up by my grandparents from very early on as both my parents were completing their university studies. My bodymind and biofield remember wonderfully nurturing bonds from these foundational times.

Each return to these ancestral lands is a healing journey that I weave back into the tapestry of my adopted ancestral land, Ireland, and vice versa. Indeed some of the reasons why I have extended my sentient tendrils spring from my deeper rooting in Ireland, the land of the Goddess Eriu, as I have gradually immersed myself more and more within her ancient lore, traditions, language, flora, and fauna, ritualising my presence in many different ways such as foraging, tracking, vision fasting in the wild, learning Gaeilge... and receiving/giving craniosacral sessions with my metaphoric and real windows more open to the sensory worlds outside my four walls.

(Magherabeag, Co Wicklow, Sophie Rieu)

All this is bouncing back and forth as clients have increasingly met ancestral stories in their organs and fascia: “I feel my father’s lineage in my liver,” “This terror does not belong to me. It goes back to my mother and grandmother”, “I call on my ancestors for guidance and resourcing”, “My mother is in my hips”… the list goes on.

This brings me to a beautiful truth spoken by author Bell Hooks: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

The word ‘communion’ is particularly apt here and such a wonderfully dynamic evocation of the healing process. As we bring many layers and enmeshed influences and presences into the therapeutic setting we learn to make peace with their restrictive conditioning while they are given space to mix and transform. In turn, we radiate this healing back into our communities.

Healing integration is this broader inclusion of all the parts that make up our living community, another beautiful word for biosphere. Healing is a ritual of peace-making with "all our relations" as the Native American indigenous prayer goes, all the seen and unseen, known and unknown, all kin, all family.

These acts of communion usher in a return to fuller participation in life, and a deeper rooting in the land we spring from. To move beyond the linear conventional borders of skin, time and space is to consider our ancestrality as an all-embracing partaking, a polyamourous intermingling between all that has gone before us and participated in who we are, but also that will continuously interweave into our ever-unfolding be-coming ( Akomolafe, 2017).

Form follows movement as the embryo teaches us (Van der Wal, 2007) and we are constantly processing, and performing this motion into form. We are portals of becoming thanks to the thresholds and echoes of the past.

Isn’t it liberating to think of ourselves as the voice of so many other non-human verbal and non-verbal expressions?! Beyond scientific borders, beyond the realm of the reductionist rationale, we are an amalgam of many unproven miracles of interconnection. In fact, all the images that attempt to represent to our cerebrum the systemic nature of our sentient belonging borrow from the non-human: a web, a nest, a mycelium…

We are hosts to millions of ancient microbes with whom we constantly interact and react in symbiotic exchanges (Margulis, 1997).

We result from the dynamic geological transmutations of ancestral elements that keep creating and shaping us. I recently heard of an artistic performance inviting participants to experience "the 1739 Stono slave rebellion through the voices of its beyond-human participants" including the water element (T Carlis Roberts). A participant spoke of how she "felt the connection with all the water, the water in the river at the place the rebels stopped to drum and dance (and wait? and celebrate?). All the same water. I connected with the generosity of this water that falls without restraint to the earth all the time".

(Sea vegetables, Sophie Rieu)

I often suggest to my clients to feel into their fluidity, surrender to the natural flow within them, and invoke joy-inspiring images of water from past memories. Whenever we shift into this elementality that permeates all existence something opens, unlocks, unfurls within us and in our lives because we are tapping into the wider tapestry of the continuity of the living, we are letting go to a de facto immersion. As we ritualise it through the container of a craniosacral session, the possibility of overwhelm in the face of such immensity subsides into dynamic stillness, what presided before the dawn of life. Wonder and awe revel in this infinitely potent whirlpool, and nothing else matters. Words are unnecessary, futile, cumbersome.

As part of my first year’s study in herbalism, we learned to feel with plants, to widen our perception so that we could consciously tune in and resonate with Elderflower, Nettle, Plantain, or Meadowsweet, and let them reach us and teach us in return. This non-verbal language between humans and the more than humans goes on regardless unbeknownst to our busy selves. Our physiology and emotionality are porous vessels of infinite affinities with innumerable other existences. But we can attune to restore our senses to this conscious Intelligence.

The days running up to the Summer Solstice and following it are imbued with very particular energetic fields as Earth fulfills herself at the zenith of her inhalation. My organism’s bubbles of potency are fired up. Our ‘sap of life’ resounds with élan, an irrepressible aliveness like a flower bursting to bloom forth.

This time of year is Earth's utmost expansion before she slowly exhales towards Winter Solstice. All of us co-inhabiting, commingling with her are held and participate in this inhalation, this communal filling up.

And more and more of us ritualise our greeting of these special times of her solar cycle.

Summer Solstice blessings to you dear kin!

(Pissenlits, Sophie Rieu)

so says Banquo to Macbeth as three witches appear in the mist on their way home from the battlefield.

I have heard us described as biospheres in craniosacral therapy classrooms; bubbles of earth’s life, dynamic transmutations of “the Breath of Life” as it manifests, as it takes form. There is magic and trickster energy in this life-creating process no doubt. Is this why we sometimes do not trust it and wish to tame and control it? Is this why living has become treacherous to so many in these uncertain times?

How can we return to its rocking cradle? How can we flow with its changeable, ever more tumultuous, and unpredictable waters?

Biodynamic craniosacral practice centers on the fluids in our organism because water, the great shapeshifter, bathes, invigorates, transforms, and moves all that is.

We come from liquid and it continually shapes us. The ocean birthed the first organisms. In our mother’s womb, our first home, we float, breathe and grow until waters break to shift us to air, also pregnant with H2O in its gaseous phase.

I listen to its music when I make contact with a living organism. Its dances fold and unfold our fascia. It conveys resonance and sound and like whales in the ocean communicate through echolocation, their chant audible across immense distances, our connective tissues talk to one another through blood, muscles, lymph, organs, and bones...

I welcome all the gurgling, bubbling and rumbling sounds I hear, and they do not always come from the gut digesting or expressing hunger. Fluid speaks many languages throughout our bodies as it moistens tissues, furrows passageways releasing membranous adhesions, restrictions in our articulations and joints, creating space for organs to breathe more expansively, swaying all like Kelp to the rhythm of waves of currents coiling and uncoiling, spiralling, oscillating, eddying and stilling.

Fluid responds to light touch and a practitioner’s grounded stillness. Sonorous bubbling often ushers easing and reorganising. It heralds a bringing together of what was separate, an enlivening of what was ‘dormant’, a relieving of what was stuck, a loosening of what was rigid, an unlocking of possibility, of potency.

These constant fluid motions are enablers as well as enabled thanks to a dynamic balance between compression and tension of more rigid structures meeting more flexible ones. This mix of elasticity and resistance called tensegrity allows for both flexibility and resilience in our living tissues. It shows up in the stem of a plant, the branch of a tree, a spider's web, dandelion flowers, snow crystals, geodesic domes...

According to American biologist Donal J Ingber, tensegrity is “The Architecture of Life” (Scientific American, 1997). He writes, "That nature applies common assembly rules is implied by the recurrence--at scales from the molecular to the macroscopic--of certain patterns, such as spirals, pentagons and triangulated forms. These patterns appear in structures ranging from highly regular crystals to relatively irregular proteins and in organisms as diverse as viruses, plankton and humans. After all, both organic and inorganic matter are made of the same building blocks: atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. The only difference is how the atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space."

It appears that wherever there is water there is tensegrity precisely because its rules underpin the bonding between hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

Ingber goes further and talks about a recurring universal pattern: "The geodesic structure found within the cytoskeleton is a classic example of a pattern that is found everywhere in nature, at many different size scales. (...) My view is that this recurrent pattern is visual evidence of the existence of common rules for self-assembly. In particular, all these entities stabilize themselves in three dimensions in a similar way: by arranging their parts to minimize energy and mass through continuous tension and local compression--that is, through tensegrity."

There is no mention in this seminal article of what actually assembles parts into a whole according to the rules of tensegrity. This mysterious creative force is what we call the "Intelligence of the Tide" or the "Breath of Life", terms that were borrowed from the ocean and the air by the founder of Cranial Osteopathy William Sutherland.

I feel its furling and unfurling, its breathing of whole bodies whenever I make contact with another organism or when I tune in to mine. I also feel it when I touch the bark of a tree, its skin, or when I lay my hands on earth. It spurs the recurring universal patterns of the architecture of life as it creates and continuously renews and restores living processes.

Our neural tube (our future spine) begins to form in the fourth week as expansive amniotic liquid wraps itself around the embryo and folds membranous tissue into a groove. This brine becomes our cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Considered to be the most potent element of our bodies by Sutherland, this Intelligent fluid filters, nourishes, protects, and ignites. He called it “liquid light”.

I will never forget the first time I felt its sparkles become louder, more potent as I held my colleague’s fourth ventricle, one of the reservoirs of CSF in our brain.

This ignition reverberated throughout the whole midline and rippled out in the entire organism. It felt truly magical and profoundly awe-inspiring, instilling a reverence that never left me.

Sutherland wrote beautifully of these internal fluid movements, which he termed the Tide:

"Then you begin to understand something about the groundswell of the ocean and differentiation of the tide, of the waves and so forth. There is a sort of spiral movement. You have heard of the different movements of the brain. Let us explore another – a spiral movement of the Tide. Make a diagram with a pencil on a piece of paper. Make a dot at a given point. Starting with the dot, draw a line around in a curve and then around and around. Then, make a dotted line around the other way back to the original dot. Let these illustrate a spiral movement.

If you want to use this diagram to represent a material manifestation, designate a positive pole and a negative pole. Then we get something in between the positive and negative poles to see in that slow movement of the Tide, that coil, a moving out and a coming together. How many spiral movements can you visualize in the Tide? How many little coils?

Go with me along a shore where there is a lot of seaweed growing. Watch this seaweed moving rhythmically in a coiling form, one going clockwise, another counterclockwise, spiralling with the groundswell. Look at the hurricane. See the potency in the eye of the hurricane, not the destruction around the outside. See the potency of the eye, the stillness of the Tide, the spiral movement.” (Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy by William Garner Sutherland, D. O. p16-17)

I invite you to find yourself in contemplation of Kelp, Dulse, Mermaid’s Tresses and Bladderwrack dancing to the tunes of brine, for you will likely hear your inner spiralling, ebbing and flowing rhythms slow down as your nervous system relaxes, and fluids begin to speak with Seaweed. You may hear long forgotten stories come to the surface, emerge from murkier stiller waters to be moved and transformed before returning to a clearer more alive stillpoint.

Where there is movement, there is stillness. Craniosacral practitioners meet both when we hold the whole from a grounded and spacious place. Spacious because it allows for the presence of much more than the body I lay my hands on: the trees near and far, the ocean, the birds, the flowers, the wind’s songs and scents… are in on this sacred experience, this revealing ceremony where stories congealed in tissues and fluids emerge to be healed.

There is shared wisdom and deep Intelligence in the liquids bathing the living in our home Biosphere.

There lies the ground between us. The earth on whom we can lay and lightly rest our hands and ears to listen to the commonage of water’s memory, the threads that interweave between us all, Salmon, Deer, Hazel, Oak, Plantain, Bilberry, Rose, Robin, Owl, Rock, Mountain, Moss, Lichen, Dulse, Chanterelle, Akkermansia, Homo Sapiens… This common cradling of the wild is where we belong. It expresses as a language CST practitioners call biodynamics and is underwritten by biotensegrity.

“Savoir d’où l’on vient c’est savoir avec qui nous pouvons continuer à parler”, says French philosopher Olivier Remaud. (To know where we come from is to know with whom we can continue to speak)

In Thinking like an Iceberg, Remaud writes of ice like a living entity. Within this solid phase of water, ice encloses the secrets of our past. “Ice crystals shelter pollens transported by clouds, the volcanic dust of eruptions, and even traces of wars waged between humans”. Analyses of ice reveal stories about the origins of life, the composition of the atmosphere millions of years ago, the evolution of weather patterns.

A body of ice like the originally massive iceberg named B15 (11,000 square km) broke up into smaller icebergs and was only 70 km2 last year. It has now passed away. A living library disappears with multilayered unfathomable consequences each time a glacier or an iceberg ‘dies’.

Their fate and unravelling tightly tied to ours, but particularly to those for whom ice is home.

In the Inuktitut language, auyuittuq, the word for glacier, means “the thing that never melts”. “Glaciers… are the memory of Earth’s elementary phases. They are the hyphen between the past and the present, like a promise of continuity,” says Remaud.

This word, this definition no longer applies and the inhabitants of such ever changing territories endure a form of exile without travelling. They experience what Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined ‘solastalgia’ (Earth Emotions, 2019), a mix of nostalgia and the Latin terms ‘solari’ for consolation and ‘desolare’ for abandoned, ravaged. This great word tries to capture the profound loss of a familiar habitat that is also who we are. The disappearance and unstoppable transformation of our home ground is reflected within our own bodies as a visceral desolation. Where is the ground of our being? What can we rely on? What can we trust?

Our bodies registering, recording such unknowns, such uncertainty, also run adrift, numb out, freeze what feels too overwhelming, out of our control.

Ice for the Inuits 'nurses' the unborn's life; it melts just before birth as the waters break. So what is to be birthed as all ice relentlessly becomes liquid? How can we midwife this parturition from one world to another? How can we best hold space for these massive changes? Or how can we let ourselves be held through this ecological collapse?

But how can we "navigate the mystery" as Martin Shaw says (Emergence Magazine, 16th May 2022) rather than live in uncertainty? In other words how can we potentise our language in a way that ignites possibility rather than shuts it down?

I went seaweed harvesting today and stood in the cool ocean waters. As the slowly shifting sands rocked by swaying brine massaged my feet and ankles I felt my body surrender to the dance and this Intelligent ‘biofield’ (field of life) re-energise me from the bottom up. I and my companions standing beside me experienced that same excitement, an ignition of our fluids as they spoke with Ocean.

Can we plant ourselves more in the shifting seas, and instead of drifting and numbing allow earth's mysteries instil and enliven us? Can we learn from biotensegrity, that mix of tensile flexibility, that creative molecular Intelligence?

Can we listen to this shared common ground and ask what is earth’s longing? What if we placed earth at the centre and took a step back, to stand by alongside all the living she supports and regenerates? Could we allow that wider angle shift our stance and entrust us into "right relationship" with her?

I too feel solastalgia whenever the songs of birds lessen from year to year, whenever majestic old trees are cut down and the land beneath and around me becomes more impoverished by the decease of wild life, whenever I breathe ever more polluted air… We cannot control much of this but we can introduce and share practices of renewal and rituals of grounded presence with the wild that plant ourselves more firmly in earth.

When I hold a body’s ever changing dynamics, when I forage and share food with others, dance, create, swim in the sea or in rivers, and stop, slow down to listen to my wild brothers and sisters I feel renewed and at my most alive because I am in tune with the wild within me.

Every earth’s bubble in the biodynamic field of my practice is a welcome expression of unravelling mystery. This Intelligence is a playful Fool, a trickster that brings ease where there is dis-ease; that helps us to flow when we are rigid.

Let us return to Water’s magical holding.

How do we relate to this primary territory? I use the word territory because we mammals have a body plan that spatially delineates our form and differentiates as well as connects each of us.

Is your relationship one of indifference, of moderate interest, of fascination? What archetype(s) would you say you are when it comes to this primary relationship with how you inhabit yourself: explorer, magician, tyrant, victim, artist, healer, alchemist, adventurer, story-teller, dancer, musician, performer, jester, mystic, scientist, inquisitor, abuser, conqueror, warrior, mother, father...add as many as you wish.

There are many 'passengers' in this container. Many expressions and much layering of habits over past generations, of conditioning in the present, of a not yet born future whose form is already in motion in the 'now'.

How we inhabit this primary loop is influenced and impacted by many external factors, a context, a milieu but also temperature, moisture in the air, the quality of the soil, the diversity of our 'natural' habitat, the food we eat, the beings we meet, the books we read, the shows we watch...

This circular relationship between internal and external territories is what is also called metabolism. How we 'make the world‘ or how we perceive and perform in the world depends on how we metabolise or digest it both physiologically and emotionally, and how we 'communicate' with it through the billions of microbes we share and host.

I am asking these questions because the word 'invasion' has once again been making headlines, and I have felt its resonance in my clients' bodies.

In the past two years, we have been told we were at the mercy of another 'invader', a virus called Sars Covid 2. This is an interpretation through the prism of one or a few archetypes as listed above.

On the other hand, a movement of military troops with sophisticated man-made weapons striking and killing civilians for the purpose of conquest of land and the wielding of power is a clearly intentionally offensive act of invasion and destruction.

Microbes are part of this layering of past generations that have inhabited us to make us. That have symbiotically partnered to create the conditions for homo sapiens to emerge, evolve and survive. They are not an invasion. They are who we are and will be. They are all at once our ancestors and our descendants. Our cells and DNA would not exist without them *.

Corona opened us to the world of the infinitesimal that inhabits us. Some became terrorised by this 'alien' wilderness, others interested, fascinated even by this hardly explored, mostly unknown internal habitat on whose diversity we depend to live.

Interestingly it also brought front stage, and probably for the first time, the possibility of a collective body politic acting concurrently and more or less in unison with a common purpose of 'defeating' and 'fighting against' what was seen by the vast majority of governments as an archetypal 'invader'.

Both the relationship to territory of a calculated all-out war and the powerful emergence of microbes as major agents of change and mutations in our midst show us how we metabolise, how we 'digest' the world we live in by how we react to what we perceive as its 'impossibilities', i.e. what radically disrupts the everyday, the norm; what was thought of as impossible previously.

Ethologists and philosophers** tell us that a territory for a bird for example is not just a space chosen for its easy access to resources, for mating and protection. It is also one where activities are 'suspended', where one stops in the quietude of just being rather than doing.

It is a place of habits and routine, of comfort. 'Impossibilities' on the other hand are major intrusions and interruptions that completely challenge our relationship to our internal and external spaces.

Both the emergence of new viruses such as Sars Covid 2, Ebola and Aids before it, and the many wars that are waged throughout the world are consequences of broken down metabolisms due to our destructive relationships to our ecologies. Just like the increase of autoimmune and other metabolic diseases such as diabetes and cancers denotes our excessively unbalanced ways of inhabiting the world. Our bodies mirror the disruptions and encroachments on the collective Earth metabolism.

As territories change with biodiversity plummeting, with wild places disappearing under the continuous invasive onslaught for resources that feed our modes of production and consumption, we are having to stop at the wall of 'impossibilities' with greater unpredictability and uncertainty than ever, and find new possibilities, different ways to move, to work, to perceive, to create, to dispose of waste, to live and die if we are to survive as a species.

We must learn other ways to relate, to metabolise in sync with the wild, not against it or in spite of it.

And we know this. We see those we label as 'marginals', 'outliers' leave modernity's ship and apply regenerative, restorative, culturally diverse ways of being in the world In tune with Earth’s metabolism.

We read about and listen to how indigenous tribes have been the custodians of their thriving territories for millennia.

Wars, extractive industries, and all the drivers of our modernity that fundamentally destroy and kill life are so many auto-immune metabolic diseases edging us closer to extinction.

The ‘louder‘, more visible they are, the more unbearable and harrowing, the more they affect the basic parameters of our living ‘container’ —the temperature, the weather, the soil, the water...—the greater the emergency, and the greater the need to discourage and rebuke the illusion of modernity's comfortable routine and create new ways of producing, moving and being in the world.

As the territories change radically so must we.

In this context, it is interesting to witness the timely revival of Irish as a native language not just among Irish people in Ireland and the Irish diaspora. I am originally French and I know I came under a spell of some kind when I first camped on Ireland’s Western shores at the age of 12. When I subsequently moved here 28 years ago some of my heroes and heroines were James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, WB Yeats, Edna O'Brien, the Pogues, Sinead O'Connor and U2. I consciously and unconsciously explored and 'metabolised' Dublin and the rest of Ireland through their lenses: a mix of the sensual, poetic, tragic, melancholic, wild, magic, rough and raw...

I am not an Irish speaker yet immersed myself in 32 words for field by Manchán Magan as if under another spell, and experienced it as an enchanting companion that held my hand during my wanderings in the forests or by the sea while deep in the uncertain pause of 'lockdown'.

Immersion as a response to the overwhelm of 'invasions'.

Conveying his deeply rooted love, knowledge and awe for the language forged by his ancestors, wordsmiths of the land, the sea, the wind, the rocks, all that they lived in each moment, this ode to Gaeilge, the Irish language, felt like a longing for a lost world.

Healing medicine for words threatened with extinction, for the loss of kinship caused by the waning diversity of what was once a richly descriptive and thriving tongue.

A sacred tying to a sacred territory, "...languages offer a connection to the inner lives of our ancestors," he explains. One could argue that the words of a language are a form of metabolism, a transformation (or translation) of the multiple relationships with land, sky, the elements, the living and otherworldly into sound.

His book prompted a huge revival of interest for Gaeilge. It was reprinted dozens of times since its publication in 2020.

Its popularity matched a yearning for meaning, for magic, for a return to being deeply immersed in the certainty and solidity of grounding in territory, in the stories of the land. Manchán's longing met a collective longing and ignited it like wild fire at a time when our ‘imposed’ slowing down allowed for the emergence and exploration of that yearning.

It was a line of fugitivity away from the trappings and enclosure of 'confinement' and towards the wonders of land, and a people for whom the "moaning of the waves" was the sign of a storm coming. for whom a speck of flour called "cáithmïn" in Gaeilge was also the word for subatomic particle, "the tiniest specks of physical life", and the word for "goose-pumps you feel when, for example, you ponder the interrelatedness of things and how small we are in relation to the whole."***... Do you hear and feel the bodymind juggling between the playfulness and depth of entanglement?

It is no wonder this book has been bought and gifted and talked about like the healing balm of a re-wording and a re-animating of the world that could reveal itself when one stops, pauses, slows down and listens; what 'lockdown' ushered.

Irish is one of the few indigenous languages of Europe that is full to the brim with references to the otherworld, the world of spirits, of the sidhe, often translated as fairies and which means the other folk, the spirit world that the women of knowledge, the Bean feasa, (or wise women, healers) can communicate and connect with to bring back 'balance' between the worlds.

Microbes are these unpredictable otherworldly beings that teach us about the magic of shape-shifting, mutation and adaptation in their relationships to place, time and life.

They assist us throughout a considerable amount of tasks including digestion, metabolising the world we live in. It is no accident that there has been a recrudescence of courses on fermentation, sourdough bread-making and wild foraging during lockdown too.

These kinds of ritualised 'microanimism'**** are a relating to the other than human, the other folk, a bonding with radically different beings that are our kin and our ancestors. They open wide the doors of perception and the vistas of living to a whole other level and in saying "Yes" to these other worlds we unlock, accept, and trust the unknown: we begin a healing process.

During biodynamic craniosacral sessions I have felt the resistance of bodies saying "No" to the world they have lived in; the fascia matrix twisted in the unfinished business of a "No" to whatever circumstances, tragedies, abuses, violations were thrown at them at the time. Like a defence against the 'invasions' of life, their contorted tissue patterns are a 'pushing away' that stayed imprinted and around which the whole reorganised.

We call them fulcrums of inertia in craniosacral speak. They are places where the potency of our inner Intelligence, the inner healing wisdom of the body, is dimmed down. They can translate as places of numbness, of higher density, compression, where vitality is disabled, and are often accompanied by patterns of protection, of resistance which I can feel as "No" zones.

A craniosacral session is about bringing different parties back in dialogue: 'Yes' helping 'No' to a more cohesive health resonance, with a potency that is free to roam with greater intensity and renewed aliveness, and a peaceful settling of the whole.

In this sense, healing is the relief of a return to the homeland of our bodies, to a sense of possibility regardless of what's happened and happening; to the healthy metabolising of re-ignited symbiotic relationships, to a re-wording of the world.

Likewise the revival of a native language and its rich treasures of lore and myths, is a knowing that is of the bones and connective tissue rather than just of the brain. It is the "Yes" deployed when potency is felt arising anew in our inner worlds, in our metabolism, flooding the whole with its luminous flow, or "glas" in Gaeilge. 'Glas' is also the colour green that is prevalent on the moist land here and it sometimes means grey too, the subtle gradation of greys of skies. As I see how the language weaves the words between worlds I hear a melody that ties the sparkles of light with lush green fields and ominously intricate grey skies. How could you not become spellbound by the sheer magnetism of a language when one single word releases such imaginal power?!

Away from the cacophony of the world, our bodily instruments resonate to the healing properties of such sounds lifting us to meet and intermingle with the poetics of the wild, re-igniting a rich conversation between our corporeality and the land's, between our metabolisms.

Health and healing are this reorganising of metabolic fields as a response to disruptive, chaotic forces. An adapting to new ways of inhabiting the entangled worlds of the living.

Our bodies know the ways of our longings.

* See Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis

** See Vinciane Despret’s “Living as a bird” for example.

*** See 32 Words for Field, by Manchán Magan, 2020.

****For more on Microanimism see microanimism.com

Thanks also to Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who influenced and accompanied my metabolism.

My hands decide to make a salt seaweed mix with this ground Hogweed. It turns out well. I taste again. Mmmm interesting. I’m excited as I write the ingredients on the label.

Not a word is spoken yet so much is contentedly, primarily, sensorily felt.

Earlier today I listened to a radio podcast (1) about how animals like dogs, cats and horses are used as mediation in the therapy room when treating children on the spectrum and/or suffering from PTSD . Studies have shown that autistic children respond really well to the presence of specially-trained dogs for example.

I have never worked with an autistic child but I infer from listening to this podcast that their particularly excitable sensory sensitivity attunes to the calm presence of a dog and helps their nervous system to co-regulate.

There as well in this ultra sensuous, feeling process no word is spoken.

I wonder whether their autonomic nervous system (which includes the most ancient primary functions of sleep, digest, heart-beating…) naturally draws them closer to another being whose sensory realm is not muffled or confused by a multitude of technological stimuli (as most of us modern homo sapiens are) that impact their capacity to settle and remain in a state of balanced awareness and wholeness.

I also wonder whether this co-regulation is related to the creation of different forms of symbiotic relationships between each creature’s microorganisms.

A very similar phenomenon of 'appeasement' and switching on of our ventral vagus nerve—our capacity to be socially engaged while also being relaxed and present— takes place during forest bathing or within forest schools. Being among trees and other creatures of the plant, fungi and animal kingdoms both settles and brings us into more presence; closer to our inherent intertwined nature.

These unspoken reciprocal inner-outer sensory ‘communications’ also affect the whole of our fascia and viscera: there is more spaciousness and fluidity expressed in our connective tissue as a slower externality is reflected internally through our heartbeat, our blood pressure, our metabolism, and the whole of our musculature.

Stress hormones like cortisol decrease and happier ones take their place. Our immune function is boosted too within such an interlaced relaxed aliveness in the world, as we non verbally re-member we are part of a living network of embedded interdependences.

The radio hosts remind us of that famous stallion, Peyo, whose calm presence in the hospital ward soothes and relieves patients towards whom he decides, with an all-knowing sensing awareness, to direct his attention (2).

The presenters seem puzzled yet fascinated by such phenomena and look towards science to confirm and explain what they already instinctively knew.

We do not trust our sensing feeling selves much, us modern humans do we?

As Irish philosopher John Moriarty points out, we have been suffering from “an earth-sensory bypass”(3).

So much so that we often censor or minimise what we feel during our every day lives unless it is rationally justified by Lord Science.

This happens quite regularly during a biodynamic craniosacral session for example, either our awareness cannot attune to our internal dances or we play down what we feel. It takes consistent coaxing on the part of the practitioner to invite the client to trust their inner awareness and sensing for the doorways of perception to gradually open.

I as a practitioner, am bewildered each time a bit more by the diversity, quality and nature of what I perceive. The multi sensory revelation never ends and the constant emergence of new sensuous perceptive fields is one of the greatest gifts granted by this amazing modality. A practice which originates, let’s keep remembering and acknowledging, in the indigenous traditional medicine and mode of knowing of the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes in the late 19th century, in present-day Kansas. (4)

Each session, either as client or as practitioner, cradles a whole body-mind presence that resonates with and re-members who I was as an embryo: in complete and constant internal exchange and connection with my surroundings.

Craniosacral therapy brings us closer to a womb-like quality with oneself. We become our own womb living in the greater womb of Earth. This is why you will hear comments such as: “it feels like going home” from practitioners and clients alike.

Everything slows down during CST or whenever we are syncing with trees, birds, a flower, or an animal that makes us feel in tune, at home with oneself and the living.

I sometimes ‘follow’ my own internal rhythms with a meditative dance, my hands slowly, patiently gesturing roundness, writing arabesques through the air.

I’m enchanted as well as relieved by the simple beauty of this fluid slow motion. Relieved because there is a natural ‘enoughness’ and ease to its expression. There is contentment, satiety.

The constant pushing and the fast pace of our activated lives feed a cycle of insatiable and addictive drives, burn lots of energy and deplete our resources.

In slow mode we are enough and in tune with the dynamics of stillness and motion of the wild.

The very slow movements of Qi Gong masters come to mind. Witnessing their exquisite dance is like seeing poetry in movement.

The speed of our existence is one of our greatest impediment to this feeling at home within oneself, this state of balanced awareness and natural attunement to our surroundings.

I am typing these words sitting on a tree stump in a little clearing in one of my favourite spots in the forest near where I live. The sun has come out and I am enjoying its warm radiance while I’m writing. The last rays of the day.

Birds are chirping in the trees around me. My body remembers a time when sitting on that same stump not so long ago, my head turned to the sound of rustling in the leaves in the nearby understorey and saw the most gorgeously lush behind of a fox trotting away towards a thicket. What a blessing! My gleeful eyes could barely believe it. I sat there for a while breathing in the magic of such an encounter, wondering how long this wonderfully cunning creature had been quietly observing me. I was writing too that day.

This non verbal memory will stay within my tissues and become part of a resourcing treasure trove of sensuous feelings I can recall.

A tree stump is not the most comfortable seat though probably because my writing position strained my fascia. My arched back is beginning to ache while my cold buttocks want to adjust and be moved.

I stretch, twist and breathe more deeply.

In a little while I will meet a client for a biodynamic craniosacral session. I listen in, drawing my attention internally and feel an inner glow, a contentment born of gratitude for the day that’s been and will continue to be.

I love slow and have edged my way towards a life where my primary source of income is centred on a practice of stillness and interoceptive presence through BCST.

This is relatively new. I closed my eco designerwear business in February 2018, only four years ago.

The older I got the more I re-entered the safety of my body through various practices and inner explorations, and the more I could act on an intuitive awareness that spurred me away from the pressures, stress and demands of my daily grind.

I am on an ongoing journey balancing doing and being, more deeply listening to my internal language as I go.

Later this evening I will drive into town to meet a few friends and play some tunes I put together in honour of Imbolc, the Celtic feast of renewal, of celebrating the return of fulness, the vibrant aliveness of Springtime, my favourite season.

In the opening circle I intend to pay homage to Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, who ‘returned to Earth’ as he says, on 22nd January 2022. His was a life dedicated to the still presence of what he called ‘interbeing’, the deep interconnection and interdependence of all on Earth.

He writes, “Touching the historical dimension—a leaf, a flower, a pebble, a beam of light, a mountain, a river, a bird, or our own body—we can touch the ultimate. When we deeply touch the one, we touch the all. This is interbeing.”(5)

Thich Nhat Hanh often writes about ‘taking refuge’ in Earth, this ever lasting creator of life and renewal.

It is through our awakening of the senses that we can truly embody this ‘interbeingness’ and 'take refuge' in the earth of our bodies within the greater biosphere of Earth.

Slowing down, resting in presence to listen, touch, taste, see, smell and feel with our whole body sensuousness embedded within all other fields of sensuous expressions.

For our and Earth’s sake, to manifest Thich Nhat Hanh’s vision of : “The next Buddha will be a Sangha.”

Here is one of his beautiful Letters to Mother Earth:

"Dear Mother Earth,

I bow my head before you as I look deeply and recognize that you are present in me and that I’m a part of you. I was born from you and you are always present, offering me everything I need for my nourishment and growth. My mother, my father, and all my ancestors are also your children. We breathe your fresh air. We drink your clear water. We eat your nourishing food. Your herbs heal us when we’re sick.

You are the mother of all beings. I call you by the human name Mother and yet I know your mothering nature is more vast and ancient than humankind. We are just one young species of your many children. All the millions of other species who live—or have lived—on Earth are also your children. You aren’t a person, but I know you are not less than a person either. You are a living breathing being in the form of a planet.

Each species has its own language, yet as our Mother you can understand us all. That is why you can hear me today as I open my heart to you and offer you my prayer.

Dear Mother, wherever there is soil, water, rock or air, you are there, nourishing me and giving me life. You are present in every cell of my body. My physical body is your physical body, and just as the sun and stars are present in you, they are also present in me. You are not outside of me and I am not outside of you. You are more than just my environment. You are nothing less than myself.

I promise to keep the awareness alive that you are always in me, and I am always in you. I promise to be aware that your health and well-being is my own health and well-being. I know I need to keep this awareness alive in me for us both to be peaceful, happy, healthy, and strong.

Sometimes I forget. Lost in the confusions and worries of daily life, I forget that my body is your body, and sometimes even forget that I have a body at all. Unaware of the presence of my body and the beautiful planet around me and within me, I’m unable to cherish and celebrate the precious gift of life you have given me. Dear Mother, my deep wish is to wake up to the miracle of life. I promise to train myself to be present for myself, my life, and for you in every moment. I know that my true presence is the best gift I can offer to you, the one I love."

Notes and references:

1- From La Terre au carré, a France Inter radio podcast: https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/la-terre-au-carre/la-terre-au-carre-du-jeudi-20-janvier-2022

2- Here is a youtube video of Peyo the therapist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXn94K-3l5o

3- From Dreamtime by John Moriarty.

4- See Susan Raffo's beautiful writing on this topic: https://www.susanraffo.com/blog/aligning-the-relational-field-a-love-story-about-retelling-the-creation-of-craniosacral-therapy-and-a-lot-of-other-touch-based-bodywork-as-well

5- From Emergence magazine: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/ten-love-letters-to-the-earth/

Have you ever noticed that there is a moment, a second, before we glance at something or listen to a sound that orients us over there, that turns on our senses?

Have you ever wondered what influences your eyes to move in this or that direction when there are no apparent sensory stimuli of any kind?

Something calls our attention but the what, how, and why are mysterious.

I feel this way when I walk in a forest. It is a place of surrender to the wonder of presence and its many gifts.

I also sense it when I hold a living organism during a craniosacral session. My attention becomes perception as it is called to witness and support. What fascinates it is the awe-inspiring and mysterious agency of the body’s bio(living) dynamics that are at play in each moment and orientate the flow.

Each practitioner's journey is bound by their degree of embodied grounding and the quality of their relationship with the client, both defining criteria of a clear presence.

In a past blog post (1) I explored the field of resonance with the helpful input of a few other BCST practitioners and teachers.

This time I wish to explore further and bathe, float, and dive into a related topic; this capacity to maintain clarity, to be a clear channel like water, like the fluid bodies and the fluid field we hold.

How do you ‘reset’? How do you clear and practise ‘energetic hygiene’ as some practitioners term it, are common enough questions that keep arising in tuition classes but also during sessions.

Regardless of our profession, we are all immersed within layers of information and distractions, conditioned by a multiplicity of events and a morphological ‘inheritance’ that have shaped who we are and how we respond to life's turns and vicissitudes.

This topic of ‘clearing’ is particularly salient for the chaotic and uncertain times we live in, asking of us to be ever more care-full and attentive to carve out a grounded presence within a constantly evolving maelstrōm.

So another way to phrase these concerns could be: how do you redistribute or diffract your attention and perception in such ways that they nourish rather than overwhelm you?

It could be, like CST practitioner and teacher Andrew Cook explains, through a practice of “focusing on the Divine rather than anything else”.

“I see people who do “achieve” that, and they are not in denial – rather are in a different reality, and the world doesn’t tend to sneak up behind them unpleasantly (as one might suppose if following a more precautionary, fearful way of seeing) - but rather, it aligns itself to that way of seeing.” (2)

Andrew adds that “The capacity to do this is in all of us… I run resilience workshops, and the central thrust of the message in those workshops is that animals, hunter-gatherers, and any living creature (such as an amoeba floating in a pond) don’t survive by being constantly attentive to what will go wrong, but are far more constantly attentive to what goodness the world has to offer. This is how our neurology evolved.”

An observation that aligns with the social engagement 'drive' of our ventral vagus nerve (3) as per Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory.

Our neurology has evolved to orientate towards safe connection (and pleasure I would add) within the uncertain dynamics of life.

This orientation towards an organising or integrative force within the natural world we also call health or Health (in the Nietzschean tradition) is also what characterises craniosacral therapy.

“Where is health?” is a rarely asked question in the western world yet it is one that keeps recurring in a craniosacral setting.

As clients tell me what ails them before lying down on the plinth, I listen and empathise but I also always inquire: where or what feels supportive, strong, vibrant, and alive in you?

(Photo courtesy of Elise Desmet)

Similarly, whenever pain or discomfort, or ‘difficult’ emotions are felt during a session I invite my clients to find the expression of ease, spaciousness, and health elsewhere in their bodies.

This is a mindful discipline we are not accustomed to. It runs against a cultural paradigm leaning towards what is wrong and problematic.

“Stepping sideways out of that way of seeing the world is also stepping outside our cultural training into something that may be unfamiliar but it is also totally natural. “ (2)

This introduction of more complexity helps to zoom out from our narrow focus on a culturally-entrenched narrative and welcome a more diverse and much richer panorama.

“Bad stuff can still happen, but it hasn’t been played round zillions of times in the head before then, and neither has it interfered with any of the beauty of life, and it lasts a much shorter length of time because it remains possible to see/live in the newnesses rather than the same old same old. In Ian McGilchrist’s terminology, we become more able to inhabit the Right brain.” (2)

I guess such an approach to living completely changes the meaning of the word predicament, which is often seen as an unpleasant experience in our cultural prism, when in fact to predicate in the Latin etymology of the word means to affirm and assert.

Within this wider, more complex context, ‘clearing’ also becomes something else, from thick to thin air, from viscous to flowing waters. It feels much easier to swim and health becomes the current's natural direction.

BCST practitioner and teacher Scott Zamurut (4) says, “When as a practitioner we are genuine observers of the healing process our boundaries are clear, thereby diminishing the transfer of energies. The prior domains of practitioner skills support our capacity to meet the Inherent Healing Process in a relatively open and neutral space.”

I have often felt that although I am grounded within my own body, I am also plugged into the wider field as I listen to the chirping of birds, the occasional wind and rainfall, as I feel the warmth of sun rays, as my perception embraces the ocean and forest nearby... Both my and my client’s presences are enriched by these unspoken influences and healing emerges as the consequent mainstream of this complex immersion and sensuous entanglement.

There is a tacit agreement between all these sensory presences at play in the room.

Scott reminds us of Dr Rollin Becker's words "objective awareness" as our primary perceptive guide which allows for and is allowed by a "moment-to-moment somatic relationship to the Earth through gravity" and by "the anchoring of our Midline into the Earth" so that our organisms' biodynamic and biokinetic Intelligence can be held in a much vaster field of possibility.

While another experienced BCST practitioner Jane Shaw speaks of the "gifts of awareness" brought by her clients within this delicate and powerful process, "signposting me to what inner patterns I need to continue to heal or address".(5)

This practice of self-care is intrinsically part of our work and it is also part of living. The more fine-tuned our perception is, the more we can swim in the complex currents of existence.

As Jane adds, "I work continuously to know myself, "the issues in my own tissues," so that when I feel something in a client session I know what is mine and what is my clients'. (...) So that I can attune to different levels of perception without "losing" myself".

A wise and learned redistribution of our attention to anchor oneself in a vaster field of awareness.

Andrew Cook also speaks of 'gifts' when he says that, "In fact, I would personally say that the focus I am required to have in my practice usually brings something of a relief from the world, and patients bring many gifts to take home as well as burdens (to not take home!)"

There is a natural clearing process within each session which is enriched and nurtured by our personal resourcing practices.

Scott mentions morning prayer: "Every morning I begin my day by offering incense or sage in the prayer wheel behind my home. I make an inner connection with Earth and Sky, the Directions, the Elements, the natural world. I will offer thanks and put forth prayers."

Andrew talks of the Tibetan spiritual practice of transformation that is Tonglen: "I do not accept the thing into my body – but rather accept the “fact” (or story) as having whatever presence it has and then have compassion for the parts of my body that are struggling with that and resisting it in various ways. I think words such as “Love”, “Compassion”, “Belief”, “Trust” (just to name a few) are bandied around as if they are easy, and they are not ... If one finds oneself disconnected from them in even the smallest way it can take a lifetime’s effort to regain them. They demand that we strive. They have layers of depth, and there is always more depth that can be discovered."

It is this incommensurable depth that informs our practice and always steers me towards what Jane Shaw calls a "returning to myself" within the wider field I am immersed in.

Like a consistent 'oiling' of a wheel of living. Like a watering of fertile ground. Like a sowing of new seeds, I bring each of my clients' gifts with me on my walks in the nearby forest to be released and merged with the mycelium above and below ground, transcending the fortuitous "I am".

I speak of the mycelium above because as practitioners we are also part of a community and whether we are conscious of it does not matter. It is a web of presences connecting us with each other through the gifts of CST.

Scott says he receives a session every week. "My most potent ally is the BoL [Breath of Life] within me, being held in a space in which the BoL can unfold inherent healing keeps my system clear of inertial energies, and provides an opportunity to resolve any interpersonal dynamics I may be holding"(3)

I personally would receive at least one BCST treatment a month and attend regular postgrad gatherings where I receive several sessions during a weekend that leave my inner and outer layers, the connective tissues of a mycelium, abundantly re-enlivened and nurtured.

There as well there is a tacit agreement, a natural concord emerging between beings connected by their common practice. This is a community.

This is part of an ongoing exploration, "to continually heal more deeply my own traumas so that I can listen with as much presence, neutrality, and awareness as I can." (5)

What helps you to feel alive and pleasurably, pleasantly embodied?

Scott speaks of yoga and hiking. I would add dancing, leaning against trees, listening to their heartbeat, to birds and the wind’s whispers and melodies...

Andrew goes for, "Gratitude, prayer, self-compassion, Awe, physical movement (building, gardening, walking)."

I notice how all these practices of self-care and nourishment are different ways to tend the rich soil of our beings within a vaster community. Scott Zamurut speaks about how "Cultural styles and expectations regarding healing are the foundation on which we build our practice. Our own self-view regarding the type of healing work we are offering, our scope of practice in practical terms, is the other key factor, and how these two pieces interface with one another defines the texture of our place in our community."

It is true that each practice interfaces within a cultural context but there is something about our craniosacral model that also transcends culture, with a set of central principles that are universal and core to many indigenous societies throughout the world.

I go back to the redistribution of our attention and quite like what Andrew Cook has to say about it: "Attention is everything, and what we pay attention to grows. The biggest obstacle to peace is that we focus on our own shadows/fears and make them solid because they are given so much attention."

I think what I really mean by 'redistribution' is a dilution and an orientation of our porous membranes to a myriad of influences. Returning to my initial evocation of water, it is the art of becoming like water as we flow more freely and clearly, as we are more transparent, less heavily and densely pulled by the rocks of darker material.

Can we become like the rivulets of capillaries that bleed in the earth of our bodies?

"In the end, the world will sort itself out. “All” we have to do is refuse to be distracted or pulled into it and use our free will to exercise the only true choice we ever have – to choose what we focus on and orient ourselves towards." (2)

And inform this choice and orientation with a conscious awareness of the exquisite depths and complexities of the vast and rich dynamics of our living, breathing Earth.

Like the many gifts and teachings bestowed by our clients, our families, friends, communities, all ecosystems...may we keep nourishing our lives with wonder, gratitude, awe, and the beauty of life in its many forms in this dawning New Year.

May we ease-fully and gratefully skate on the river of living (6)

Notes and References:

1- See https://www.mycraniosacrallife.com/single-post/the-wonder-walk-of-knowing

2- Andrew Cook is a CST practitioner and a teacher. See more at: https://www.body-mind.co.uk/craniosacral/redirect_landing.html

3- Stephen Porges is the author of the Polyvagal Theory. See more at www.stephenporges.com

4- Scott Zamurut is a BCST practitioner and a teacher. See more at www.scottzamurut.com

5- Jane Shaw is a senior teacher with Body Intelligence, a BCST practitioner, and the founder of the Elmfield Institute, see more at www.elmfieldinstitute.com

6- Reference to Joni Mitchell's song River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFudDAYqxY

A much needed energy for the times we live in but not necessarily a welcomed one.

Why? Because it is one that requires a complete letting go to uncertainty and opening ourselves to its sense of infinite possibility.

How enmeshed are you in the world you inhabit? How committed are you to its social and financial demands, the subtle and gross ways it preempts the fundamental, radical changes needed for us to possibly avoid total ecological collapse? How caught up are you in a double bind?

In that trickster dream, I was driving towards a dangerous sharp right turn edged by a few majestic Pine trees that looked as if they were floating on pieces of soil above a drop of some height.

I was uncontrollably attracted by these strange trees and fell in the 'crack'. When I came to and slipped out of the car unscathed I saw three dinosaur-like creatures reminding me of gigantic Komodo lizards walking slowly towards me. I panicked and tried to find a way out. There was an odd looking building on the left behind me and I began to run towards it.

It had massive drawers instead of windows. I pulled one but there was only a thin slit at the bottom of these deep rectangular boxes. I leaped out and spotted a doorway, a French window as they’re also called here, and I stepped into what looked like a shop with a woman and a dog beside her. She looked towards me as if she were expecting me and said ‘Well done! You’ve pulled through. Follow me.’

She led the way with her dog out of this ‘shop’ to a path in the middle of tall grasses…

It was quite puzzling at first but as I walked with it I realised what it was about.

A few days before at a craniosacral postgrad seminar organised and hosted by Jane Shaw of the Elmfield Institute (1) we had talked at length about the trickster energy of liminal places, the domain and chief characteristic of the messenger God Hermes, one you know I am particularly fond of if you read my previous blogs.

The floating trees embody that very trickster energy I am lured by and fall for. It is one that leads me astray from the dominating paradigm of what we call ‘normality’ to land in this liminal, queer world of possibility: one that is peopled by the surreal, the unexpected and the wild, the monstrous. One that can set off fear and anxiety because it feels unsafe, threatening, overwhelming but one that can also point to a path, a direction home, to wholeness.

Why were we talking about Hermes the trickster of the in-between?

Because we were exploring the microcosm of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes that become our microbiome, and live in our gut walls and membranes as well as our lungs, hair and skin and maybe even our brains, and how it affects our health and our connection with the macrocosm of life on Earth within the infinite cosmos.

It has been said before, our organism is a planet that is host to trillions of strange inhabitants living in symbiotic relationships within our cells and fascia. The more bio-diverse these 'guests', the healthier we are.

I personally feel and see this as a massive playground, a slightly dizzying and exciting gigantic maze, a communal microcosmic chaos of monstrous proportions, that supports and nurtures life, without which we could not survive. It is an intrinsic and intricate part of who we are and how we relate to the world we live in.

These microorganisms metabolise other forms of life that feed us. They also play an essential role in our immune system.

They are the messengers between the substantial out there and the particular in here.

They are our constant gardeners; the ‘punk’, anarchist type, not the ‘classical’ kind you may enjoy in the formal landscaping at the palace of Versailles.

This microcosm includes bacteria, fungi (yeasts and moulds), viruses and bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria and can help maintain our gut balance).

Microbiome analyst and craniosacral therapist Viola Sampson (2) speaks passionately of this 'forgotten organ’ whose significance and impact on our overall health has been the subject of regular breakthrough discoveries in the last two decades.

She explains how, from life in the womb onwards, our microbiome is ‘seeded’ first through our umbilical cord and the placenta, then via our landing on earth when the birth canal gifts us with our mother’s vaginal flora.

Like our mother and father, these trillions of invisible creatures are our primary care givers.

Like the magical folk presiding over the successful birth and lives of princesses in tales, they are family.

Viola explains how this ‘metabolome' or the overall balance of these microbial species in our microbiome is a complex ecosystem which will continue to form up to three years after birth through healthy exposure to the land.

Toddlers instinctively know to play with soil, puddles of water, and just about anything that adults usually view as ‘dirty’. This interaction is a healthy attraction that will result in a more diverse microbiome and stronger health and immunity, especially important if you were born via cesarian delivery.

The more diverse this invisible family is, the greater the range of responses to different situations and the more possibilities to transform, adapt and evolve.

Like Irish philosopher John Moriarty(3) intimating us to remember our fundamentally therianthropic nature, a knowing woven in multiple myths and lore throughout the ages, our microbiota are this pool of wild monsters that have constantly shape shifted and mutated since the dawn of life on Earth.

They are the threads to our early ancestors, like the precursors of life on this planet: fungi.

The threads of fungi are multitudinous hyphae, networks of infinity in the making called mycelium. They elongate at whim attracted by ‘food’ and bioelectric signals. They adapt and change direction as they grow, constantly in process in the most unpredictable manner and entering into all sorts of symbiotic partnerships or mutual aid type of exchanges as they do.

As biologist and fungi-lover, Merlin Sheldrake, author of the fabulous Entangled Life says,

”Mycelium is a way of life that challenges our animal imagination.” It “ceaselessly wanders beyond its limits”. (4)

“Mycelium is ecological connective tissue,” he adds.

Like quantum diffraction, it completely escapes human apprehension. “Mycelial coordination takes place everywhere at once.”

They are the beginnings and the endings but even this linear and ‘finite’ vocabulary falls short of their endless meanderings because their mode of being is profoundly circular, queer and often surprising.

Fungi and other microbes were the first forms of life on earth and will no doubt outlive us.

Fungi’s association with algae about 420 million years ago created the conditions for the first plants to grow on land. Thanks to this ’coupling’ a few hundred million years later dinosaurs roamed the land among trees and other plants.

Fungi survived the asteroid strike that wiped out 70 percent of life on Earth. They literally ‘cleaned up’ the mess left by this catastrophe as they processed the decaying dead and allowed new life to spring forth. The mammals who had survived were able to live alongside fungi thanks to their body temperature.(5)

Fungi are the ultimate tricksters, the connectors per excellence. They bear all the qualities of omniscient, omnipresent and very playful gods in my personal cosmology.

So it is not surprising that fungi are all over and within our organisms. Their spores fall from the air on our skin and yeasts and moulds inhabit our gut and fascia nourishing us, and helping us to maintain a metabolic balance.

In fact, according to the majority of anthropological research, our ‘partnership’ with yeast is what sealed our evolutionary trajectory from nomadic hunter gatherers to more sedentary agriculturalists (5).

Merlin Sheldrake explains how about ten million years ago, ADH4, the enzyme used to digest the alcohol generated by rotting fruits fallen on the ground mutated to become forty times more efficient, thus allowing our primate ancestors to come down from trees and feed from these easy pickings.

It is thought that as a result apes spent more time on forest floors and slowly evolved to become humanoids.

“Long before our ancestors became human and long before we evolved stories to make cultural and spiritual sense of alcohol and the cultures of yeast that produce it, we evolved the enzymes that make metabolic sense of them.” (4)

If these micro organisms show anything it is that we are not in control, we can only influence and optimise the conditions to maximise the potential of our metabolism.

We can have a “conversation with our microbiome through the food we eat,” Viola Sampson says. Part of the key stimuli for such playful chat is immersing oneself within the wild we co-evolved from and are intimately bonded to through our inner jungles. Viola explains that foraging for wild foods that are rich in polyphenols like elderberries and blackberries for example is particularly beneficial because it feeds ‘good’ bacteria in our large intestine.

We are literally what and how we eat and each microbiome is unique.

For this very reason Viola adds that a treatment like craniosacral therapy is just the ticket since our balance-creating microorganisms are in constant flux, a fluidity that needs to be supported and facilitated rather than arbitrarily controlled.

CST encourages this allowing adaptability and does not function on the premise that we know what’s best for the person we make gentle contact with.

In the biodynamic form of this therapy, each individual organism decides on the course of events through the body’s higher Intelligence. There is an inner Knowing translated in tissues and fluids, that creates space for transformation, for the fabulous trickstery of transmutation to slowly and naturally occur while the practitioner holds and facilitates this change.

We trust in this process because of its boundless wisdom harking back as it does to the dawn of life itself.

According to evolutionary biologist Rob Dunn, in the current medical context, we target the ‘bad’ (bacteria or virus) that makes us sick by ‘killing’ it. But we don't have"much of a framework" for the "idea that something good is missing and that it makes us sick"(5).

Our microbiome is very much the new frontier, an unknown ‘planet’ we are only relatively recently exploring and discovering. One that we have disconnected from just like we have cut ourselves off from the microbial world we came from in the wild. It’s no accident that a rekindling of interest in wild foraging coincides with these new discoveries at a time when this awareness and apprehension of our bodies as ecosystems within the wider ecosystem of our great Biosphere is crucial for our survival.

At a time of massive loss of species and biodiversity.

At a time when an exponential rise in allergies and immune-depressant chronic diseases, rooted in excessive inflammation and imbalances in our organisms, comes as a direct result of “our isolation away from the microbes we’ve evolved with.” (5)

Viola Sampson says that just like there is irreversible damage in our environment, there are also microorganisms that have forever disappeared, some whose story we no doubt never got to hear or explore.

So it is indeed a form of ‘punk’ gardening that is needed to match and meet the wonderfully messy and chaotic wild of the land, of our land. Classical landscaping and ultra hygienic living destroy the diversity we need to thrive.

I quite like that there is a bacterium called ‘the gardener’ maintaining the integrity and quality of our gut linings. She (I can't help imagining her as a feminine entity) is named Akkermansia. She likes it when we intermittently fast, Viola explains, because she can tend better to our garden during this slow downtime.

Groundbreaking researcher, biologist and author Lynn Margulis speaks of “the intimacy of strangers” when it comes to symbiosis and how two, or more very different organisms can associate and cooperate to transform and adapt to new environments (6).

An intimacy that is not so far removed and is still consciously present in indigenous populations around the world. In Ireland, the ancient reference to the Other World-- a magic realm of 'other folk' and ever-lasting life set beneath the ground that one can ‘visit’ through special portals in cave/womb-like structures when the veil is thin at Samhain -- is a great reminder of this ancestral conversation with the invisible forces of the wild.

We are slowly reviving this intimacy in many domains of life, a threading of a new wonder-filled path that gives hope to Viola Sampson as “it can break down artificial barriers between medical microbiology and environmental microbiology.” So that Health can be apprehended through the prism of the “global community of the living”, not in isolation.

We are holobionts, a collection of a host and many living species, and microbial diversity attract us as much as we attract it. Life revolves around it.

Lynn Margulis has these beautiful words,” We animals, all thirty million species of us, emanate from the microcosm. The microbial world, the source and wellspring of soil and air, informs our own survival.”(6)

The quality of potency of our internal microcosm is intricately interwoven within the macrocosm we live in. It is also very much dependent on it.

I remember the dream and wonder are we ready to go astray from a fast road leading straight to catastrophe and instead become 'lost' as fugitive tricksters at one with the wild?

Are we ready to surrender and fall for this inherent attraction that animates us and has always been within us? This intimacy with invisible monsters?

I know I am like you, somewhat afraid and uneasy around uncertainty and just like in the dream I tend to run away from it. But maybe this frantic 'fugitivity' (7) is really an escaping from both the inevitability of complete collapse and extinction (as symbolised by these dinosaur-like creatures) and our ongoing fast-paced suicidal growth.

Others like Nigerian philosopher and author Bayo Akomolafe (7) have spoken of a “third way”, the way of the 'Middle', the way of ‘pisar suave’, treading slowly and lightly in Spanish,

Just like fungi filaments,

Just like Akkermansia,

Just like the other folk of our underworld

Oh and did I say that the dog I walked behind amidst tall grasses at the end of the dream was an Irish Wolfhound? The hound of Cuchulainn, the famous Irish hero of mythical lore.

Meanwhile Hermes the Trickster keeps playing their tune… while symbiotic tricks shape us.

Notes and references:

1- For more on courses offered by Jane Shaw at the Elmfield Institute see www.elmfieldinstitute.com

2- Viola Sampson made a presentation on the microbiome as part of the seminar mentioned in the ongoing series From Earth Mother to Birth Mother hosted by Elmfield. For more information on Viola's work see www.violasampson.com

3- From the wonderful Dreamtime by John Moriarty

4- From the excellent Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

5- From a series of two documentaries called Life on Us that can be viewed here:http://www.smithandnasht.com/life-on-us

6- From the brilliant Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis.

7- I am currently enjoying the sensuously exciting and insightful exploration hosted by Bayo Akomolafe: We Will Dance With Mountains see https://course.bayoakomolafe.net/ and highly recommend his book These Wilds Beyond our Fences.

I feel some of the physiological and emotional sensations of my clients in my own body during a biodynamic craniosacral (BCS)session. The more I practise the more sensitive I become to what I perceive in my clients' organism, and in the world around and within me.

I have felt my client’s tears rising in my eyes on a few occasions. I have sensed their terror as well as their pains, their aches and how they gave way to spacious fluidity and even joyous buoyancy.

I have questioned this ‘mirroring’, this feeling what my clients feel. My reasoning mind called it projection, bias, personal reading at first. But the more I practised the more I realised that trusting this intuitive inner Knowing, as opposed to the knowing of an intellectual mind, was an essential part of my holding and of my allowing my client to in turn trust their journey home.

But this of course raises questions for any practitioner, particularly new ones: to what extent when holding another’s stories are you also holding your own?

To what extent can this skilled holding of resonances enable or disable a breakthrough in your client?

In the words of BCST teacher and practitioner Margaret Rosenau(1), “ It is normal in this work for practitioners to feel within themselves some of the physiological and emotional experiences of their clients while they are on the table. It is part of the territory. The magic of BCST includes the practitioner’s ability to sense exquisitely, including often what a client is sensing when the client is sensing it.”

We’re in the embryological, pre-verbal body world here. No words needed. All challenging by my mind’s “Loyal Soldier”(2) be gone. The words themselves especially if they are overtly critical are an expression of a pattern of self-defense, a protection which points to a past unresolved story that needs to be aired and met in personal therapy and/or supervision.

The more I am able to hold, the more my client is able to enjoy the safe anchoring gifted by these resolved spaces and feel the practitioner’s strong supporting presence. The more they can trust their body’s inner Knowing and let go of their own familiar patterns of protective holding back, of restrictive guarding.

This is such a mysterious and wondrous phenomenon.

One that BCST and pre and perinatal therapist Cherionna Menzam Sills(3) echoes: “I frequently find my heart deeply touched, even to the point of tears, by the client’s history or process. My clients mostly come to me because of my specialty in pre- and perinatal experience. It is not unusual for me to feel like I am holding a tiny little one just born or still in the womb. Often the client also feels this little. This is always a tender, heartwarming experience. I love letting myself be touched in this way.”

A few days ago I was walking in my village along an enchanting path full of fairy houses. The sweet people who built these houses around tree trunks were no doubt in great terms with the other folk, and also placed some signs with words telling the names of each in-dwelling sídhe (pronounced shi, Irish for otherworldly folk) as well as their ‘purpose’ or intentional journey. Through their protective presence, they were helping to pollinate, to nourish, to guard against disease, to heal and enable balance, harmony.

I was there with a friend and her five-year-old daughter(4) who literally lit up at the sight of each new house, and proceeded to go and knock on every door she saw to ‘wake up’ the sídhe, maybe in the hope of a response but more surely for the sheer fun of it.

As I witnessed this little one’s rush of glee at each new discovery of a house with a front door, an entrance, I too felt my heart leap and loved her complete abandon to the power of wonder. We followed her without words directed at her, letting her do her thing, and leading the pacing. The only ask was that her mother read out each sign, and then, and only then, could we move on.

Thinking back on this magical wandering, I perceive how this very much reflects the spacious holding mentioned above and how the boundaries it included were crucial to its allowing enchantment.

For if we had interfered or voiced out loud our own emotions, our own surprise instead of merely witnessing, and gently inviting as we saw each new door for her to knock on; this would have skewed the process and changed the dynamics, directing them by adding our own stories to the mix, in a way that could well have disabled the integrity and complete ‘owning’ of this little one’s journey of fascination.

The doors were sometimes quite high above the path and demanded a fair bit of scrambling amidst roots, clay, and stones. I could feel my protective patterns play out within me and no doubt her mother did too as we exchanged understanding eye contact but we did not interrupt the expression of this wonder-filled courage with our fears.

We also intuitively knew she was safe. We held these emotions and, as we did, we facilitated the whole to come through. I had the sense that this brave five-year-old pixy was on a heroine’s journey, to borrow (and adjust) Joseph Campbell’s words (5), fired up by her boundless determination and thrill, she was easily overcoming all her disabling emotions.

It did not matter that there was no reply of the kind we’d expect, to each of her powerful knocks. The knocking and the journey it took to complete this holy task were enough. Our witnessing her, like a validating of each and every effort was also important.

There were so many lessons and realisations in this witnessing. One of them was the necessity for boundaries.

BCST practitioner and teacher Scott Zamurut(6) speaks to this: “Sensitivity and perception of our clients inner state(s) is a natural facet of our healing practice, and it requires conscious navigation. Sensing another with our awareness, even through body awareness, is common. While the information gathered can be supportive in holding a safe container, “energetic hygiene” asks us as practitioners to not remain in a resonance with a client that does not disperse or clear as their system clears, and as the session ends. Leftover resonances can be harmful to us as practitioners.

I have found that holding these awarenesses like a homeopathic medicine in which just a small amount of awareness goes a long way works best for my clients, and myself.”

One of the keys of our biodynamic craniosacral allowing container lies indeed in this gentle facilitation of the expression of the subtle ‘unlocking’ of restrictions so that the living organisms of each body can ‘test’ possibilities to then let go to a fuller manifestation of the Intelligence in the tissues and fluids.

In my experience, each session is a gradual un-layering of set patterns of protection, a slow revelation of centres of inertia that each holds a story that may but not always, be expressed verbally. There are many storeys to a person's story and each voyage of discovery is unique to each individual.

This is another lesson of our work which I can relate to the wonder-walk-and-knock tale, there is no attachment to an outcome. We encourage a ‘knocking’ that is the expression of our “Knowing” and trust each dance, each emotion. Never mind if words are not spoken. Never mind if emotions that I feel in one’s chest are not ‘released’. These can manifest in other ways: a change in temperature, tingles, images, memories…In time words may come and emotions can be owned like a reclaiming of one's territory.

Scott Zamurut explains, “Since we are speaking of Biodynamic healing it is essential to remember that the resolution of inertia releases bound energies of emotion, thought, memory, and so forth, and that these phenomena will pass through a clients mind/body as they resolve.

More than this it is the Breath of Life which is the agency of healing, not us as practitioners. Our role is to support the clearing of biokinetic forces, which does include helping our client’s personality to meet their process with openness and courage.”

This unwavering support is what allows surrender to our body’s wisdom to safely unfold and re-organise, revive, and restore.

There was clearly facilitation of ‘ignition’ in this young child. Prior to this walk, she had been quite distraught and distressed. Our stepping back to hold and invite while creating the conditions for the magic of wonder to emerge turned her upset and her need to shelter in her mother’s arms into an intrepid, trusting, and glowing presence. It was such a joy to behold and resonate with.

Resonance is also something crucial to our practice. But as mentioned before it needs boundaries in order to flourish.

“The magic of BCST includes the practitioner’s ability to sense exquisitely, including often what a client is sensing when the client is sensing it. In my experience, boundaries and resonance are not mutually exclusive. I believe having a strong sense of boundaries and a clear sense of resonance are essential practitioner skills,” says Margaret Rosenau.

In my experience boundaries fuel my sense of awe. This grounded fascination would cease were I to interfere or suddenly give in to my emotions, startle or freeze with overwhelm. This awe is the voice of my trusting in my Knowing. As I anchor in my midline, I feel the force of a boundless creative impetus that is my client’s inner Intelligence unfurl more freely.

That is why personal work on our own developmental stories and patterns is essential and also why supervision is necessary for a balanced and allowing interchange, a freeing resonance between practitioner and client.

Cherionna Menzam-Sills recalls, “There are also times that the specifics or intensity of a client’s history resonate with something of my own. I am grateful that I have done enough work with myself to be able to resource and take care of my own little one, if that is who is involved. I see it as important to maintain a professional boundary as practitioner. I can feel and have empathy but I don’t want to get lost in history, either my own or the client’s. I also am careful not to share my own experience or history unless it is clear that it can benefit the client to hear this. If I have a need to share for myself, I hold this for my supervision or personal therapy.

I learned from Ray Castellino the importance of having layers of support, both in relation to pregnancy and birth and in relation to life. My supervisor and therapist offer additional layers of support. In my supervision practice, I have frequently seen how the practitioner having processed or integrated something that was activated in relation to a client can lead to profound changes for the client in the next session. “

The more I do this personal exploration and unveiling, meeting my own patterns, my birth and pre-natal story, my life's traumas, the more I can hold others' in my practice while also resonating and enabling.

The more I am met while talking about these unresolved traumas with my supervisor, the more I can allow my client to speak and reveal, to let emotions emerge and express freely as they change.

The more I receive biodynamic craniosacral sessions the more my awareness of my own body's patterns, inertial fulcra, and subtle dances, grows and the more these patterns and fulcra can more readily resolve too.

The more I can hold, the more I can track and 'follow' to its source, to the original blueprint of the body.

The more I come to life and rejoice in what makes me happy, the more I can hold these possibilities in others.

The more permissive the hold, the more powerfully potent the session in my experience.

But this also applies to our listening before and after a hands-on session. Establishing the relational safety necessary for our client to be able to resource and trust the process requires that we meet every word, every emotion, every story no matter how harrowing with a supportive presence.

If we have not disentangled our own core trauma stories we could well be activated by aspects of our clients'. This in turn impacts the quality of the session. Even if we feel we can contain our emotional reactions, our bodies communicate at a subtle level, one that is often unknown to our conscious minds.

This sensitivity is particularly high amongst babies and children, something I noticed when I began working as a BCST: I had trouble holding babies' emotional outbursts following a significant release and was personally activated by their intensity.

This activation was an invitation to explore my own traumatic birth story more deeply, something I have done in different therapeutic settings and will continue to do.

Scott Zamurut says, "In regards to our own unresolved material lighting up during a session, we can note what is arising and make note to bring it to supervision or personal healing sessions of our own. In my experience allowing my material to be active within the relational field does not serve my client in their healing, nor me in mine. Clear boundaries and containment of personal material is an essential dimension of energy hygiene."

I am now more able to anchor and hold these expressions while also connecting with mother and allowing baby to complete their process instead of disabling it because of my own confused traumatic resonance. Baby knows when I rest fully in the Knowing mentioned above. It's quite magical really. I have felt a 'yes, I'm with you, thank you', in simple eye contacts with babies that did not need spoken words. But babies also appreciate our spoken acknowledging of their emotions and what they have been through as pre and perinatal therapists such as Cherionna Menzam Sills remind us.

This is also the case for children and adults may I add. Validating someone's upset, anger, or terror is part of this seeing, hearing and 'reconnaissance' (literally knowing again or re-knowing in French which translates poorly as acknowledgment) that we all crave, especially if our trauma stories include neglect and abandonment.

"Client and practitioner share an energetic field. We cannot help but influence each other. As social humans, we need that influencing. We need to be heard, seen and felt. When I allow myself to deeply feel in resonance with the client, it offers a reflection we all need as little ones and may not have received. Seeing, hearing and feeling our clients with professional boundaries in place can provide reflection along with containment that fosters safety and trust." (3)

With each new step taken on our journey back to full aliveness, we more trustingly enter into its magic, we feel a whole spectrum of emotions that had laid hidden and were restricted, and our awareness can more readily and confidently hold the multicoloured ways our bodies' organisms express.

As Margaret says, "Practitioners must know their own sensations and emotions to be able to determine whether what they are sensing belongs to them, to the client, or both. We do this well when we can also feel ourselves as distinct from our clients, simultaneously aware of them and of our own emotions, and our triggers and history. Seasoned practitioners know the difference between resonating and merging, because they’ve experienced both. They know how to shift their attention away from the strong physical or emotional pull of another’s story to their own midlines. They’ve traveled the path between their wounds and their healed places more times than they can count. This territory takes practice to navigate, but it is precisely this navigation that makes us skilled practitioners."

Light is made more visible in the dark

Holding all this resonance with life

The nuances that make the whole

Becoming ever more salient

As midline aligns and reorganises

With porous dark filling with light

Our inner skins glowing inside out

Basking in a still unfurling nectar

While leaves gently rustling in the wind

Whisper 'welcome back to life'

Notes and references:

1- Margaret Rosenau is a teacher and biodynamic craniosacral therapist. See more at www.schoolofinnerhealth.org

2- See more on such archetypes in Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin

3- Cherionna Menzam Sills is a teacher, a pre and perinatal, and biodynamic craniosacral therapist. She is the author of Spirit into Form: Exploring Embryological Potential & Prenatal Psychology.

See more at birthingyourlife.org

4- Gratitude and deep thanks to my friend for allowing me to use her daughter's story

5- See The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell

6- Scott Zamurut is a teacher and biodynamic craniosacral therapist. See more at https://www.scottzamurut.com/

Like the innate, inherent wisdom, or Intelligence of our earth bodies.

Untamed and raw, this wild context allowed for reverence and awe to colour each and every experience, every witnessing. Many times have I knelt down and placed my hands on the soil, on the land as I would on a body to listen, to feel and receive the ages, the presences of so much that could not be named, to which I could only give in, cede, surrender.

It is a place out of time and yet it is profoundly, intimately shaped and eroded, sculpted, conditioned by its patina. It is host to countless fascinating myths and stories that often mirror the colossal nature of its rugged majesty and/or the infinite sensuality of its heavenliness.

It is enchanted and enchanting. I sit and I pray so easily there. I sit and I hear the waves of yesterday mingling with present and future ones. I am moved to tears by what feels like sanctuary: the solid certainty offered by these giants inviting me to fold and unfold into their mystery.

The spacious holding of the land deeply affects and informs my holding of bodies. I too am sculpted and weathered by its multiple influences. These regular immersions have steeped me within the 'deep slow' that is required of us biodynamic craniosacral practitioners, when we humbly sit by and make gentle contact with the holy land of another living organism to listen, witness, and facilitate change.

It is probably no accident that on my return from Donegal a week ago, I found that I had received a copy of Fulcrum, the magazine of my professional association- The Craniosacral Therapy Association (CSTA, https://www.craniosacral.co.uk/) —in which was published an article I had submitted some months before about the time factor in biodynamic craniosacral sessions.

With kind permission from Helena Swahn, the Editor of Fulcrum, I have reproduced it below (with added photos I took in Donegal and Wicklow) and hope you will find it useful.

I was gazing at the ocean earlier today. I breathed with waves as they majestically heaved and rolled, slowly unfurled. I felt their levity before they crashed on the shore, merging into stillness at the top of their exhale for a few seconds, before inhaling again.

I thought of William Garner Sutherland contemplating the sea and wondered what he felt when he named the rhythm breathing our fluid bodies ‘the Tide’.

I am grateful for Dr Sutherland’s pioneering vision which gifted future practitioners with a non-linear, non-dualistic window through which we can perceive away from a medical paradigm centred on ‘doing’ and steeped in linear time and space.

Which is why I have often wondered how do we fit into time and space the felt experience of a clinical session that is clearly boundless? The spatial boundary is not constraining as we are trained to widen our perceptive field as far as the Moon and back, so there is no limitation there.

But what about the time construct?

I was taught that a treatment session should last 45 minutes to an hour long. This was applied at our students’ clinics and during our practice sessions. On entering professional practice with the same framework, I invariably found that treatments felt forced and rushed, especially as the ‘after chat’ – as essential to my practice as the initial check-in – was cut short. I found that my sessions would invariably last an extra 15 to 20 minutes sometimes even 30 but I was still charging for a standard one-hour session.

I began to feel dissatisfied with this framework. We are not “fix it” people. We are not ‘completing’ a process. We are beholders witnessing and supporting an incredibly powerful unfolding, a kind of homecoming, as Dr Rollin Becker would say with his expression: “The boss has come home (1).

In my experience, a spacious and easeful before, during and after is key for the relational field to be continuous, and allowing of the free expression of this higher Intelligence of the body-mind complex. I have had many a client new to CST return to their ‘before’ chair with enthused and awed facial expressions wondering “what was that?”. Needing time to feel into their refreshed or brand new embodied presence in a sitting and standing position to enable a safe bridging process.

It is true that words fall short when speaking to what is fundamentally quite mysterious and ineffable. I find that even sitting in silence for a few minutes, hearing some words around how they feel, offering some suggestions to continue to resource and help them find support within their body, can help a client to meet the world again from a place where ‘integration’ into the every day is much more likely to complete itself with ease.

Some clients also need their experience to be ‘translated’ into some sort of physiological terminology they can relate to and this can also take time.

I have also found that these clearly differentiated parts of a session are instrumental to creating boundaries between therapist and client – clear separations that need time to be felt.

I liken a treatment session — this reconnecting to one’s original blueprint, to the primordial embryological forces of creation itself — to a sacred ceremony that calls for an opening and closing.

To honour this, about two years ago I decided to offer longer one hour thirty minutes sessions at a different price to some of my clients whose conditioning life history requested more time to feel safe enough to surrender to the process.

This option was taken by all the clients I offered it to and proved the right choice as their physiology responded expansively to this additional time, like the creation of permission for a new possibility to unfold. It was not just about safety, it also added to the caring quality of the slow pacing of the container itself.

Then, about a year ago, a client and BCST practitioner* visiting Ireland actually requested five two-hour sessions on consecutive days.

Part of me was delighted, and part of me was concerned about his ability to integrate from one day to the next. He reassured me affirming he had done this before and even had several three-hour sessions.

This journey proved quite incredible: I witnessed probably some of the deepest, most potent expressions of dynamic stillness and tidal reorganisation so far.

His story was rich with pre-natal, birth, life and ancestral trauma that had generated quite a few fulcra and holding patterns.

My notes speak of: “a deepening into a revelation of patterns. Amazing multiplicity of centres of evolution and life. So many dances!”, or of, “a slow layering of physiological and emotional unfoldings with phased ignitions of the brainstem, heart and umbilicus, “one after the other with distinct intensities.”

The more we delved, the more the field widened to encompass the objects and nature around us. I could perceive the resolution of the ‘pixellation’ of field particles gradually sharpen while the Intelligence within reorganised, and the Breath of Life pervaded the whole to settle into dynamic stillness.

He spoke of his joy at “having found stillness again after losing it five or six years ago.”

I felt a “moving in closer and closer”, a honing in on subtle details while also maintaining a wide perceptive field. This allowed for an “elasticity of space and time, of consciousness itself. A sense of objects themselves being animated with presence, with a sense of scintillating potency,” as Sutherland’s ‘Lighthouse Beam’ (2) lit up what was too dense to see clearly, highlighting all the “spaces in between”. My whole ‘planted’ being bowed at the potent levity expressed in this body.

On a few occasions I perceived what felt like a “fifth phase of water (3), between fluid and gas as air becomes more tangible and connects with the fluids through a skin that is at its most permeable when in dynamic stillness.”

At the end of the third session I wrote: “Longer is definitely so much better, because we’re edging ever closer to source, to the embryonic original blueprint, in a time that is not framed by the reductionist referential points of a dualist and linear paradigm”.

While extraordinarily rich, the sessions proved overwhelming at times. During the fourth session my client admitted to being “frightened about the new him, how to be in the world without the familiar patterns”. In response I oriented towards an even more spacious and more rooted hold, and the ‘buzz’ of overwhelm slowly dimmed and dissipated bringing us back into the “resourced effortlessness of the blue yonder.”

Would I do this again in hindsight?

Under the right circumstances, yes. Not sure this is needed as I am answering in paragraph below?

I found that it takes a tremendous amount of skill and resources for a client to witness and stay present with such depth and intensity of reorganising in such a concentrated timeframe. This client was a BCST practitioner well used to longer sessions and to exploring a variety of other alternative modalities. Yet I would ask for more time in between to allow for more integration. We are trained in the art of titration after all, which ensures as little overwhelm as possible.

Personally, these sessions could not have happened at a better time because my practice was gradually re-emerging from four months of lockdown which I experienced as an extraordinarily resourcing and spacious time thanks to regular immersive intimacy with nature and with creative expression. Therefore my grounded and ultra-resourced holding was deeply satisfied with this opportunity and was able to meet my client in each moment.

I experienced a complete disappearance of that time factor and with it a liberation of the body’s Intelligence and a much more fluid inherent treatment process.

Experiment with time

I know that longer session models do not fit every practitioner or clients’ financial and practical constraints, and it is also true that many sessions do indeed naturally ‘complete’ within a shorter timeframe. But I wonder would some clients choose to explore longer, less time-constrained sessions?

I like the flexibility of choice and continue to offer different time frames. I still run over time on a regular basis, content in allowing and exploring possibilities, not forcing anything.

This article is humbly throwing a ball to invite a ‘play’ with time to match our expansive space continuum. It is also an invitation to recent graduates in the field to experiment and freely settle into what feels best for them. If there is one thing this amazing modality teaches it is that there can never be one mould that fits all.

As my former tutors write in Cranial Intelligence: “We see biodynamic craniosacral therapy as an endless dance between you and your clients. It can be constantly refined and you will be constantly challenged to develop your skills to work with a wider range of people and their conditions. Just when you think you have got it, the next client who walks through the door will show you something new.”(4)

* Deep gratitude to this client for allowing me to quote my notes and write of this experience.

Notes and references:

(1)- The Stillness of Life, Dr Rollin Becker, 2000

(2)- Contributions of Thought, Dr William Garner Sutherland, 1998

(3)- Gerald Pollack discovered the Fourth Phase of Water, see book of the same name, 2013.

(4)- Cranial Intelligence, Steve Haines and Ged Sumner, 2010.

The first time I placed my hands on someone’s ankles as part of a practice session, our tutor Colin Perrow invited us to pay attention, to notice any figure, image, shape, smell or any sensation we felt. I remember distinctly that a ‘parabolic highway with a slight curve at the top’ came to my perceptive field and I had no clue what it was.

Colin encouraged me to draw it and I duly did. A few months later as we were studying the viscera, there it was that exact outline: the peritoneum, the fascia protective suit or membrane surrounding our gut, liver, stomach, spleen, gallbladder and pancreas.

I was dumbstruck, and I will never forget Colin’s words: “Trust your intuition. Trust what you see and feel” and I’m paraphrasing here but he would add that no matter how outlandish the image, the scent, the sensation trust it. Listen to it.

(photo courtesy of Elise Desmet)

This was our first seminar and it was the perfectly right moment to tell us this, to entice us away from over relying on our cerebral cortex and our intellect, the one part of us that is so overstimulated from our days in school.

Reasoning and learning have their place but I soon realised that in our practice, intuitive and instinctive awareness are essential. They communicate with our intellect in a holistic manner, like equally important parts of a whole, and they reinforce and reinvigorate one another.

It is so easy to doubt one’s intuition when our educational system is so hooked on the reasoning mind and we are taught from a young age to disbelieve what is not tangible.

Colin would also explain how he could ‘see’ what was unfolding beneath the skin, it just came to him in different ways that he was opened to receiving.

I was fascinated by what at first felt like supernatural abilities. But as I continued on this path, I realised that far from being ‘airy fairy’ this sensuous perception is deeply anchored in the tangibility of the body.

It is a form of deep listening to a world of signs, symbols, images and sensations that craniosacral practitioners learn to ‘track’ and decipher by immersing themselves into a contact with bodies that is at once very gentle and respectful of boundaries and yet extraordinarily perceptive and gifted with astounding acuity.

When asked about this experience, Ryan Halford of the Craniosacral podcast (1) also speaks about the natural kinship we develop with the forms of the body and their language:

“I know what a liver is because I speak its language. I know its form. I know where it came from, and I know what it seeks to do in the body. I've spent time with many livers over a span of decades, so we have some familiarity.”

“When I am awake and attentive, the client's body speaks to me and tells me important stories that have been locked away, hidden ... unacknowledged. Healing brings the light of consciousness to these stories. They emerge through shapes, shifting tensions, wave forms, vibrations, memory, emotional tone, and many other variables that permeate the fluids, membranes, and ether of the body space. It is endlessly fascinating and beautiful ... an ongoing saga of humanity's struggle to find balance and peace.”

We track the unseen and this unseen speaks to us from a particular perspective as we remain as neutral as possible in our non-doing.

I quite like French philosopher Baptiste Morizot’s reference to animal trackers as “diplomats towards the living” with “relational powers” that are used to “dive irremediably among them, in their midst.” (2)

(photo courtesy of Elise Desmet)

A craniosacral therapist in many ways is also this diplomat endowed with what may seem to the neophyte incredible ‘powers’ but which are really everyone’s “birthright” as Ryan adds.

Another BCS practitioner, Scott Zamurut (3) says that, “Specialized perception is an inherent capacity of human beings, and it can be cultivated through practice, training, and the clearing of interfering obstacles. Just as a wine sommelier can identify the county or village in France where the grapes for a particular vintage are grown, we as Biodynamic practitioners can cultivate a perception of the various anatomical terrains of body physiology to a very fine degree.”

A diplomat immersing himself and ‘seeing’ with the eyes of the creature they track, adjusting their perception to sense from another’s perspective. As Ryan Halford explains:

“Most of us living in modern civilizations are out of touch with our capacity for deep sensing. We don't really need access to our deepest organic senses because so many of life's basic needs are provided to us fairly easily. When we go out into nature and experience the wildness of the world we begin to get back in touch with our more primitive capacities. It is there in nature that we are reminded of our capacity to feel in layers and see the underlying movements of consciousness through space. We notice subtleties that provide clarity, enabling us to better understand what is within us and around us. It is our natural state to see clearly.”

I have taken to tracking in the nearby forest after training with professional tracker Lucy O'Hagan (4), and noticed how, like in a craniosacral session, there is a natural ‘decentering’ occuring in that “I” becomes part of a multirelational universe where I listen to the signs left by the ‘invisibles’. It is as if I were ‘in the body’ of the animals I track while at the same time listening to what my own body feels and to the surrounds, the plants, the trees, the wind, the scents, the soil. The tracker becomes part of a constellation of symbols they can ‘read’.

(photo courtesy of Lucy O'Hagan, look closely you will see a badger)

Morizot speaks about “awakening the eye of the spirit” that many indigenous tribes refer to.

Teacher and BCS practitioner Margaret Rosenau (5) says: “I remember the first time I saw the Grand Canyon in someone’s spine. The recognizable span of space between vermillion cliff walls, the blue of the Colorado River far below. The Grand Canyon was teaching me about potency, showing me that the potency had retreated in this person, like the river far below. My first impulse was to convince the potency to rise towards me. But the canyon said no, descend. Go to the place where the potency is. Don’t ask it to come to you. Don’t convince it to do anything. This person has already done that for too long. Be with their depletion. Deal with your discomfort. Know their Health is present, recognize that their potency is still available. Recognize the potential wherever it is and magnify it. Exhale. Nothing is yours to fix. Everything is already whole.”

This “awakening of the eye of the spirit” is what Colin Perrow was talking about without using the same words: allowing an adventurous mapping, one that has never been done before each and every time we hold a new living organism.

A mapping that brings the Grand Canyon to Margaret or that sends the Milky Way to my inner eye, as the spiralling galaxies I often see in bodies tell me of a return of Health expressing along midlines or in places that once were inertial fulcra.

This perception feels extraordinary in a profoundly disconnected world but it is ‘normal’ to indigenous tribes who are at one with the land and ‘dream’ it with ease.

I am forever an apprentice of the bodies I hold. I trust my intuitive and instinctive awareness more and more each time and I am astounded by the ‘results’.

As Ryan says, “Craniosacral therapists are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet. Not only do we stay in regular contact with the constantly-shifting material landscape of biology, organic life, and space itself through our senses, but we do it from a place of stillness and neutrality. This life path facilitates the re-emergence of our deep natural capacities, which are the birthright of all of humanity. This birthright, sadly, is forsaken by the vast majority of people. We are so lucky to be on this professional path of inquiry, for it brings an increasingly vivid experience of life.”

I am in a constant state of awe when I hold a body whose Health speaks to me fluently. I fall in love with the multiplicity of dances and the diversity of unfoldings I witness.

(Photo courtesy of Elise Desmet)

We are drawing from the deep and ancient well of co-evolution with the living and biodynamic craniosacral therapy is an incredible path that can lead us back to our true nature.

Margaret speaks of this consistency, “For many years now, the Grand Canyon comes in into my inner vision whenever a client’s body wants to show me the depletion of its potency. I teach my students what the canyon taught me to do. I teach my students to trust what they see, to know that this kind of sight is part of Craniosacral Therapy and is not just limited to it. I remind them that the kind of knowing and seeing and listening that we do as practitioners of BCST are ancient skills that have been dismissed or buried. But they are not gone. They are right here at our fingertips, in our hands, behind our eyes. They have always been there. It’s time to get to know them and trust them, recognize their and your potential and magnify it. Exhale. Nothing is yours to fix. Everything is already well.”

This trusting the signs has been my guide and my teacher throughout my practice. As Margaret says there is nothing to fix, the organism's Intelligence is the one in charge, the one that communicates with me throughout sessions. I also call it my mentor sometimes. It knows what I don't and often mirrors in my own body what my client feels.

I share with my clients what I feel about a very specific emotional charge or pain, clearing, tension, physiological shift and they invariably confirm what I pinpointed to them. It is such a precious gift and creates such an ineffable bond between practitioner and client, and this mysterious Intelligence that is everywhere in and around us.

Through each body's expression of this universal Intelligence I also receive details of morphology ( I prefer the word morphology to anatomy for a living organism) that inform my facilitation and will engage my perception in a particular way.

For example fascia 'conduction' and connection recently communicated to me that a misalignment in the hip of my client was related to a tilting of her jaw. This client confirmed that she had had ongoing jaw and teeth 'problems' and had been suffering from an ongoing discomfort in the left hip that could become severely painful whenever she would exercise.

As my whole body holding adjusted to include this information I could feel the left hip open while the right softened and slowly began to balance.

I could 'see' as well as feel the protuberance of the iliac crest on the right side adjust downwards while its rigidity dissipated. It even felt less 'sharp' to my perception. I also felt the 'swelling' on her left hip and the tension in her left shoulder and left side of her neck subside gradually as reconnection along the midline took place.

Soon after this was initiated I felt her jaw's relief at being held and supported while it began to realign and set off a whole body reorganisation.

Scott Zamurut explains that, "The continually unfolding discoveries in the study of fascia point to the capacity for our fascial body to transmit information and energy which, along with the rich enervation of our fascial body, may account for a portion of our perceptual sensing in session work."

He relates that, in a recent experience,"While holding a client’s sacrum towards the completion of a session I felt there was still something more her system needed to accomplish. As I sat I became aware of the denticulate ligaments of her pia mater. At first all that came was a knowing, and the words “denticulate ligaments.” Then an image of them appeared in my inner eye (these images often look like Dr. Netter’s paintings), with an embodied sense that I was in touch with this anatomical terrain in her system. Then I felt her system “washing the shock out” of her denticulate ligaments (thanks to Dr. Becker for his description of shock being washing out of tissue by the Breath of Life). Specificity of perception supports healing in a clear and precise manner".

In many ways it is a pity that it should be seen as extraordinary because it places craniosacral therapy in a particular 'niche' and prevents the mainstream 'medical' paradigm from acknowledging how BCST can change people's lives for the better.

But I take comfort in the fact that as we impart our intuitive and instinctive knowledge to our clients, inviting them to re-embody safely while checking in, sharing what we perceive and encouraging them to trust what their awareness is telling them, this becomes part of their living routine, thus re-igniting skills we have been granted since our hunter gatherer ancestors began to hone their tracking cognitive powers.

Notes and references:

1- Ryan Halford is a teacher and BCST practitioner based in Texas. He is the creator of the famous craniosacral podcast see: https://www.craniosacralpodcast.com/

2- Baptiste Morizot, Sur la Piste Animale or On Animal Tracking, Actes Sud, 2018.

3- Scott Zamurut is a teacher and BCST practitioner based in New Mexico, see www.scottzamurut.com

4- For more on what Lucy O’Hagan offers see www.wildawake.ie

5- Margaret Rosenau is a teacher and a BCST practitioner based in Denver, Colorado, see https://www.schoolofinnerhealth.org/

In other words would you hold the whole as well as its many parts and would you also relate it to its history, its geographical and social context, its ecology, its cosmology? How this country speaks its own indigenous languages within coordinates that are not set in time and space but forever in movement, and requiring constant re-appraisal and deep listening beneath the surface ‘noise’ to hear what the stars have to say, what the fungi, the bacteria, the pericardium as it relates to the remainder of our fascia suit, this entanglement of tissues shaping our middle?

This mode of ‘governing’ is not the one we're familiar with, there would not be rules from on high, instead the 'grassroots' of a wild prairie would prevail, with all their co-evolutive aliveness deeply engaged and ingrained within the wider community of the living, in perpetual becoming. There could not be set borders but boundaries shifting in each moment as they influence and are influenced, as they relate and respond.

This is a paradigm of being and living in the heart, the middle of a vast liminal space created by the exclusion zone delineated by our modern linear narrative and its social, cultural, economic, political trappings.

I consider the biodynamic craniosacral approach and central philosophy to be such an ‘other possibility’ arising from necessity, from the cracks of multiple failures and ongoing ecological breakdowns. Why? Precisely because it is placing the body’s inherent wisdom and individual expression of an Intelligence that is also present in the collective community of the living, at the epicentre of everything.

It is re-embedding us within the borderless web of life we have artificially been disconnected from through this dominant and exclusionary top down, standardising, homogenising, divisive system with its stringent laws, dogma and rules and its set of solutions and fixes to everything: an imperative knowing that is intent on ‘killing’ and destroying dissidence and radical originality, weeding all that could potentially threaten its very existence.

My whole body sighed with relief the first time I was held and allowed to be exactly as I am by non-fixing, non-doing hands that surrender to a Knowing beyond their limited understanding, and I succumbed, fascinated, enchanted even, by these inner expressions of so many songs, so many dances, so many galaxies with their stars and planets showing me another way, many other ways of being with, of living within and bridging the in-between “I am” and the collective “we are” of all that lives and breathes around me at different rhythms in different ‘time zones’.

It animated what was numb and dormant with myriad stories and possibilities.

This practice ( It is so much more than ‘work’ in the common linear meaning applied to it by our modern societies) revealed vast domains that I had up to then hardly suspected existed. My unconscious knew, and no doubt fed me some riddles now and then, but it took me years to ‘read’ and feel, to come into their presence through biodynamic sessions that kept igniting new possibles.

I also call it a practice because it is constantly co-evolving with earth, the land and creatures I live with and through, the non human universe that inhabits my body, as well as my clients and community of family and friends, a very large collective kin in other words within which “I, named Sophie” is enmeshed.

Reality is constantly shape-shifting and ever elusive, it is a 'queer' phenomenon far from the fixed narratives and universal truths of a linear model, as quantum physics amply demonstrate.

For this chief reason and others, it would be preposterous to ‘rule’ on what is ‘best’ at any given moment and there I refer to my former use of ‘best’ at the onset of this piece. The biodynamic paradigm allows and facilitates a ‘best’, an optimum, to naturally emerge in each session, in each moment, re-entraining the body’s awareness back to relational intertwining with itself, unveiling and clearing ways for she/he/they to awaken to the many stories it is telling and letting them change and shape what is.

It is facilitating an erotic landing back to the earth of our bodies, and unlike our History of conquest laden with plunder, rape, and mass slaughter, seeing this ‘new’ country with eyes and senses that welcome the tremendous diversity of these inner realms and slowly listen, discover what is already there, re-learn a pre-verbal language rich in surprise and unpredictability, constantly evolving and in ‘fluid interchange’ with all that is there, the visible and the unseen. Falling in the cracks of this liberating wild unknown as we do so.

I fell in awe of this inner wildness the minute I held its expression within my thankful hands and knew I would become its lifelong apprentice, because I had always already been there. Its presence kept emerging each time I met a stillpoint of coherence cradling the whole in its subtle motions and could only ground my gasp, my ‘wow’ in humble silence. The moment when all the possibles are held aloft in one biodynamic swell of the Tide, our internal fluid rhythmic inhale and exhale. I realised then that I had been in exile all these years, lost in a sense of false be-longing to a social construct that is superimposed on what is fundamentally queer to arbitrarily reduce and restrict.

There is no ‘fitting in’ possible in a system that denies so much of Life and pretends to offer options governed by the binary diktats of ‘for and against’, ‘right or wrong’, ‘good or bad’, …

Which is why, as highlighted by Dr Gabor Maté in the recent documentary: The Wisdom of Trauma,(1) there has been an exponential increase in chronic inflammatory diseases worldwide, as well as a deadly rise in drug abuse of all kinds.

Which is why more and more of us are either trying to carve out a niche at the edges or simply cut ties and cross over to wholeheartedly embrace our inner and outer wilderness.

I am titrating in the in-between the domestic and the wild, listening, grounding, and allowing as I go. I am learning to slow down and befriend my inner monsters, ever the explorer of new and ancient possibles.

Fittingly, William Garner Sutherland, the founder of biodynamic craniosacral therapy encouraged his students “to read the space between the physiologic centres” and he added, “Tis the mortar in the space between the bricks that holds a structure together”(2).

This reflected his attitude to life, “You see before you a dreamer – one who had to get away from the texts, as did Dr Still, and follow something he could not explain. Something that kept him digging into his dreams.”

Digging at a frontier whose fence keeps on moving. We are sitting across this shifting liminal space, us craniosacral therapists and all other explorers of this unknown and mysterious wild whose complete ‘workings’ will thankfully forever escape our limited understanding so that we can keep on dreaming and the Dream can dream us.

In The Wilds Beyond our Fences (3), Nigerian philosopher, psychologist, and author Bayo Akomolafe writes most beautifully of these in-between spaces as places of creative emergence. I see them also as places of healing.

“Thoughts don’t come from within; neither do they come from “without.” They emerge “between”. It’s the same with feelings. (…) I like to imagine that when a seed falls to the earth, it experiences grief, and its grief is met by the loamy femininity of the soil, and that is how trees sprout out with joy.”

“Perhaps those moments of unspeakable silence, when depths churn and sides groan, when words escape you, when a pill or a diagnosis doesn’t add up to much, when all you want to do is squeeze yourself into the tiniest place in the universe, it is because you—for all intents and purposes— are co-performing the disintegration of imaginal cells within a cocoon, and knowing the pain of becoming a moth.

“Perhaps this is the next frontier: not outer space or inner space, but spaces between.”

This is so akin to and evocative of what can happen during a craniosacral session and it's interesting that we owe this very practice to a meeting between Andrew Taylor Still and the Shawnee Indians on whose land his family settled. It is in this frontier space of a deeply fraught History of conquest that Still was inspired by and appropriated the wild medicine practices he witnessed. He therein ‘fitted it‘ within the prevailing medical paradigm of his lineage and carved a new avenue of tending to the wild of the body or the body as wilderness that became osteopathy, then cranial osteopathy, and later craniosacral therapy.

The wisdom of wellness that is biodynamic craniosacral therapy springs from and is rooted in the prairie of the Shawnee Indians.

It is no accident that this practice emerged when it did and is now gaining momentum at a time when we are returning to indigenous ways for more inspiration and ancient ancestral knowledge. This time however we do not come as victors but as lost wanderers. And yes it could be said that these victors were lost wanderers and vice and versa.

As pointed out by Bayo Akomolafe: “In many indigenous non-Western cultures, time is circular—not flowing forward from past to present then future, but entangled together in a thick now, so that the past is still accessible and the future can be remembered. Or as Karen Barad puts it, “the past is yet to come.”” This sentence, in my opinion, could apply to the somatics of trauma.

This ‘betweenness’ is what is missing in our life-denying societies. We are missing that ‘middle’, like the embryo who becomes a “wind egg” in the third week when it does not remain connected to the trophoblast through a stringy, capillary-rich stalk and does not form a heart, thus forever interrupting the process of building an ‘innerness’, a ‘middle’(4).

The current debate around vaccination is one aspect of this absence of middle in our midst. There is no sitting on the fence allowed, no in-between, we must be for or against, and the measures some countries are enforcing are aimed to corner citizens, to ply them to vaccinate in a process that is deeply divisive, disintegrative, and coercive, in alignment with the same belligerent ways that have governed the handling of this pandemic crisis.

Behind these tactics unfortunately lies a return to what was before: under the guise of protection, health and safety, economic growth can be restored in a semblance of a pre-epidemic ‘normal’ that allows for business as usual, the very same addiction to growth that resulted in the ongoing collapse of entire ecosystems and has spawned series of new viruses since the eighties.

Our preponderant economic, political, social, scientific, and medical paradigm invariably responds to crises with ‘quick fix ’ solutions that evade the root causes and maintain a status quo allowing for same paradigm, same systems to continue unabated.

“How are we honoring the sovereignty of life rather than trying to control it so that we feel we have done a good job?”asks body worker and writer Susan Raffo (5) in a powerfully poignant piece responding to the ongoing unearthing of remains of indigenous children forcibly 'educated' into this conquering paradigm, from school grounds in Canada and the US.

There is an urgent need to question and doubt, to ‘queer’ our realities so that they recount all the other possibles that are tragically truncated from our discourse and our ways of living.

Susan Raffo speaks of these silences of the unheard flesh, the voices of our lineages that are re-surging for us to ask these questions and feel all that there is to feel. The befores that are also nows.

There are no quick answers to these, no quick fixes either. There cannot be. There is so much to feel and be with.

The heart of the matter, that will create or re-ignite an innerness, a fascia-like entanglement lies in a return to our monstrosity, when we "stand still in the face of a monster, warts and all, and recognize ourselves.” (3)

“The dragons that breathe fire in the distance are no less monstrous than we already are. To put it differently, a monster is not the exception to the rule; a monster is the rule without exception.”(3)

Humans are now the last fence post for viruses to go to when the wild once was. Our bodies have become that frontier and each new virus can be seen as that monstrous ‘other’ we keep on ‘othering’, in an effort to outcast and exile it. It is holding up a mirror for us to see what we have done to Nature and our own nature.

In my practice I hold the whole of your bodies, the visible and the invisible, the non-human, the wonder of an ever moving form that is everything and everybody, a miracle: the result of thousands, millions of years of co-evolution of symbiotic relationships between cells, fascia, organs… and bacteria, viruses, fungi. All emergences are welcome. There is no exclusion zone, no fences… in fact a session sees a compact fragmentation give way to a fluid whole where fences and ‘othering’ have no ‘raison d’être’.

Embracing our magnificent aliveness is welcoming back all that we have outcast and exiled, all the monsters. Like the "differential flow of performative becomings"(3) we are.

Can we collectively move into our heart and grow a connective stalk to create space for our middle to emerge on Earth instead of striving to settle in space and further petrify (6) our 'wind egg'-ness?

Notes and references:

1- The Wisdom of Trauma: https://wisdomoftrauma.com/hub/

2- William Garner Sutherland, Contributions of Thought.

3- These Wilds Beyond our Fences, Letters to my daughter on humanity's search for home, Bayo Akomolafe.

4- Thanks to Jaap Van der Wal, see more on this at www.embryo.nl

5- Susan Raffo: https://www.susanraffo.com/blog/the-lineages-healers-have-to-contend-with-working-with-ancestors-of-purpose

6- To recall John Moriarty’s metaphor for our dominant paradigm as a Medusa-like figure turning all that is animated into stone. See Dreamtime

I have felt many times this distinctive expression of potency (from the Latin word for power) as it is ‘freed’ from a fulcrum, as it surges and naturally 'dissolves' a zone of inertia to reintegrate the whole.

The first time it happened I was holding a newborn, just a few weeks old. It was absolutely exquisite and felt like pure gold trickling down. I sensed the sheer relief in the tissues, and the fluid expansion that ensued as what we call primary respiration resumed.

I could have cried there and then with gratitude and awe.

This is what the founder of cranial osteopathy, William Garner Sutherland, called “liquid light”(1).

What I perceive as a ‘shower of sparkles' is but one expression of potency in my experience, and every time it revealed itself so soon after contact and so clearly was following a recent trauma, a bike accident, a fall, an injury, a birth; like a dissipation of 'shock energy' stored in the tissues.

But this may not necessarily apply the other way around, and there are many other forms of sensory perceptions for this rhythm, this drive in our fluids and tissues, that is also present in the animal and plant worlds.

Like Hermes the winged intermediary between the immortal and mortal realms, potency is the great messenger.

I attended an excellent talk on potency by BCST teacher Katherine Ukleja last month at Jane Shaw’s Elmfield Institute (2).

Referring to an Albert Einstein quote— “ Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” —

Katherine points to the Breath of Life as the musician, potency as the music, and primary respiration as the dance.

This metaphor of potency as the music to which our organisms dance as respiration is very helpful indeed as it makes room for the infinite diversity of expressions and qualities of motion of potency.

Katherine Ukleja calls potency “our true sphere of influence”. Whereas one can only “genuflect” in the presence of the Breath of Life, this ineffable universal force way beyond our understanding, our human grasp, she says that we, biodynamic craniosacral therapists, can "respond" to potency, can “work with it” as it is the “interface” with which we “actually interact through the quality of our touch”.

It is indeed, in my experience, an orientation I cannot help but surrender to and follow as it sets the tone, the rhythm, it reveals the dancing signature, the inner map of an organism, and the priorities of treatment too.

In the words of Rollin Becker, who continued what William Sutherland began, potency is a “diagnostic tool”.

“The body has the capacity to express health through this inherent potency, and it has the capacity to maintain compensatory mechanisms in response to trauma or disease through variant potencies” (3)

Becker goes on to explain how the quality of “interrelationship’ between trauma, disease and health is shown by how potency manifests.

Another prominent figure in this lineage, Franklyn Sills (4), built a model from the work of Sutherland and Becker, who outlined the main functions of potency as organisation and protection, and added healing as a third one.

So that we can apprehend potency as it constantly organises and expresses Health from that magic moment of conception, the original ignition when a male and female nuclei fuse until our death.

The constant drive towards coherence and homeostasis, the impetus of the force of integration that is Health in our organisms are conveyed by potency.

“It holds the blueprint. It maintains unity. It maintains wholeness,” Katherine Ukleja explains.

We can feel its protection as it meets life’s overwhelming events by coalescing their impact into an ‘inertial fulcrum’.

This ‘dimming’ of the potency of primary respiration “meets the contingencies and limits the damage” says Ukleja. Like a “coiling in of the biodynamic potency and the conditional forces”, an inertial fulcrum delineates a locus of protection to maintain the integrity of the whole. This could be felt as compression or congestion in the tissues, a ‘damming’ of flow in the fluid, a density, a frozen or numb area, a void or absence, a locking, an opacity…

And we can perceive and be blown away by its healing properties when an inertial fulcrum uncoils and releases the ‘trapped’ potency from this local containment to re-enliven and re-integrate the whole. As Katherine explains, this liberation can reveal itself as, “an explosion, ripples, light or heat”. In my experience, it can also feel like a chill, a thawing.

Between organisation and protection, Katherine Ukleja inserts the ‘adaptive’ function in this medicine wheel.

She says that “ life is a conditional process and we don’t want to protect against life.” In other words, the quality of our potency adapts to whatever life throws at us. It could be said that this also interestingly picks up on what Becker called the quality of “interrelationship” of potency, as quoted above, and what he referred to as the constant interchange between life and an organism.

Clinical models like these are extremely useful to ‘read’, i.e. to interpret and translate what we perceive and thus inform our contact and our holding.

They borrow from science observation, reasoning, and defining tools. But what if we widened the lens to include our intuitive and instinctive awareness, our unique personal perceptive experiences, be they through the prism of our inner musicians, artists, poets, and/or mystics… what happens then? What if we took Einstein’s poetic reference to a “mysterious tune” and celebrated potency as the boundless symphony it is?

How do we, biodynamic craniosacral therapists, with a unique history, physiology, and psyche/soul signature, apprehend potency?

For there are as many ways to touch and perceive and there are as many ways to express potency and primary respiration as there are individuals.

So I asked a fine bouquet of BCS practitioners for their felt metaphors and "routes in"(9) to meet and greet potency.

And not only did these varied experiences help me to further inform and ground my perception of potency, the Breath of Life, and primary respiration but they deeply inspired me and filled me with even more awe and gratitude for the work we share, for the freedom and allowing of our wide perceptive fields.

Picking up the thread of subjective histories informing how we ‘communicate’ (to use Katherine Ukleja’s word) and listen to our clients’ inner dances, Franklyn Sills recalls how he was “fortunate to have experienced Chinese "Chi Kung" practice before studying in an Osteopathic college, with a true master, Sifu Fong Ha, in California. Sifu Fong Ha stressed the inner experience of what the Chinese call "jing" or inner essence. This is very similar to what Dr Sutherland called ‘potency.’”

He explains that later on as he attended Osteopathic college, he “had a teacher who had trained with Dr Rollin Becker, a disciple of Dr Sutherland who stressed sensing the Fluid Tide, the embodied manifestation of potency and the larger Long Tide, a vast stable supportive organizing field of lifeforce; and sensing the inner working of embodied healing forces. When working with clients, I began to experience this "inner essence.”

To distinguish between potency and Breath of Life, Franklyn explains that the latter “is a spiritual essence from which all of the forces of life manifest. It is usually in the “background”, but sometimes comes to the forefront and when it does you sense a presence that moves through everything like a wind that invigorates all form, the Tibetans call it “the winds of the vital forces” and your heart is cast open in love.”

So I would dare venture that Franklyn touches his clients from an open heart and with “spiritual fingers” as Ryan Halford beautifully puts it.

I have experienced demonstration sessions between Franklyn and his wife Cherionna Menzam Sills at the Karuna Institute and invariably I melted into the pervasive open heartfulness of long tide as the whole field softened and expanded, eventually settling into dynamic stillness (5).

Cherionna refers to that very softening and flowing that accompanies the revealing of potency as a force of coherence:

“As the client’s system settles, a sense of softening, spreading and direction arises. Something invisible but very tangible directs us. It often feels like a welcoming, soothing warmth to me. There is often a sense of light, either in one specific area or infusing the whole. I sense an aliveness, a fullness, the embodied essence of life itself. There is a certainty to its message. It calls awareness to specific areas at specific times.” (6)

Cherionna also mentions her sense of awe and gratitude in the presence of potency. “Its Intelligence is so much vaster, deeper and acute than any I could conjure up on my own.”

The metaphor of warmth and light is shared by Margaret Rosenau (7) who experiences potency as “sunlight in water, an effervescent glow or illumination of the body.“

“I can no longer count how many times potency has revealed itself in the body and field simultaneously, times when the person’s body illuminates at the same moment that the sun breaks through the clouds, or the light in the room brightens.”

She refers to its texture as “smooth, silky, buttery, soft – the glow of the sun within the body, within the fluids.”

There is awe and fascination in Margaret’s words too when she compares the bioelectric feel of potency with the photons in light: “I have thought a lot recently about the photons in CSF [cerebrospinal fluid] and the quantum nature of light .”

These references to photons and light deeply resonate with me because potency often presents as a scintillation that looks like pixels to me, and the more powerful the potency, the sharper the pixelation. I perceive this within the body's primary respiration and in the fluid field too. It is quite magical really.

Ryan Halford (8) is very lyrical and poetic in his description of how potency feels for him: it is, “the power that moves every organ system, tissue, cell, molecule, and atom. Every part of a living being is moving, vibrating, spinning. It is potency that provides the felt frequencies of this dance.”

Very much conjuring my image of Hermes the messenger god mentioned earlier, Ryan says, “It is potency that delivers orders from the spirit world and directs matter to fulfill the will of the gods. Potency gathers up atoms from a chaotic universe and holds each one in the precise place created for it in the flow of arising form."

"Each moment of unfolding time and shaping of space is known to eternity. Potency ensures everything makes it to the right place at the right time.”

"He distinguishes between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ potency: “Most healing ultimately involves internal disengagement and expansion. In hard potency, it is challenging to let go of the shapes of our somato-emotional contraction. With soft potency, it is easier for our spiritual fingers to loosen their grip on our internal inertia."

"Hard potency is tough love where the soul is taught a lesson.

Soft potency is sweet love where the soul is given a gift.

Hard potency can be the stuff of Hell ... fiery arrows, piercing pains, unfortunate reckoning, unyielding power

Soft potency is the stuff of heaven ... a pleasant breeze, graceful flight, friendly angels, a gentle caress."

I could feel my potency enliven and my whole body expansively inhale just reading these words I must say. I love the freedom and ease of this allowing, like a flamboyant dance.

The distinction between hard and soft potency is also helpful to name the different yielding qualities of potency.

In contrast, Steve Haines (9), a self-confessed and unapologetic materialist, says that “potency is just another metaphor”, “the ability to do work”, “a useful lens”, “a nice route in to meeting a whole person.”

Steve speaks in terms of emergence, connection, yielding, texture, and sound metaphors:

“When I feel I’m in a space that’s very connected, coherent, I often go to metaphors of sound: there’s a nice rhythm playing, a nice song being expressed.”

He talks of the “room gone quiet”, of “silence ”, and "there's a sense that the texture or the tone is of softness and ease". There is "coherence, flow, aliveness", “it feels very easy and effortless to be around, an order is emerging. It is often quite timeless.”

Steve talks about the “vibrational and energetic quality of potency” but feels that referring to it as “energy” brings us closer to the ‘qi’ or the ‘prana’ of oriental spiritual traditions.

I so appreciated receiving, collecting all these beautifully different evocations of meeting with, and feeling what is essentially the drive, the texture, the tone inherent in our life force as it expresses through our fluids and tissues when primary respiration dances us, as it organises, adapts, protects, and heals by allowing Health to be restored in the whole organism.

But I understand why Scott Zamurut (10) spoke in a recent craniosacral podcast with Ryan Halford, of the confusion there is around the use of the term potency.

It is indeed easy to say potency to mean primary respiration, the Breath of Life, or the Intelligence of the Tide for example. “All we hear about is potency,” he laments.

Scott refers more to the Breath of Life and the Intelligence in primary respiration. When I asked him to tell me how he relates to potency Scott replied, “My experience of the Breath of Life, which I view as intertwined Intelligence and Potency, expresses uniquely in every session I witness- whether as a practitioner, a teacher supervising a learning process, or as a recipient of Biodynamics. I recognize the infinite dynamics of BoL expression through body physiology and the biosphere through my embodied knowing of the BoL within my own self, a recognition and knowing for which language serves only as a pointer. I apprehend the BoL and the activity it generates, yet I will not limit my description to “this" or “that,” so as not to eliminate all other possible realities.”

He further explained that during his training he learned to attribute to the Breath of Life the "attributes" or functions of potency as highlighted above, and "along the way, Potency became an intermediary between the practitioner and the BoL, much like how the Parish Priest in Catholicism became the intermediary between the parishioners and Yahweh."

But in the end, "we are in fact talking about the same phenomena", he adds.

We are indeed, and although I cannot but listen and perceive potency as a very tangible direction within this Intelligence as mentioned by Cherionna above, I also know to bow to the Breath of Life as it emerges and takes over.

In fact, the BoL can appear to me as a slow unfurling of a gigantic wave spreading across the whole and what powers it is potency. It is the motion of Love, the one that bathes and binds all in this universe and that can be especially felt during Long Tide or Dynamic Stillness because it is a primeval embryonic force.

This is but a modest attempt at conveying the wide array of experiences felt and woven by our diverse fields of perception. But it nevertheless highlights a spectrum between the most spiritually inclined and the staunch materialists within which we all fit and that

is testament to the wondrous diversity of life itself.

We are not empty vessels and our contexts, our histories, our image-making soul or psyche signatures will invariably play a part in our holding no matter how ‘neutral’ we think we are. How we perceive determines how we ‘communicate’, how we meet our clients, and also how we surrender to the higher Intelligence at play within each organism we hold.

As Ryan Halford reflects, the end result is the same "but the scenery along the way can be quite different.”

All these perceptions have common threads and in different ways let potency be the “welcome guide” (6) that it is.

"Celebrate whatever route you have into a sense of the person and then keep practising so you can find different routes in," says Steve Haines.

Just like Hermes the messenger god, potency can be seen as this emissary between spirit and matter, thereby meeting our own vast spectrum of individual perception in the process.

I hope this will have somehow enriched and nourished your own experiences of this most precious work.

Deep gratitude to Franklyn Sills, Cherionna Menzam-Sills, Margaret Rosenau, Ryan Halford, Steve Haines, and Scott Zamurut for taking some of their precious time to reply to my questions.

I will leave the last words to Rainer Maria Rilke as they provide a good conclusion to this questioning:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Notes and References:

1-- William Garner Sutherland, see Contributions of Thought and Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy.

2- Jane Shaw is the founder of the Elmfield Institute, see elmfieldinstitute.com

3-Dr Rollin Becker, Life in Motion,

4- Franklyn Sills, author of Foundations in Craniosacral Biodynamics, Volume I and II

See also http://www.craniosacral-biodynamics.org/

5- For more on Long Tide and Dynamic Stillness see http://www.craniosacral-biodynamics.org/thelongtide.html

6- Cherionna Menzam Sills just released her new book Spirit into Form: Exploring Embryological Potential and Prenatal Psychology. See also birthingyourlife.org and resourcingyourlife.org

7- Margaret Rosenau, founder and teacher at the School of Inner Health, see schoolofinnerhealth.org

8-Ryan Halford is a teacher and creator of the craniosacral podcast, see https://www.craniosacralpodcast.com/

9- Steve Haines is a teacher and co-founder of Body Intelligence, see bodyintelligence.com

He just released a new book: Touch is really strange. See also bodycollege.net

10 Scott Zamurut is a teacher in Santa Fe, New Mexico, see scottzamurut.com

He took part in episode 156 of the craniosacral podcast: https://www.craniosacralpodcast.com/episode-156/

I often wonder whether we are defined by these default states of protective numbness and how much they deny us too. For they work on assumptions that the past is the present, stored as so many silences in our tissue, ready to grip us whenever triggered appropriately.

How much do you operate on automatic going about your every day routine? How often do you feel, actually feel the ground beneath your feet? How often do you look at your hands and feel gratitude for these wonders of creation? How often do you follow your breath within your inner darkness and feel your inner realm, deeply listen to all that dances you in every second, hold all of who you are, the rich soil of the unconscious, the traumas, as well as the lighter stuff from a place of resourced compassion?

Our excessively demanding and stressful lifestyles have us usually operate from our thinking heads and stay at the surface of our bodies, in reactive mode whether we mobilise or immobilise.

A craniosacral client triumphantly told me he felt his feet on the ground for about 30 seconds a few days ago. He had mentioned in previous sessions that he was mostly “living in a space suit, insulated from the world”(1), this bubble of protection preventing him from truly connecting with his surrounds, from being consciously present to his environment.

He is not alone.

In fact, all of my clients are delineated by dissociation and each biodynamic craniosacral session is a staging post on the journey home, a time and space to stop and learn to re-inhabit their bodies: a gradual surrender to the revelation of who they truly are underneath the layers of protection, absence, dissonance and compression.

Each session is a safer landing in the body.

But a landing that enables a true sense of being at home in the body cannot take place unless we actually re-build, re-engage with that home from the ground up, with strong foundations which in time will be our new baseline, no longer mostly controlled by the positive feedback loop of a default dissociative state, blurring our realities.

This is a truly creative endeavour. A new embodying that for some can also be a spiritual awakening.

As we discover the possibilities until now concealed under layers of pain, anxiety, distress, fear, depression, and overwhelm… there is such excitement, a retrieval of trapped energy, a surge of what we call potency: the drive within the tissues and fluids.

With it comes the relief of being able to engage with difficult stories while also being more aware of greater resources, and trusting the body’s deep knowing.

It is this strong foundation that allows trauma, shadow material, to gradually come to light and thaw while being held by our conscious and compassionate awareness. It is an alchemical process that transmutes what we considered as enemies into allies.

I took refuge in dissociative day dreaming on a regular basis as a child. The place where I grew up was not conducive to safe verbal and creative expression so I learned to exile myself to my bedroom to read, teach to fictitious pupils, and dance; or to the nearby forest to speak more freely to trees and animals and write… When I could not escape I dissociated, I froze and I know I brought these with me into exile too.

Eventually I exiled myself to Ireland. I discovered Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms in Dublin when I was 26 and experienced such relief, such excitement at finding a practice that actually encouraged non-judgemental creative expression through dance!

This began my landing in the body. I missed very few if any of the weekend workshops offered. I was ravenous.

I vividly remember a momentous exercise from way back then. We were asked to move up and down the room while looking at our hands. But not just looking, our teacher said, ‘become fascinated’.

I broke down in tears as I saw my hands like never before, and was dumbfounded at my awkwardness. This simple gesture brought up so many stories of loss, shame, grief, fear… it was quite overwhelming.

Even now as I recall this exercise tears well up in my eyes.

I could not speak my experience because of the resulting shutdown, but in time as I repeated the exercise I could enter into a dynamic relationship with what emerged and I fell in awe and love with my precious hands.

Expressing through movement has always felt much safer to me than through spoken words.

It is not just the parts of the body but the words that are frozen until they thaw from within, fill with meaning that we can truly hear and safely vocalise within a group.

It took years for Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (2) to truly land in my body, so much so that I can now explain it with ease to my clients. So much so that I can feel its implications in my daily life.

I am 52 and am still landing.

In fact past the initial overwhelm, this last year and a half of extraordinary circumstances have helped me to land in the simple but nourishing ordinariness of every day and spend time being more than doing.

This allowed me to build much stronger foundations and uncover parts of myself that were still hiding, afraid of being seen and met. Strangely enough, this ‘cocooning’ time actually helped me to come out more and more of my own ‘spacesuit’ and feel so much more connected to the ground beneath my feet, to the land I inhabit both within and around me. I have never touched and felt so intimate with trees, plants, animals and with the one friend I kept on seeing during that time.

With it came a truer sense of belonging in my body and in the place that has been my home for 27 years.

It created sanctuary: a sacred space to land.

It is in this creative reciprocal relationship that I continue to welcome myself as I midwife the welcoming of others through my craniosacral work.

It is my sense that this period of deep uncertainty and complete unknown further ignited the receptive, intuitive, flowing and grounding energies of Eros and dimmed the controlling tyranny and the reasoning supremacy of Logos.

I appear to depict them as enemies but really, as dreamworker and author Toko-pa Turner says: Eros and Logos are “unrequited lovers” who “have been separated for so long, they barely remember they belong to one another.” (3)

I understand their complementarity like yin and yang, or the archetypal feminine and masculine.

In the last four to five centuries Logos has won the ongoing tug of war. Meanwhile Eros has been vilified and forced into a taboo, forsaken to our collective shadow. But as the devastating environmental and social consequences of this imbalance have come to light, Eros is slowly re-emerging as a major healing force igniting our inner fire and spurring a return to the earth of our bodies and the body of Earth.

David Abram speaks beautifully of Eros as this “gravitational draw that holds us to the ground”, “the lovelorn yearning of our body for the larger Body of Earth, and of the earth for us.”(4)

Landing as desire, as a meeting of our longing to create.

If we choose to land in our bodies, dissociation can be seen as an artistic container in that it sets the conditions for each of us to embark on a creative journey and thus awaken our inner artists; to enter into conscious relationship with the bodies’ many concealed stories and ignite them back to life, integrating them as they emerge, exploring new dynamic pathways of being and relating.

Healing as an art form.

I wrote a blog post two years ago about a deeply traumatised Cambodian artist who paints with ice that brings him back to life and spirit (5).

Expressive artwork can be one of many ways back to the body. But I would like to widen the angle and see creation as a life process, like the embryo within us constantly re-creating, re-embodying and coming into form.

With midlines that could be paintbrushes, pencils around which the forms organise and intermingle.

Creativity, the realm of Eros, is not something that is actively encouraged in our education systems and so it is hardly present in our adult lives. In a world dominated by Logos, ruled by the intellect and the thinking mind, by the head rather than the whole body, our orientation to place is far away from the ground, and the rich soil of our being. We indeed function in a bubble— the “spacesuit’ around our heads severing the carnal and sensory ties with all that is non human around us.

The original abilities and natural creative gifts of a child along with their propensity to be curious and enmesh themselves sensuously in the world around them fade as they learn to read and write, 'boxed' in a classroom, separating from nature’s reality (6) as Logos takes over and ‘colonises’ the creative and receptive influence of Eros.

The resurgence of Eros, of the archetypal feminine, comes at a time when the need for balance between Eros and Logos is an emergency. I have enjoyed this infusing and merging of both influences in the works of Stephen Harrod Buhner, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Merlin Sheldrake (7) to name but a few. They all beautifully navigate the worlds of Eros and Logos with ease and skill.

This fusion is an ignition and a remembering of our origins.

We use the word ‘ignition’ in biodynamic craniosacral therapy quite regularly because it is an essential beat in our internal respiration, the breath of life ignites as it breathes us.

The emergence of embodiment (or “innerness” as Jaap Van der Wal calls it (8)) in the embryo — which is accompanied by an ignition— through our primitive streak and later our notochord (the precursor of the spine), comes about a week after we ‘implant’ in the uterine wall and shortly after an ignition of the heart and of our umbilicus, where a connective stalk made up of capillaries creates a tie with what will become the placenta: our alchemical interface with the greater environment of motherland. I call it alchemical because it metabolises ( from the word change in Greek) the external reality to enable and process our transmutations into form.

We begin to orient to the space and environment around us as metabolic fields organise and differentiate around our midline and as we ground into embodiment connected to the placenta within the amniotic sac, this amazing ‘bubble’ of protection in the rich darkness of our mother’s womb. Our bodies will never forget that we floated in the womb for nine months --in fact dissociation could be a remembering of that protective bubble, that floating, that levity.

Imagine how shocking it must be to suddenly lose these waters and to have to squeeze ourselves into the birth canal spiralling in the dark towards a complete unknown, moved by a force of emergence, of urgency towards a landing of incommensurate proportions, in a radically different and colossal environment surrounded by an air pregnant with many sensory longings, forced, suddenly, to relate to this Great Other; a magical universe to some, a terrifying one to others.

Craniosacral therapy is wonderful at helping babies land and remedy the terrible sense of loss and shock that can remain stored in the body especially if there was no direct bonding between mother and baby right after birth. I have felt a melting in the babies I have worked with as I gently held their brainstem and their spine, like a shower of sparkles dissolving and integrating the whole. It is often followed by a big cry, a letting go of whatever emotion needs expressing as trauma clears and reorganisation occurs.

Creation is a profoundly moving coming to life and the world around us, an emergence from darkness into light.

In 2010 artist Dominic Thorpe performed in complete darkness at the 126 gallery in Galway, Ireland. The audience was given small torches and was free to bring the performance to light as people engaged with their bodies through the motor and sensory realms. (9)

Darkness is that great unknown. We come from it and this is where we likely return. It acts as a creative sensory and sensuous container. Depending on our experience in the womb, the dark may not be conducive to safe creativity but if our autonomic nervous system and our ventral vagus nerve are switched on, i.e. once we feel relaxed enough to environmentally engage, we learn to perceive with more acuity from our whole body in the dark.

Just like dissociation, darkness is a portal towards another perception, a landing. We see differently in the dark and as we navigate within ourselves or under earth we find a “deep knowing that lives in our bones, our bellies, and in the earth itself” (3)

I had a dream that earth’s traumas were her geology and that I could tend to her stories through these deep time drawings. The dream told me that earth dissociates too, she turns into glass that will thaw as lava.

I took a workshop with Toko-pa Turner through CIIS (10) and loved how she went about dreamwork: as a courtship, a sensitive dialogue teasing out the significance of each character, each symbol and testing the nuanced layers of a dream, landing it into waking life, a deeply grounding practice.

To me, the lava in this dream is an ignition, a fire, an alchemical transmutation. As lava scorches and purifies she lays new foundations of a dark and most fertile soil to welcome new growth and further landing.

Notes and references:

1- Deep gratitude to this client for allowing me to quote him

2- The Polyvagal Theory, Stephen Porges, 2011, see also stephenporges.com

3- Belonging, Toko-pa Turner, 2017, see also toko-pa.com

4- Becoming Animal, David Abram, 2010, see also wildethics.org

5- https://www.mycraniosacrallife.com/single-post/2018/06/01/the-ice-healing-path

6-The Spell of the Sensuous, 1996, David Abram

7- The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner, 2004; Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013; Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake, 2019.

8- From embryologist Jaap Van der Wal, see embryo.nl

9- https://imma.ie/magazine/what-is-performance-art/ by Amanda Coogan

10- California Institute of Integral Studies, see https://www.ciis.edu/

Like right now.

I notice a slight tightening in my sternum as I write this: an anxious resonance. In turn my gut contracts just below the umbilicus, a signalling of a birth imprint: when the cord is cut too quickly for us to transition slowly from one universe to another. When instead of gradually feeling into support and bonding before surrendering to this complete unknown, the new born is violently separated, cut off from her placenta: shockingly ending a nine-month relationship with her previous lifeline, her other half.

Just like that.

I have listened to and held many harrowing stories of wounding, abuse, loss and much overwhelm through my work as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist. They have spoken of a deep longing for safe reconnection with self and the world we live in through engaging with resource and nurturing relating and relationships. I am blown away by the courage and strength, the beauty of the human spirit as well as the extraordinary ability of our bodies to transmute and heal.

I have nourished my soul, my bodymind with equally wonderful and challenging essays, documentaries, books, workshops, discussions that speak of the ongoing disruption, destruction, corruption of living processes and contrast it with different ways of being and doing in the world, of perceiving life's relationships anew.

If only we created more space for their many languages to be taught and spoken more fluently, to support their inherent intricacies, so that we can more wondrously embrace the great unknown we live in.

I am left with many questions. Starting with how come knowing what we know and witnessing the interconnectedness of life all around us, do we continue to think and act as separate entities?

When did we lose our ability to wonder, to become enchanted by life and all its manifestations? How could we not apply, imbricate, embed this fascination into all that we relate to and do?

I watch birds as they flit from branch to branch, playfully frolic about with their mates, sing to their small heart’s content, feed from this and that. Alert to every and any potential danger yet navigating these so lightly and briskly.

I feel my heart open and brainstem relax as I gaze, my whole being lit up by the infinitely exquisite subtleties of each of these expressions of life, as well as their excruciating fragility.

Then I hear lawnmowers trimming and levelling, cutting down wild flowers bees feed from and I feel my nervous centres activate. My inner voice wonders when will this madness stop, when will we finally realise that living such out-of-tune ‘tidy’ lives is not really living at all?

How could we be so far removed from the beauteous enmeshment of life? How can we continue to fail to connect the dots even though we know that bees' numbers are dwindling, that we as well as many other species depend on their pollinating to feed ourselves, that we cannot thrive apart from all other members of this tremendous ‘oikos’ (home or house in Greek, the root of the word ecology) nurturing us all?

How can we still spray deadly herbicides on footpaths to kill so-called weeds? We would not use such products in our house yet we act as if nature was a living room we can hoover, and wipe 'clean' of its wilderness with toxic sprays; or a reservoir of resources we can relentlessly abuse, exploit and rip asunder.

In An Ecology of Mind, the documentary about her father, the ground breaking anthropologist Greg Bateson, psychotherapist Mary Catherine Bateson asks a potent question I have asked myself many times: “What is there about our way of perceiving that makes us not see the delicate interdependencies in ecological systems?”

She adds as an offering of an answer: “Given their integrity, we don’t see them and therefore we break them.”

But is it because of their integrity or because of our projecting from a dis-integrated place that we do not see them? For many writers and thinkers throughout the ages have written and spoken about these interconnections yet the predominant ‘story’ of modern humans living Western lifestyles, feeds a separatist bellicose narrative where Nature is an enemy, wildness must be tamed, harnessed and controlled. What is it within us despite our cosseted living that is still terrified by the wild? Why do we continue, despite all the books, the science, the conferences, the documentaries, to feed an insatiable 'monster' that is destroying us, and wiping out millions of other species in the process.

With each new listening to my clients’ tight connective tissues loosening their anxious grip and basking in the relief of a returned wholeness, my perception becomes more sensitised to these interdependencies. And the more I hold and witness the interplay between the fragments of the divided self and the oneness of dynamic stillness and coherent homeostasis the more I 'understand' from a place of deeper knowing and can hold more compassionately why we act the way we do.

Like Greg Bateson and many other thinkers, I have questioned our siloed and divided living and studying, each discipline arbitrarily separated from the other, instead of embracing how they can interact and pro-create, feeding off one another like a mycelium.

Like him I wondered about our obsession with definitions, names, capturing, limiting instead of delighting in simply being with and marvelling in the myriad of relationships at play all around and within us.

Many of us resonate with Greg Bateson’s questioning around life’s processes and our ignoring them at our peril. Should we not challenge our lifestyle as a result? Should we not “tell the truth” as the non-violent organisation Extinction Rebellion calls for? Should we not cry out ‘ecocide’ when entire forests are cut down to make way for yet another motorway or for cattle to feed our meat-eating habits all of which exacerbate the emission of greenhouse gases?

It is Franz Kafka who wrote: “It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at the table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”

There is a similar simmering, a witnessing of creative forces at play in a biodynamic craniosacral session. I have no idea what is about to happen yet I completely trust their unravelling. I have learnt to ground my patience, and hold the emergence of resources as my client comes into more presence and feels supported enough to safely surrender. It is usually at that magical threshold moment that the ecstatic flushing of potency into areas of inertia begins. When some of the traumas our bodies freeze and rearrange around, -- protecting the rest of our organisms-- gradually thaw, regenerating the whole.

This is also when I perceive how this fragmentation deeply affects the fluid expression of the whole, and how our initial pre-verbal mapping loses its original fluency to continually adjust and create new holding patterns that translate as ways of being and doing in the world. Like a geological multi-layering that not only speaks of one lifetime but includes transgenerational stories. A multi-storied evolutionary ‘oikos', an ecosystem with its own unique ecology heavily influenced by a context and the quality and quantity of different relationships.

Stored in our physiology and our unconscious, unprocessed traumas divide our being, creating dis-ease, dissociation and dis-integration; fuelling our reactivity and straining, draining our life force and love of life.

These inner divisions rule the whole unless we address them holistically.

Our triggers for example reflect our restricted, divided selves as we project and act out our overwhelm from a place of hyperarousal (fight/flight) or parasympathetic absence/numbness (dissociation).

It takes repetition, support, determination and patience to become aware, to come into resourced presence and safe embodiment, to redesign the familiar and observe definite changes, to make more of the unconscious conscious, to retrieve our souls and vitality, our lust for life.

Some dams easily break free in the very first craniosacral session transforming a burdened frown into a whole body buoyant radiance but the journey rarely stops there. As we go deeper the transitioning to a more aware and fulsome expression of self takes tremendous courage and patience. It must be gradual as it is uncovering exquisitely sensitive vulnerabilities, alert to any disturbances in the field.

It brings us back in touch with the animal within, with a specific neurobiology and reactivity, a wild kind of wiring, something we often try to mask, conceal and deny.

In this manner the war on nature is a projection of our own inner wars, fragmentation, our own traumatic stories as written and acted out in novels, tragedies, pervading popular as well as high culture over many generations. Sadly but truly these external manifestations of inner unresolved conflicts are born of our protective reactions against our inner 'wild', this reservoir of overwhelming emotional wounding which we numb and flee: a positive feedback loop that fuels and is fuelled by greed, addictions and insatiable needs.

As author and spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl writes: “Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition compulsion and projection and from within as tension and contraction, reduction of life flow, illness or disease.”(2)

This is what lies at the root of our societal double-bind, a phrase coined by Greg Bateson.

Around our widespread culture of entitlement and the pro-deregulation and anti 'nanny state' corporate agenda, psychologist and author Robin Grille says, "You can see in our culture, economics, and politics the hyper grandiosity of a three or four-year-old whose developmental needs were not met." (3)

We can only free ourselves from the tentacles of this developmental scarcity projected on our modern societies if we dissolve their grip with integrative regenerative collective healing. One way described by Grille is to meet and feed our inner child with the emotional nutrients that were lacking during childhood.

In my experience as a BCS practitioner the healing process is mostly non verbal. Silence and slow, patient listening are essential to our spontaneous physiological and psychological unravelling, reflecting embryonic pathways of coming into form.

When words are spoken they serve to support, resource and enable the staying and being with whatever is emerging in the now.

Transitioning is deeply unsettling if done too fast. Yet this is what we are experiencing now as a collective of beings. We may not have the luxury of time to individually heal our traumas but we can at least support, inform and inspire one another, become one another's apprentices.

In today’s divided world, as the urgency to emerge anew is rising, as the predominant Western story of development is repeatedly and forcefully challenged, our perceptions are changing, offering possibilities to “re-thread the world back together from the inside” (1).

The double bind we are caught in is an opportunity for creative apprenticeships.

Just like healing forces the positive feedback loop of disintegration to stop in its tracks and reconfigure creatively, freeing up trapped energy that will enliven the whole.

As we keep re-attuning to this whole and orienting to health, we can transform our pain and suffering, enjoy a more embodied, fuller presence and ground ourselves in stronger, sturdier, and more harmonious foundations.

The freer we are from trauma, the more enlivened and in love with life we become. At the root of our collective healing lies our renewed consciousness of our innate love of life or ‘biophilia’ as coined by biologist Edward O. Wilson (4): “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”

Indeed, whether we are conscious of it or not, “We are ‘holobionts’ or complex, collaborative organisms consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life.“(5)

We are essentially symbiotic beings.

Life is a constant interchange as observed by cranial osteopath Dr Rollin Becker (6) and we are in constant interchange with it.

As I set out to write this blog post I did not know what I was going to write about. Just like at the onset of a craniosacral treatment I am an apprentice to the great unknown, serving and entrusting myself to a higher Intelligence. Each session clears the way towards a deeper, more compassionate apprehension of self, igniting our inherent biophilia, our love of life, in more ways than one.

This precious work has shown me time and again how we are all apprentices to life's enmeshment. There is nothing about our rich, chaotic, inner wilderness to tame, be ashamed of and destroy but instead everything to learn and be in awe of.

So we may experience our body as the splendid, shape-shifting, metamorphic "sensitive threshold", "travelling doorway through which sundry aspects of the earth are always flowing", " open to the same currents, the larger valleys and plains of the earth, open to the same currents, the same waters and winds that cascade across those wider spaces." (7)

Notes and references:

1- An Ecology of Mind, Nora Bateson, 2010: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bateson

2- See Robin Grille on developmental needs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WXf8jHtOWE and his latest book Inner Child Journeys, 2019

3- Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, Thomas Hübl, 2020

4- The Biophilia Hypothesis, Edward O. Wilson, 1993.

5- Exiting The Anthropocene and Entering The Symbiocene. Glenn Albrecht, 2015, https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/exiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene/

6- The Stillness of Life, Rollin Becker, 2000.

7- Becoming Animal, David Abram, 2010.