I love biodynamic craniosacral therapy; the art of using touch to support health. When you touch people they change. It is that simple.
Many people struggle with safety; it can be hard work negotiating being in the body. Coming into a relationship with a skilled therapist can ease the pain. The inherent drive for self-regulation within our physiology is very powerful. Appreciating how the human body strives for health, and how health is expressed as coherence, connection, and a pulsing flow, is the skill of cranial work.
In my Art of Touch biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST) training we work with embodied presence, education, movement, and non-doing touch to help people reconnect with health. Here are two of the core principles that guide BCST:
Humans are rhythmical beings
Rhythms are a fundamental feature of human beings. We have heart rates, we have twitching of tissues, we have guts that churn, we have rhythms in our brain, we have blood pressure waves, we have waves of fluid moving around our nervous system.
We’re also embedded in bigger rhythms. We have circadian rhythms where we secrete immune cells at four o’clock in the morning. We have hormones that are secreted daily and over weeks and months.
We have rhythms inside us, rhythms outside of us in nature, we have cycles and seasons.
Sometimes all these internal rhythms can coalesce into a meaningful, beautiful tune, and we might say that health is playing more beautiful music on the inside of us.
When our rhythms are working together, communicating well, and our sensitive systems and secretions are working together, there’s harmony in the body.
In the Art of Touch biodynamic cranio-sacral course, we teach you how to be sensitive to internal rhythms, pay attention to the deep pulse of being alive, and learn the ability to differentiate between the different rhythms.
We’ll give you a framework to interpret the rhythms of the body, so that you can both diagnose as well as support your clients to more coherence, more communication, and to come back into harmony and rhythm. And we do all of that by slow, gentle touch.
Humans are self-organizing organisms
The smartest thing in the room is the intelligence in our bodies. If we create enough safety, all our self-healing mechanisms will begin to kick in – when you cut your finger, you know it’s going to heal and self-repair.
As a BCST therapist, your role is to offer resources, safety and a relationship that can facilitate self-repair. You become the reference point reminding your client’s body of these slower rhythms and of how to create a safe environment. Reminding them that they can rest, they can repair, they can start to meet the things that are difficult and begin to include them and find a way of healing, becoming less sensitive, of reducing the things that are too much, meeting them with resources and safety.
Other foundational principles of BCST include:
We are shaped by our experience
Cranial work is deeply informed by the understanding of early experiences such as birth, as an early defining experience. We’re also informed by embryology, how we grow is how we heal.
Being trauma-informed
Cranial work is also deeply informed by trauma and the understanding that when we dissociate, withdraw, shut down, or speed up this really, affects the ability to express rhythms in our body. Safety is the most important thing human beings need, and we’ll give you lots of tools to help you negotiate safe, meaningful touch for people.
Anatomy is the language of the body
Anatomy is the language of the body. We’ll teach you how to speak that language, through an immersive study of the immune system, the nervous system, the structures of the body, the organs, and the fascia, so that you can know how to sense what’s under your hands and how to pay attention to that and how to support the physiology to engage.
Philosophies of interconnectedness and a principle of non-doing.
It’s very meditative work, so we’ll do a lot of tuning into your own body, learning what you can feel on the inside of you, and from that active presence, we can help other people be more present to themselves and more present to the world.
The core of the course is experiential – you feeling your own body, you receiving treatments and you giving treatments.
If you want to find out more about training in London or Ireland, please visit www.bodycollege.net.
Upcoming Trainings with Steve Haines:
Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®)
TRE intro days:
London: 15 Jul, 23 Sep, 18 Nov
New TRE 1 year training:
London: starts June 2024
Nice: starts Oct 2024 – with Sylvia Benoist (English with French translation).
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST)
The Art of Touch 2 year trainings:
London: starts Oct 2024
Waterford: starts Oct 2024
The Art of Touch intro events:
London (evenings): 11 July
Waterford (days): 29 June
