By Cherionna Menzam, PhD, LMT, OTR/L, RCST ®
Initial Hardness Melts Away
When I first put my hands on a client, I often feel hardness beneath them – like how we usually imagine bones to be. Hard. Rigid. Solid. Heavy. You as client may also feel these kinds of sensations, and tell me about the pain, tension or discomfort that brought you to Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.
Initially, I may feel a rapid pulsing under my hands, or a chaotic kind of activity. Lying on the table, you might experience a busy mind, perhaps some anxiety or feelings of stress or tension that you have brought with you from your day.
As I continue to sit with you in a quiet state and attend to the subtle movement my hands detect, things gradually change. It is as if the tissues under my hands begin to melt. I have a sense of softening and spreading. There seems to be more space within the tissues. I begin to feel like I’m holding a bag of fluid, gently fluctuating back and forth within its sac.
Eventually, the movement becomes smoother and quieter. I begin to feel less like I am holding a particular part of the body and more like I am holding the whole. What has been separate and isolated is now connected. As client, you may feel lighter, more peaceful and more whole. For example, you might suddenly realize that you not only feel your feet and your hips but that you now also feel the space between them. You now “have legs” and a new sense of connectedness.
Where there was pain or tightness, you begin to feel more ease and relaxation. As your system lets go and relaxes into a state of relative stillness, you breathe more easily, and we both spontaneously take a deep breath. After these kinds of changes occur, you begin to notice improvements in your health and sense of well being.
When you get up from the table after having felt the new sense of connection through your legs, for example, you are surprised to feel the support of the floor under your feet in a way you have never felt it before. You feel a new connectedness with the earth under you. You discover the tension in your neck and shoulders has also relaxed as they can now rest upon the support from your lower body. Your body has started to function as it was meant to – as a whole, connected system.
Problems are just Part of the Picture; Love Embraces the Whole of You
While I may spend time during a session with my hands directly holding a problem area, I no longer believe it is generally necessary to directly “treat” a problem in this way. Regardless of where my hands are, my focus is not on “fixing” a problem. Instead, my intention is to tap into the field of love I believe is holding all of us: me, you, your issues and their resolution.
When we bring love to a problem, instead of trying to get rid of it, change happens. When we judge something as wrong or “pathological,” we miss an opportunity to learn from it and receive the gifts it has to offer. We also withhold from that aspect of ourselves the energy it needs for healing, for wholeness.
Every aspect of you deserves to be loved. Love is all-inclusive. When we’re afraid, we separate, divide, and reject what we do not understand or respect. In love, we can accept what is, understand there is a reason things came to be as they are, and begin to perceive a mysterious intelligence behind them.
Your patterns have come into being to help you survive and function in your life. While a pattern may no longer serve a purpose, we need to honor and respect the wisdom that brought it into being, and to welcome back into our hearts whatever aspects we have tried to exile or escape from. Then, they can heal. With the power of love and appreciation, we can return to wholeness.
To me, this is the essence of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. I sit with the whole: the wounds and the health. I invite them to hold council together, so they each have an opportunity to express themselves and know they will be heard and received with fairness.
Within this larger field of love, we hold whatever arises, knowing it is just this moment’s expression of an aspect of the whole. In this context, your problems become less overwhelming. Instead of filling the entire picture, they begin to melt into the soft expansiveness of the background. As the clouds clear, your deeper essence, your inner sun, emerges. You remember what you had forgotten as the hardness formed and your mind got busy. You remember and come home to who you truly are.
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