Course Overview

Become an Expert in Touch: Train with Body College

Training with Body College is intensely focused on practical work. Theory is great, and we have lots of ideas to explore, but the practice of putting your hands on is key to becoming a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist (BCST).

You will develop your perceptual skills by the regular and consistent practice of touch.

Perception requires involvement. The first thing you meet in attempting to offer the ‘relational touch’ of BCST is yourself. To that end, we teach a range of meditative skills in class time and via self directed study.

Body College is a sister college to Body Intelligence. We have been teaching BCST for over 10 years in more than 40 cities around the world. We have lots of experience and tools to support your study and skills building, including the course book Cranial Intelligence written by Ged Sumner and Steve Haines, and our own wiki: www.bodycollegewiki.net

Once you have learnt to meet your own resources and settle under your needs, you have much more potential to be open to meet another human. Seminar 1 is all about core skills to support safety and how to negotiate setting up a ‘relational field’ that meets a whole person.

Early seminars develop understanding and skills on meeting trauma. The most important decision your brain is making is ‘Am I Safe?’. Learning about the defence cascades of ‘fight-or-flight’ or ‘freeze’ forms a backdrop to all our work.

As a community of people working in the cranial field we have learnt to value and interact with certain core phenomena of health; feeling rhythms and slow tides, orienting to midline function, appreciating shapes in the form of the body, connecting to flow and harmony in fluid systems, finding a neutral and deepening into stillness. In Seminar 2 there is a focus on the midline and we introduce embryology. In Seminar 3 we explore the tissue field as a unified whole.

We will practice letting go into wholeness, presence and learning to trust something greater than your intellect. There are deep, emergent forces of health we can access in a skilled relational field. BCST is a practice of non-doing and trust in the way of life. Sutherland, the founder of the cranial paradigm, called this the ‘Breath of Life’.

By the end of Seminar 4 you will be familiar and skilled at interacting with these core phenomena. You will have learnt to feel stories in the spine, cranium, pelvis and the living matrix of fascia. Your verbal interactions, perceptual skills and meditative awareness will start to become increasingly enhanced and powerful.

We are shaped by experience; birth is an early and defining experience in the cranial paradigm. On Seminar 5, at the midpoint of the course, we will start to explore how birth processes impact our health and how to relate to early dynamics in our physiology.

The second half of the course includes rich insights on meeting viscera in Seminar 6, the nervous system in Seminar 7 and the facial complex, including the jaw in Seminar 8. We will strive to always appreciate complexity and larger field dynamics in finding health. We do a deep dive into pain science.

We finish with looking at skills to work with parents and babies in Seminar 9. During this seminar we revisit and celebrate complexity in understanding suffering and trauma. Seminar 10 completes with the beautifully dynamic web of cells, stress and immunity communicating by fluids. We return to stillness.

There will be space to explore professional practice and client management through out the course. We want you to be a confident, professional expert in touch, ready and able to help people suffer less from pain, anxiety and trauma.

Body College BCST Course Curriculum

Course Booklist