Published Writing
Articles
Exploring the art and philosophy of Visionary Craniosacral Work®
Paul's writing has appeared in Body Sense Magazine (ABMP), Massage Magazine, and the Santa Barbara Independent. The two full articles below offer a deep look at the philosophy and practice of this healing work.
"Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart."
"The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart."
"The deeper we go, the more we come to trust that spirit knows what to do."
Body Sense Magazine · Autumn/Winter 2010–2011
Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals (ABMP)
Visionary Craniosacral Work® — Accessing The Healer Within
By Paul Brown
It's no secret that proper nutrition, exercise, and living a low stress lifestyle are among the keys to good health and longevity. If we pay close attention to these three cornerstones of our health, our body will reward us with vitality and well-being. Amazingly, even when our body gets a little out of balance — a sore tennis elbow, an irritating cold, or an achy neck from a tense business meeting — we are each equipped with a high-performing immune system miraculously designed to heal our body and protect us from disease.
The demands of our modern world often challenge our immune system's ability to keep up. We get pulled in competing directions — work, kids, telephones — with everything vying for our time and attention. Stress has a way of creeping in, cutting us off from the precious life forces that lay at the root of our foundation for health. If we haven't been building and maintaining the nutrition, exercise and stress management cornerstones we need, then the sore tennis elbow, cold, or tense neck becomes more serious and our health foundation starts to crumble.
When this happens, we instinctively reach out to our doctors to 'cure' us. We fail to realize that nature has already provided us with our very own miraculous inner healing force — the craniosacral system. My role as a craniosacral practitioner is to help my clients find a way to optimize their own healing force so they can either build a solid, healthy foundation or restore it if the crumbling has already begun.
A Gentle Touch
Craniosacral work is a healing modality that grew out of osteopathy, the ancient art of bone setting. In craniosacral work the subtle art of precise and gentle touch is applied to correct imbalances in the fluid and membranes surrounding and protecting the brain and spinal cord.
Craniosacral work is based on a particular understanding of human anatomy. Imagine your craniosacral system has a regular rhythm much like the heart only more subtle and slower. Just as your heart pumps needed blood to the rest of the body, the craniosacral system pumps important fluid — cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) — between your brain and spinal area. The CSF plays important roles in your immune system's performance. These include offering protective covering for your delicate brain tissue, delivering glucose to the cortex brain, inhibiting viruses and bacteria in the brain and forming a transport medium between the blood and the brain.
CSF has a big job to do, but health problems can create an imbalance in the flow of the CSF, limiting health and clarity. If CSF is allowed to flow unimpeded, then the body has the opportunity to maintain or restore balance. Proper performance of the craniosacral system and its fluids is essential and necessary to the entire central nervous system, which controls the actions and reactions internal to the body and your body's adjustment to your environment.
Think of your brain as a computer and the spinal cord as the cable. The spinal cord links the computer's input and output to the rest of the body. Remarkably, your entire motor function, learning patterns, and emotions are affected by the craniosacral system as your whole body expands and contracts with the rhythm of the pumping fluids. This is where craniosacral work can improve the functioning of these essential self-healing systems.
Think of your craniosacral practitioner as your partner. You go into a state of deep relaxation while allowing your body to find its optimum health. Your practitioner lends his or her ability to go to those places on your body that need support to help your body's natural flow. Together you are able to bolster your body's own resistance and improve how your central nervous system responds to stress and illness. When soft touch is applied to this system, the body will respond accordingly and clients can achieve incredible releases from long-standing restrictions, stress and tension. Craniosacral work achieves not only relief from physical pain, but also restoration of clarity and emotional wholeness.
What to Expect
During a craniosacral session, the practitioner will have set up a space devoid of distractions. In my practice I refer to this as the 'sacred space' because I strive to embody the philosophy that time and space are special, unique, quiet, restful, and where stillness resides. The practitioner will ask questions to support what health or healing concerns the client has. This is a critical part of the healing process because craniosacral therapy offers many techniques that can be directly customized to the client's needs.
Next, the client lies on a traditional massage table, fully clothed, and the practitioner begins to apply a slight amount of pressure — about the weight of a nickel — to the craniosacral system. I draw on more than a hundred different techniques from my years of training and use a precise, gentle touch to areas such as the brain, spine, or other parts of the body.
Once the body is in a relaxed state, craniosacral therapy has the ability to teach on a cellular level. The body knows this; that is, every cell in the body will remember the connection with the forces of healing and the more the body remembers those forces of healing, the more it can allow itself to heal. This same 'cellular memory' can be achieved in a similar, but positive, way by giving the body — and the central nervous system — an extreme and wonderful experience of deep and often profound relaxation through craniosacral work.
During the session you may encounter memories, emotional issues, thoughts, feelings, and/or spiritual insights. When they arise, know that these are the exact aspects of yourself that consciousness has chosen to bring to your awareness. By allowing whatever arises to just be there, without feeling that you have to do anything about it, the separated parts will rejoin the wholeness that you are. By the time you leave your session, you will most likely feel relaxed, refreshed and re-energized.
The Stillness
Most of us have mastered the art of 'doing' in our crazy, activity-filled world, but 'being' is actually tougher, much more rewarding, and is truly a gift. Lao Tzu, the prolific sixth century B.C.E. philosopher, said 'The source of all great movement lies in stillness.' I've often been awed by what the body can do when we give in to the dynamic activity of stillness — when we slow down enough for the body to respond positively to its own healing ability.
While craniosacral work is a complementary practice, I also view it as a spiritual practice. Now, more than ever before, we are witnessing a return to healing that encompasses the totality and wholeness of the body, mind, spirit, and psyche. We are paying more attention to what we eat, we are looking for alternatives to drugs, and we are stopping to think for a moment before we make that call to the doctor. We are flexing the muscles of a deeper consciousness as we strive to experience what it means to live a healthy and authentic life. In many ways, we are reaching out to the spiritual roots of our healing. By tapping into our inner healer, craniosacral work helps us get there.
Massage Magazine · August 2011
Massage Magazine
The Healing Art of Visionary Craniosacral Work® — A Practitioner's Role
By Paul Brown
Craniosacral work is a healing modality that grew from osteopathy, the ancient art of bone setting. The subtle art of precise and gentle touch is applied to correct imbalances in the fluid and membranes surrounding and protecting the brain and spinal cord. The practitioner uses specific techniques, along with presence, where sacred space is held by means of mindful awareness for healing. This allows the client to achieve releases from restrictions and tension throughout her entire body. This, in turn, brings about relief from physical pain, restoration of clarity and insight, and the optimization of emotional wholeness.
Craniosacral work is valuable for many medical problems and is routinely used as a preventive health measure, as it increases resistance to many ailments. People of all ages, from children to seniors, can benefit from this form of therapy.
The Difference
The difference between craniosacral work and other modalities is the duration of the techniques that are held on the client, as well as the moment-to-moment attentiveness the practitioner holds to the client's needs. The craniosacral practitioner facilitates the healing of the client's own healing process. In doing this the practitioner slows, broadens and eventually stills his attention to the intelligence of the client's primary respiration system — the totality and complete submicroscopic self-organizing movement of the fluids in the body. When this is done, the client's body then knows what to do.
What a Practitioner Does
As a practitioner, the ultimate priority in this work is to hold the well-being of the client and value the uniqueness of each individual. The client's body is empathetically connected, allowing for emotional safety. While instinctively remembering the individual's wholeness, sacred space is held within the dynamic stillness that permeates the room.
The practitioner consciously breathes in the pain and suffering, synchronizing with the primary respiration that is different with each client, while exhaling loving kindness. Full intention is used for the connection of primary respiration as when we find cohesion with stillness, moving at its own pace. Elevated consciousness is brought about between the client and the practitioner, as he proceeds to be present with an open and loving heart that is necessary for optimal healing.
If the body is carefully listened to, the body will tell the practitioner which pertinent techniques or holds to use during a session depending upon the client's specific needs. A gentle, sensitive finger touch is used that optimizes the slow and steady movement within the body known as the cranial wave. In addition to this, precise touch at specific points on the body monitor and interface with the oceanic environment of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This offers relief from pain, deep relaxation and maximum revitalization of body, mind and heart, allowing for the individual to find his or her way to a state of health and wholeness.
What Makes Craniosacral Work Unique
The most unique aspect of the role of the practitioner is the visionary approach — one who perceives outside, senses what is inside and trusts both at the same time — that allows for him to meet, greet and hold united consciousness with the client, all while waiting for nature to heal the disease. The practitioner comes in touch with spirit as a quiet, intuitive presence. This moment-to-moment stillness allows him to be guided, as his hands become receptors of healing energy.
The practitioner expresses his highest knowing, moving to the place that supports each client's body, mind, and heart as it finds its own profound medicine and undergoes a reawakening of the power within on the journey to optimum health. As a practitioner, this carries forth into the work, giving him a deeper sense of love, compassion and, most importantly, presence. Presence then becomes more important than technique.
Craniosacral Work as a Spiritual Practice
This work becomes a spiritual practice. In order to do the work that needs to be done, the practitioner allows time to slow down, creating sacred space and holding the client's dream body — the totality and wholeness of the client — with reverence and awe. Through the many techniques and holds available, a process is used of extreme gentle sensitive touch, a form of Taoism, the 'doing non-doing,' to optimize a movement within the body known as the cranial wave.
Problems can create an imbalance in the flow of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), limiting health and clarity. As the work continues and if the practitioner is open to the practice explained above, the body will be free to open up sutures, air sinuses, rigidity, and blockages in the body to free up CSF — and the healing processes will naturally follow. In essence, sacred space is being held for these other forces. This is more than can be physically seen, touched or healed. It is something beyond our knowing and it is timeless.
Healing happens on both physical and emotional levels, but the deepest healing takes place when the practitioner stays in the moment and is truly present, serving as a channel for this love that reaches down to the innermost part of the client's being, where the real healing takes place. The responsibility of the practitioner is to reinterpret everything according to a deeper reality, and this happens when he lets go of what he thinks and knows and touches into the dynamic activity of stillness.
Craniosacral work has the ability to teach on a cellular level. The body will remember this; that is, every cell in the body will remember the connection with the forces of healing and the more the dream body remembers those forces, the more it can allow itself to heal. This will remain as an indelible lesson in the hearts and minds of those whose lives the practitioner touches, both now and for years to come.
Paul's work was also featured in the Santa Barbara Independent (May 30, 2012).
Read the Independent article →Experience the Work
Reading about craniosacral work is just the beginning. Reach out to Paul to schedule a session and discover what your body already knows.