Holding Space

In my last entry I said that the model of craniosacral work I follow is based on doing nothing.  I've had many conversations about it since that time. It’s a challenging place to be since our society is so geared towards “doing”.  Then, I wondered if that was an adequate description for what transpires on my table.

I was also moved towards that thinking from a book I’ve been reading about the scientific approach towards craniosacral therapy.  This author’s basis is steeped in Global Scaling which is a mathematical description of how the material universe works.  This ordering principle is based on wave patterns and how they exist in animate and inanimate organisms. They transmit information such as the communication that occurs between different organs in our bodies or the information that sound waves provide for us.

There are wave patterns that are less than seconds long and waves that oscillate back and forth only once in countless billions of years!  They are all connected and communicating with each other.  Our bodies are oscillating with the rhythm of the Universe and beyond.

When I say that I do nothing in a craniosacral session I’ve been feeling that even those words are totally inadequate.  Words are tough to describe experiential events because we know that there is no dance; there is only the dancer.  What I perceive is different from what anyone else perceives even if we are in the same place at the same time watching the same event.

During a craniosacral session I sit in silence paying attention to whatever arises and something happens.  Is that really doing nothing?  Isn’t the mere fact that I am sitting with my client changing the dynamics?  Global scaling shows that anything that happens here on earth on a small scale can be perceived billions of light years away and exerts the same effect.  Stillness and emptiness still has movement.  My stillness interfacing with my client’s stillness can’t really be “nothing”.  My intention can be to do nothing but sit in stillness and remain aware.  But on the quantum level of understanding even that is something.

As I ponder the consequences of doing nothing I suppose I can say that what I do is to sit in stillness with my clients and the whole of the Universe moves. 

Living Forces

“I’m treating to restore health.
I’m not treating to correct the problem.
In treating this way, I have opened the doors
for the body to try to do what it wants to
with its own living forces.”
Dr. R. E. Becker, DO

This is a basic premise of this work that is called Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.  I find it challenging to put a name onto what it is that I do because at the heart of it I am really not doing anything.  I am allowing your inherent health to manifest itself.  Dr. Becker said he was treating and if we had more doctors in our health care system that felt this was treating then we would certainly have less disease and more health because we have a propensity to move towards health if given the proper tools.

For some people I imagine that this philosophy is challenging.  If I spent money on something where the practitioner said she wasn’t doing anything I would sure want something to happen.  That is my desire but it may not be what needs to happen.  My body on a very deep level of being knows what it needs.  This is why I love this work.  I can put my hands on someone and know that if I stay present and appreciative of whatever arises that person as well as myself will benefit on some level.  And I can have the same expectation when someone puts their hands on me from this space of openness to the Infinite.

For me, sometimes it is not always apparent where I have benefited.  Sometimes I may have a set back.  When I can comprehend that life is a journey and not a destination I have a connection to Dr. Becker’s statement.  I have choices in my life.  What I do with those choices and how I respond to every situation takes me where I need to go.  Is it always where I expected?  Or where I wanted?  Of course not but I do understand that it is where I have the greatest need in that moment.  And then I move to the next moment and the next choice.  And don’t let me fool anyone.  Yes, sometimes there is resistance.

My body’s physical health cannot be separated out from this philosophy.  My journey is for the whole of my being – body, mind, spirit and whatever else may exist there.  Sometimes it just isn’t convenient to be sick or in pain but when I can allow that to be what it is, my responses are so much more in the flow of life processes and the next moment becomes another opportunity on a different level than if I had resisted.  I am finding that the more I can practice this the more contentment I find in the journey.

www.sherryphillips.net