I had the pleasure of spending last weekend in a long-awaited Craniosacral (CST) continuing education workshop, put off for many months by the pandemic, and I got to learn some incredible tools that I’m very excited to bring into my practice. The work we did over the weekend was deeply profound, and left me reflecting on a few other deep places this work has taken me in just the past few months. I thought I’d share some of them here.
In December, I got the rare opportunity to see a client the day after she was in a car accident. Pain takes a day or two to set in after a car accident, and hers was just starting to set in when I saw her. She had accidentally rear ended someone and totaled her car, and had whiplash from the impact, bracing with the brake pedal, and her seatbelt and airbags. It was a very scary accident because she saw it coming, tried to stop in time, but stil slid on the wet road. This is the kind of accident that could cause pain from whiplash for years if not treated well. I saw her once a week for 4 weeks, and using CST, her pain was gone after 3 weeks and her panic at seeing accidents or unpredictable drivers was gone after 4 weeks. We were both amazed and delighted at how quickly her pain and fear dissipated.
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I have a client I’ve been working with on and off since early 2018. The first time I met her, she described experience as feeling like she was wearing a straightjacket all the time and couldn’t take a full breath, let alone a deep breath. She had dealt with neglectful and abusive parents, an abusive husband, and an abusive workplace before we met, and was now in a healthier marriage, retired, and ready to not be in so much pain. We’ve had a long journey together and have explored many deep questions about her relationships with her body and her mind, and it’s been amazing to watch her become more and more herself. I am so honored by the trust she puts in me.
Working through complex trauma like hers is like peeling an onion - you have to start with the most recent layers before you can get to the oldest ones. Recent CST work has brought up some early childhood memories about her parents’ neglect, which means we’re getting closer to the source of her problems. CST is a beautiful way of accessing and releasing cellular memory and subconscious or unconscious memory of very old traumas.
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There’s a common misconception that the skull is a solid piece of bone, but it’s actually made up of many different bones with slightly flexible sutures between them. This weekend, we learned how to release stuck spots in those sutures, which can resolve decades-old head injuries - not just help, but resolve. I experienced it myself, feeling a lingering twist at the base of my skull from a 2017 car accident untwist and leave. A classmate experienced all kinds of incredible changes related to falling off her bike and onto her chin when she was 8. She’s in her late 50s now.
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By far the most amazing thing we learned and experienced this weekend was how to affect bone structure inside the mouth. Effectively, we learned how to do what a palate widener in orthodontics does, but in just a few minutes and with no pain. Note: this does not work for all dental issues and is not a guaranteed replacement for orthodontia.
Here was my experience: I noticed that the left side of my hard palate was narrower than the right, and that when I bit down my left molars were turned under so my bite was landing on the outside edge of my upper molars instead of flat to my bottom molars. We learned how to “sink into the bone” of the hard palate with our intention and allow the bone structure to shift and widen. When we finished, my bite was completely different - my hard palate was more even, my left upper molars were more upright, and my left molars met flat. Since then, a sometimes sensitive tooth hasn’t been sensitive, and I literally have more space for my toothbrush around my left upper wisdom tooth. It’s a remarkable visible and felt change.
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This weekend’s workshop was mind-blowingly cool. I often can’t explain how I’m doing what I’m doing with CST, but this weekend took that to a whole new level and I’m so excited to see where it goes next and what else there is to learn. To quote my sister after I described the workshop to her, “So, you’re a Jedi now, right? Not sure if you’re Yoda or Han Solo, but you’re definitely a Jedi.”