I wish to end 2024 with ‘fascination’, a word that originally meant ‘bewitched’, ‘to cast a spell on’ and became ‘enchanting’ and ‘enchanted’ with the renewing winds of the Renaissance.
Spellbound by what I feel when I deeply listen to bodies, I could not but wish for more in the year to come.
The privilege and honour of fascination come to me as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist (BCST) with the gifts of surrender to the Health matrix in all of us, full acceptance of what is and the duty to hold the whole in whatever is unfolding in each moment.
Mostly non-verbal this holding may also require verbal cues to assist in the ‘validation’ process of what emerges and allow more to surface and find resolution.
I once heard someone talk of not just one organism for the human body but many, probably innumerable ways of ‘organising’ and ‘reorganising’. I witness this wondrous filling and bridging of absent parts, this marvellous tumbling down of fences stacked around the stronghold of protective fulcra, this fascinating restoration of the vitality of the fluid field in the whole. I also empathise and sympathise with the precious vulnerability that becomes more exposed as stories of past times and lands emerge.
Stories influenced by the initial directionalities of our embryonic formatting and further fuelled by the nature of our birth and our early years as a human being. These times and spatial circumstances infuse our sense of internal and external boundaries with a uniquely fundamental signature or blueprint interlaced with imprints that will determine how we meet life and the world.
If I break down fascination as an ‘en-chant-ment’ I hear the enabling and fulfilling of one’s chant(s), one’s own song(s) and this, to me, ranks among the best definitions of my practice as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist.
I like to wonder at the journey of becoming, itself a process or processes, of the word ‘fascination’ as it ‘unburdened’ itself of its ‘negative’ load generating new and qualitatively different relationships in so doing, as this unfolding of new and ancient songs too.
So I wrote this piece as a series of questions that have arisen during my work to which I answer with a medley of personal and clients’ chants, unique ‘voices’ and ‘voicing’ which converge towards blueprint as they unveil themselves. Ultimately these are stories of fascination, of en-chant-ment, enabling each of these vital songs to resonate and resound more clearly and more powerfully .
What do the contrasting sensations of today’s session tell me about you?
Left and right sides: we ‘build’ ourselves around the axis of the spine. Does your left ‘support’ your right? Your right side stores your core wounds and organises around its many fulcra while the left is quieter. Your right hip feels lower than your left. Your neck feels ‘thicker’ on the right than on the left. There is no outline on your left. No sense of skin delineation, your presence is highly permeable and therefore more vulnerable to daily blows or unwelcomed influences. Your left ankle is ‘not there’, you dissociate. We blank what we do not wish to feel. We must protect and dissociation is often the best and only way to do so. You feel your left speaks of fears of intimacy. Your right shoulder feels stuck in an endless loop of ‘not good enough’.
Bottom and top: Your neck resists presence as it holds on to a familiar pattern. Heads so often disconnect from the rest of our bodies. We dangle from up there and forget our feet in contact with ground, with earth. Afraid of landing from a traumatic birth? Touching down and trusting the ‘ground zero’ experience of these utterly, radically new incarnated relationships. Still holding this visceral fear in tissues and fluids, still organising and formatting around it.
The solar plexus at the bottom of our sternum comes up as another crossroad, another restricted skein directing the ‘up and down’, an influencing crux between the above and the below.
Front and back: how we implant to the uterine wall of our mother’s womb. I resist letting go to forces beyond my control. Why does your ethmoid (third eye area) echo your umbilicus? Your embryonic pharyngeal pleats once folded around your heart and navel. Your face formed as they unfolded. What happened then that you may feel again now in your jaw and abdomen? I repeat and return to that original imprint in my constant becoming process. You feel a lack of support unravelling at your back. You lost a twin and struggle to trust connection. Disoriented you struggle to settle, overwhelmed by emotions. Spinning. Lost.
And then there is your innerness itself, your connective tissue, your blood flow, your potently sparkling interstitial fluid, your organs; your liver struggling to take space, to relax and release. But your heart radiates joy and health to allow your whole chest to expand and breathe in more of who you are. Your nerves ‘shake’ off the strain and the pain. You say your brain slows down and quietens as I gently hold your head.
How do you connect with the disconnect, with what feels locked, trapped?
This alone deserves a whole essay. Parts of us want to run away from other parts. Too painful, too filled with so much ‘crap’ you say. So much hurt, some of which you cannot recall, some of which does not belong to you. Layers that need to be ‘touched’ on slowly, gently, quietly because of our terror, sometimes, of this deeply seated ‘wild animal’ we are so scared to disturb and awaken. Where feels vital, ok, not as painful and stuck? Can I learn to trust at least some parts of me? To lean back and feel the support of the practitioner’s hands and still presence, fully there with you so that your organisms can relax and allow healing reorganisation. Now I can feel the room, my skin, the rhythm of my breath, my pulsating tissues, the dances of my fluids. Your belief in your pain, your frozen shoulder, your spasms never subsiding can make way to what radiates ease elsewhere. It’s possible, you’re doing it. It’s gone! You say you feel so free, it’s been such a long time. It won’t return now that your body remembers and settles around it. So much power was trapped there, you feel energised, renewed, revealed and you almost dance out of the clinic room! Your voice sounds different, relaxed, fuller, more vibrant. Where there was hard concrete there is softness, where disconnect once prevailed now coherence pervades. Next time I see you you wear colour instead of black. Your relationship to the space within, and the land around your skin expands after all this decluttering. What was perceived once as scarily ‘untouchable’ feels peaceful now.
You/I say: what remains unexpressed that I wish to explore? And on to the next session please!
How do you connect with your blueprint, how does it bolster your essence?
So much of our existence orients around how we relate. Are you a poet who feels mountains, rivers, canyons, ocean waves in different parts of you or speaks about your ‘windy toe’? How does your mind relax to help the process with images of this big oak at the end of your garden, the walks by the sea, your gardening, your daily walking barefoot on the earth? The windows, the cracks through which we let in the light, what are they like for you? I doze off and entrust you, the practitioner, you my dear organisms, you the fluid field around me, you the multi-force field sustaining life on Earth, to do what you know best.
So many ‘time zones’ constantly interact within us, as BCST, Polarity, and Pre and Perinatal practitioner Anna Chitty calls them. You can relate to your one-year-old at the back of your heart, you can listen and be with them. You can give them what they needed back then. Dropping off the burden your stories readjust. That time zone fits in better now doesn’t it?
How do you navigate the storms around you?
Where is my blueprint? How do you discern among all the imprinted presences expressing within you the one that reflects who you are and always were. Where are the boundaries of where I begin and you end, where you begin and I end? You slowly become your own, reclaim your own. You must reconcile the parts otherwise you keep returning to a confused overwhelm, to a never never land of painful core beliefs. You know it’s possible or you would not lie down here on this plinth. You/I trust the practitioner to facilitate and guide.
What is my role as a therapist?
I, like a boat anchored to the still moving ocean floor in a stormy sea, stay tuned in and attuned to your organisms’ struggles and yearnings. I read your internal maps and speak words of support and encouragement, of validation, yes this is your Health! Your blueprint expressing, can you rest there while I gently make contact with my hands? I give permission: it is safe to inhabit, to be present where you once ran away. I hold your hand on this journey of reclaiming who you are with your imprints, your wounds and glories and beneath them where stillness dynamics sustain the whole. I help you to celebrate how you survived, how you lived through all the ‘crap’, the turmoil, the horror, the upheavals, the stuff you could not possibly make sense of, the neglect, the omissions, the scarcity, and yet here you are, miraculous you, perceiving and expressing your aliveness now. In all this I am mirroring my own still blueprint and need to be clear, transparent, rested, healthy, current and grounded in present time and space. Judgement has no place here. My fascinated en-chant-ment serves yours as I am also held by a greater Intelligence or call it Wisdom at play.
I would not keep doing what I do if I weren’t each and every time enchanted by the processes unfolding under my touch.
The world isn’t holding that sensitivity, you said. Your songs feel unmet, unresponded to. I, the practitioner am also here to respond, to meet you in whichever form, way, process, patterning you are. All of you is welcome here. I wish to and am able to listen to all of your songs. But remember I am just a part of the enabling process, your organisms, the formative field play the major roles. Learning to trust and entrust them with who you are will alter how you view and relate to the world.
Very best wishes for your songs to be revealed and enabled in 2025!
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