One of the strongest results I’ve had using Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy was with a stressed lawyer, who’d come with acute/chronic shoulder pain.
It was so bad that she couldn’t drive anymore, and could only work part-time, but she was a very busy, and very successful lawyer.
She’d been working with physiotherapists, a homeopath, and another manipulative approach. We worked together for ten sessions. The first six sessions, I completely bounced off her. I was still doing bits of Chiropractic and Shiatsu at the time, and mixing in cranial work. I started by playing with points and manipulated the shoulders, using all my best tricks from my other body work trainings, and nothing really happened.
I did what I was trained to do – sit down and just listen
It was still in the early days of my career, so I revisited the biodynamic approach and did what I was trained to do, which was actually sit down and just listen. Then it got much more interesting.
The acute shoulder problem was making me miss all sorts of other things going on in her body. The thing that came up was that there was this big, sort of absent quality in her pelvis. Around sessions six and seven I began to pay attention to this, noticing that there was this lack of movement, a coldness, a quality of “not there” in the pelvis.
We approached this and at the end of the session she made this incredible statement: “I can’t tell you what happened there, it’s something worse than death,” and then she left.
She had been coming weekly at that stage and I was left with this anxiety around what had happened. She didn’t come back for another couple of weeks, so it was a much longer than normal gap.
She came in again, and we started slowly, and then raised the issue of this powerful statement, at the same time holding the abdomen and this quality of not much being there. This amazing story emerged; she’d had an abortion a couple of years earlier, although she hadn’t really wanted to do it. It was a complex story around her partner and getting married, but for her, this quality of “something worse than death.”
That story was upsetting her whole system. She was contracting, and the pain was just being expressed through the shoulder, so her whole system was overloaded and the shoulder was just an indicator; a flag waving saying that she was really distressed and something needed paying attention to here.
The shoulder was like the red light on a dashboard. Originally I was just trying to turn the light off on the dashboard, but the whole system was stressed, the whole system was in a fetal position, the whole system was dissociated. She wasn’t able to feel her body completely, and there were all sorts of stress patterns and her behaviour was changed.
After two or three more sessions, where we supported a gradual opening of her abdomen, she began to be able to feel her abdomen, and was able to talk about the story and acknowledge its consequence for her.
Then the acute shoulder pain – that had been stopping her working and that had been stopping her driving – resolved. It was a very cool experience.
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is an amazing way of touching people. At its heart, it’s an entering into a relationship with another human being, but using touch as the way of exploring that relationship or supporting the body of the other person to move towards health.
One of the most important ideas at the core of BCST is that there is an intelligence and self-regulating principle at the heart of the human experience. Our bodies are always striving for health and trying to optimize their balance, and they do that very intelligently. There are millions of years of evolution behind the processes and flows and movements in the body, and that is the intelligence we’re aiming to access.
It’s really about kind of getting out the way, giving the body a chance to rest and recuperate, and holding a mirror up to the body. When we put our hands on areas that are out of relationship – that are perhaps tight or painful – and just remind them they can move differently and not be fragmented, the whole nervous system and all the control mechanisms in the body, can engage and reignite processes of healing that might have been frozen or overwhelmed due to stress or lack of time.
If you’re interested in training in BCST with me, you can still join our current London course at the second module on June 17th- 21st. (We’ll make a plan for you to catch up on module one). You can find out more and register here.
Upcoming Trainings with Steve Haines:
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST)
The Art of Touch Two Year Trainings:
London 2026: Join at the current training on Seminar two on June 17-21
Galway: starts March 2027
Waterford: starts Oct 2026
Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®) One Year Training:
London 2026: starts 27-28 June
