The Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Felt During a Treatment (So Far…)

I have felt a lot of cool things in the treatment room by now. But this one thing was pretty spectacular. I have to tell you about it. (Although I got permission to share, I won’t name names.)

A student of mine took my Intro to Craniosacral Therapy, and after class she asked me if I thought I could help her husband with cervical dystonia. I had never treated anyone with that diagnosis before. I asked her how that presented for him, and she shared some of his symptoms with me. I did some reading about it.

When he came into my office, I felt compassion for him because he was in his early 60s and couldn’t look straight ahead, because his neck was so rotated to the left that his eyes and his neck muscles were in a constant war. He was trying to look straight ahead, but his neck wouldn’t allow it. If you remember Katherine Hepburn, you can imagine how his head was shaking as he tried to look forward—not quite as pronounced as her shaking was, but definitely on the way to that.

He shared with me some of his health history. There were two significant injuries, and I think they were both insults to the brain. One involved breathing chlorine gas, which had landed him in the hospital with a brain injury. The other was decades later when he fell and tore his medial collateral ligament of the knee, which ended up getting all the attention, but he said he smelled the chlorine gas after that injury. It was after that injury that the torticollis set in.

I imagine that the fall also gave him a nasty concussion, and possibly reinjured some of the previous injury that was being held there, to let it wreak havoc on his brain once more.

I did the Barral listening to the head to determine where the primary source of tension in his body was, that day. It took me to the lower part of his cranium. I guess I’m starting with the head, I thought, which I historically haven’t done very often.

Since his wife was there and had had my CST class, I asked them if she could hold his sacrum while I worked on his head. She listened to the sacral movements, while I went to work.

I did what I knew for brains by then, a limited number of techniques, but those techniques are powerful and can be a doorway to a long, drawn out conversation with the brain, and a big release of tension. That’s exactly what happened. The brain went into a rotation that mimicked his neck rotation (no wonder he couldn’t turn his head to look forward). When the brain was finally done reliving its trauma and releasing the tension, there was the biggest expansion I have ever felt in any tissue of the body. It lasted a good minute or longer. An involuntary smile filled my face the entire time it expanded. I had never felt anything like it.

I always try not to put words into the mouths of my clients, so I didn’t say much, but I’m sure the shock on my face was apparent.

I finished the treatment, did some integrative techniques so he wouldn’t feel like he was just one head. Then I invited him to get up slowly. He sat up and sat there for a minute. He looked at his wife. He said he had never felt so relaxed in his neck. He could tell the work was powerful. But what happened when he stood up, I will never forget.

From across the room from me, he looked straight at me. The torticollis was gone! What just happened?

That was a huge lesson for me. That was the first time the body had taken me to the cranium to work on first. I had been taught by my mentor of 10 years that it would be a rare thing to work on the head first—usually only in cases of a head injury, which made this qualify, even by his standards. But the anchors from below still have to be dealt with, so I usually would buy some adaptability into the system by working below the head first, even if I knew the primary thing would be to work on the head.

Since then I have let go of that rule of thumb, somewhat. I still do something, even if it’s just listening, below the head, in every treatment, even if I don’t do it first. I am no longer afraid to start at the head, if the body tells me that’s where it wants me to go. “Only the tissues know,” says JP Barral. I think he’s right. The tissues know what happened, and they know what they need to be able to heal. We must learn to listen better, and do less, and let the body do what it was designed to do: heal itself, with us as the facilitators only.