Craniosacral Therapy: Gentle Doesn’t Mean Passive
You’ve probably heard that Craniosacral Therapy only uses 5 grams of pressure—the weight of a nickel. How can you possibly make a difference with the weight of a nickel?
You haven’t heard the whole truth. The weight of a nickel is a great place to start to learn how to feel the rhythm. Much more than 5 grams, and you will start to influence the rhythm, stop it, or change it one way or another, getting into a more myofascial dialogue with the tissues.
Though we use a lighter touch than what you have been taught as deep tissue massage, where your focus is muscles, our focus is tissues deep to the muscles—bones, ligaments, organs, even fluids and the nervous system as a whole. Did you know that in the Introduction to Massage Therapy book used in many schools, Craniosacral Therapy is listed under Deep Tissue Modalities?
Take the nervous system as an example. Using 5 grams of pressure to listen to (or feel, with your hands), the rhythm, you will notice your client change their breath, relax, and start to calm down. It literally starts up the parasympathetic response you’ve been trying so hard to elicit in your clients, while dampening the sympathetic response they probably walked in with. It happens so much faster by being still and letting the rhythm come to you than by warming up and treating the muscles.
That being said, I don’t use 5 grams of pressure for the whole treatment. Rather, I match the target tissue, just like we were taught to do in massage school. Once I have felt the rhythm and done my initial assessment and have a target tissue, that’s when my hands go to work and engage with a little more umph.
For instance, if my target tissue is the knee joint, I’m going to match the tissue of the joint capsule, or more specifically the meniscus, or the articular cartilage, or the femur and tibia, or, yes, I admit it, even the muscles and tendons involved in the joint. The amount of pressure I use will be determined by the density and rigidity of the tissues I’m working on.
That doesn’t mean that the more rigid the tissue, the more force I use—quite the opposite actually! Often if a tissue is rigid, it requires a softer touch in order to engage it. And you can engage all of the different tissues at different levels of treatment. You can engage at a more myofascial level, or you can engage on an embryological rhythm level, as an example.
It becomes a dialogue between you and the tissues you’re working on, or really, the human under your hands. A dialogue between your heart and theirs. It’s beautiful to connect with other humans at this deep and intimate level.
Passive work? Hardly! This work is so focused, and I have to be so present, that often times I feel at the end of the day like I got a treatment as well! It’s like an entire day spent in deep meditation, so focused on what is in front of me that there is no room for outside thoughts. This is work you can lose time in. You’ve probably heard how good that type of work is for your brain and your spirit.
Are you ready to get a taste of what this work is like? Hop into any of my classes. They are all based on this and similar work. It will change the way that you look at the body, the way that you connect with the people on your table, and even the way you show up in relationships. When you really learn to listen and dialogue effectively, great things happen in all aspects of life.
