Prisms: Reflecting On Craniosacral Therapy in the Now
/I’ve wanted to share some thoughts in honor of Craniosacral Awareness Week and it’s been a troublesome endeavor for me: partly because the work is important to me and partly because I am conflicted by what I see happening in the field and it makes me sad. It’s also unsettling to share thoughts and feelings that go against the grain.
Medicine, even natural or holistic medicine, is a field that despite what one might think, doesn’t reward unconventional and non-conforming viewpoints. When I began studying craniosacral therapy 25 years ago, I never would have imagined there would be a paradigmatic mainstream in the field but it appears that one has emerged. This fact contradicts my experience practicing, studying, reflecting on and teaching this work over the last 25 years.
We begin our CST study by placing the subject in the center of the room and imagining we are gathered in a circle around it. The subject is the body, the body as earth. It’s wide open. We then state the obvious, that everyone in the room is already an expert on the body because they have one and have lived in and with it for their entire life. Our inquiry comes from our embodied relations with one another and with the earth. The last line is a paraphrase from this passage by the Nigerian writer, architect and urban theorist, Dele Adeyemo. He says:
If, in Yoruba mythology, the fashioning of the world represented an understanding of beings’ inseparability from our embodied relations to each other and the earth, what environments must we foster to imagine the world anew after the undoing? (Adeyemo, p. 14)
Fostering a craniosacral therapy classroom environment is a task I take quite seriously. Class does not begin by reifying a list of departed elder practitioners who “discovered” the different streams of CST that have become two paradigms of the work. We start in the present with the expertise and wisdom of the bodies in the room and on the land. Adeyemo situates us in the present and needing to create new environments with a specific imperative – fostering conditions for a reimagined future. A CST classroom can be one such environment. Adeyemo is offering an example of the pre-figurative imagination at work. We need every example of this we can find and we need to uplift them all. So, the classroom is not the reimagined future; it is a place where we can seed it by imagining it differently. It’s a place to practice how we create new worlds.
In this present classroom (and equally important on our present tables) are bodies with very specific challenges based on living in this “poly-crisis”-- understood as the simultaneous convergence of multiple crises. At present authoritarianism is on the rise, folks are being more specifically targeted based on their socially constructed identities, especially the most vulnerable bodies in our culture; most directly against trans folks, the LGBTQI community and migrants. There is increasing oppression and erasure being committed against Black and Indigenous folks specifically as I write this and all people of color in more general but no less tangible ways. The climate collapse is exaggerating real crises in elemental resources, water, food and shelter, precipitating material precarity that is a root condition in late stage capitalism. All of this has consequences for our embodied relations with each other.
As the writer and activist Johanna Hedva reminds us at the beginning of her brilliant book, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability and Doom:
The definition of “the body” I like the most that I like the most is that it's ‘anything that needs support.’ It’s a human body that needs food, rest, sleep, shelter, care, other humans. It’s a social body that needs to be propelled and maintained by a collective’s aims, the tension of many convergences and disagreements coalescing into a whole. It’s a body of water that needs solid ground on which to rest and surge (Hedva, p. 5).
Hedva is describing our embodied relations: we need each other, we create each other, and we need the interrelationship of earth and water. These are universal concepts should be specifically stated in our collective now. Context always matters. It is the myriad embodiments of these contexts that lay their troubles on our tables. We are not treating an idealized western-European White cis-gendered hetero body. We are treating specific bodies impacted by social realities, including and especially identity based oppression, dislocation and class.
Mimi Khuc suggests this idea in her book Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American. Khuc coins the term pedagogy of unwellness, which she defines as, “... the understanding that we are all differently unwell. By this I mean that we are unwell in different ways at different times, in relation to differentially disabling and enabling structures, and so we need differential care at all times.” (Khuc, p.4) Hedva again, the body is “simply a thing that needs.
It’s important to name all this up front. One of the ways that the tyranny of Whiteness operates is via absencing its presence. Bodywork circles do this unconsciously all the time through the implicit assumptions of a “White body of culture” ideal (see Resmaa Menakhem, My Grandmother’s Hands for more on bodies of culture). I’m writing this from the position of a White, cis-gndered hetero, male body.
Making the implicit explicit can be uncomfortable. We are witnessing the consequences of this discomfort writ large on the national and global scale. The ethics of our work means that we, as a field, need to confront this discomfort. As practitioners, we already have values around working with our own discomfort in the clinical setting. We understand this as part of the gig we chose. So, we need to access that muscle and become more comfortable around these topics. It opens space for others. What we don’t need to do is fill the space with our discomfort. This is ongoing practice for me as I know it is for so many folks reading this. Onward.
A Philosophy of the Body via Some Simple(ish) Principles
Everything expressed so far is part of my evolving philosophy of the body that began when I began studying CST 25 years ago. Currently, I don’t practice as I was taught then. My approach now reflects my embodied relationship with some elemental principles that have been co-occurring with an ongoing reflective process and my immersion in the environments of the body itself. Through studying the principles and the body as reflective of natural processes and recognizing the limitations of scientific modeling, I began sitting with the question, “How does the body experience itself?" This has been my guide as a practitioner, forever student and teacher.
CST requires a different framework for how knowledge is constructed and put into practice. We could call this a pedagogy. Western-European ways of knowing and western models of education don’t quite match my experiential understanding of this work. I find much more coherence when I look to other cultures–especially North American Indigenous culture–as the root of this work. The Anishinaabeg activist and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson helps us understand Indigenous knowledge generation as absolutely kinesthetic.
Kinetics, the act of doing, isn’t just praxis; it also generates and animates theory within Indigenous contexts, it is the crucial intellectual mode for generating knowledge. Theory and praxis, story and practice are interdependent co-generators of knowledge… Doing produces more knowledge. (Betasamosake Simpson, p. 20)
I love the centering of kinetics or as we discuss in class, kinesthetic learning. It’s a real body of knowledge (haha) and we construct it differently than how western culture thinks knowledge is generated. I have been working in this way for a very long time, constantly reflecting on what I am experiencing in the clinic on teachings from various wisdom holders, more time, more practice. Gradually, what has evolved in me is a powerful form of embodied cognition. I think what western folks struggle with is both the time and the rigors of engaged reflection. I strongly believe that this work is not about someone telling you what or how to do things, it is about building one’s own kinesthetic knowledge – over time.
I have a specific reason for centering Indigenous knowledge traditions. The principles I have obliquely referenced come from the Shawnee people via A.T. Still, who is credited as being the founder of Osteopathy. What follows is not intended to diminish Still’s contribution but rather to widen the frame and engage in a more ethical practice through properly attributing the source of these ideas and practices.
Still’s family moved to Kaw/Kansa and Kiikaapoi land in the mid 1850s, outside of present day Kansas City, Missouri. (native-land.ca). As part of a missionary, he travelled there as a student of medicine. At the time, medicine was taught in an apprenticeship model. Still is said to have apprenticed with a Shawnee healer. It seems apparent that the philosophy Still articulated as “Osteopathy” was heavily influenced by his time with the Shawnee, especially with one individual he never identified. I have read some of Still’s work and he regularly cites the source of his ideas as his Christian God and not an Indigenous philosophy that was shared with him. It’s clear that the principles Still outlined in Osteopathy are not based on Christian ideals, but rather on a deep engagement with natural systems—and the understanding that human bodies are inseparable from natural processes. (For more on this, see Susan Raffo’s blog post on the subject.)
I was presented with the Osteopathic principles in my first CST class at the Upledger Institute 25 years ago. Since then I have deeply internalized them and processed them through both my body and mind. How they express themselves depends on the context I’m in. They’ve never felt static to me—stable, yes, but never fixed.
The body is a self-organizing whole in relationship with other bodies and the earth in both seen and unseen ways.
The body (individual, social, and earth) is composed of interrelated systems, each with their own personality. Physiology is another term for it, but less fun. These systems interrelate and integrate to create the whole, and the whole also interrelates to form specific systems. Or, as my acupuncture teacher, Dr. Qin, once said, “There’s only one channel, they just made 12 so we could talk about it.”
The body has both wisdom and curiosity about itself. Our job is to participate with this wisdom and curiosity with our engaged presence and our own curiosity. We listen, because the body has a story to tell.
The body speaks through its form, its specific reflection of the earth. Understanding the body as it experiences itself is at the core of our approach. This means a full immersion into the terrain of the body (or relational anatomy—what is connected to what and how). We use everything we know to enter into this understanding, and the tissues of the body recognize it through our touch. Imagination is part of how we construct this knowledge. Our imagination serves as a bridge from what is known through western science into what we know more experientially and infer from studying the workings of nature.
This is my interpretation at this moment. Ask me tomorrow and I might explain it differently.
Natalie Diaz, poet of rivers, says: “The body language of our bodies in relation exists outside the typical definitions by which life is measured.” (Diaz, p. 54)
Earlier in this same essay Diaz offers what I think is as a good a description of what it means and feels like to practice CST:
I am in alchemy with the river. In the water, I learn both what I am ‘of’ and what I become. A fusing – to return to our first body of water and to the knowledge system of our original liquid form. This knowledge shapes a methodology of cycle, how to be among the earth and the sky, the plants and animals, how to move with, against, toward, and through one another and our worlds – in rush, flow, and current; in hold or carry; crystallizing; vaporing; cleaning; ebb and tide; reorganizing gravity and pressure; to fall; to still; to recharge. (Diaz, p.46)
My intention in this piece is to center Indigenous ways of generating knowledge through collective kinesthetic practices and recursive, reflective pedagogies. I am not claiming these practices as my own but I am very much inspired by them and their coherence with how I experience the work I teach. To me this becomes a path toward a more ethical relationship with what craniosacral therapy is today, and to honor its roots in a living, vibrant cultural tradition. It is my hope that sharing ideas like this opens conversation and helps foster more environments that can imagine us into a world renewed.
The principles that guide this work don’t pass through us unchanged; rather they move through each of us like light through a prism, refracting into practice patterns that are entirely unique. I experience this as the beauty of this work and don’t want to see it curtailed unnecessarily. As we engage with those we treat, their specific embodiment reflects the living principles back to us, creating a second, equally unique refraction. The simple math here is one of infinite potential.
Endnotes
Adeyemo, Dale. “We Dey Move”. Borders, Human Itineraries and All Our Relation. Duke Press, 2023.
Hedva, Johanna. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability and Doom. Hilman Grad Books, 2024.
Khuc, Mimi. Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American. Abyss Duke Press, 2024.
Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. As WE Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Diaz, Natalie. “Fusings”. Borders, Human Itineraries and All Our Relation. Duke Press, 2023.
We welcome you to explore more about our approach to teaching ›› here
