✨Happy World Kidney Day! ✨ As we approach the end of a long winter it’s time to celebrate the organ associated with the season - the Kidney!  If you’ve ever experienced a form of burn-out you’ll know the kidneys and adrenals are usually those organs most affected, as fight or flight hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are over-produced in a bid to keep up the pace and consequently become depleted over time. When we work with the adrenals and kidneys in Craniosacral therapy the organs should feel soft and spongy, rather than contracted and hard or dry, which indicates burn-out from st ..read more

Around 200,000 people get braces every year in the UK, in fact they’ve become pretty trendy in recent years.  Whilst they’re a lot more accepted than they used to be, they can certainly leave their mark on the Craniosacral system.   In people who wore braces as a child or adult, the skull and facial bones will often feel tightly compressed, and the Craniosacral system will often feel very contracted or ‘pulled inwards’.  Braces pull together the teeth, jaw and skull bones and narrow the upper palate. The sutures between the maxilla bones and all the other facial bones can b ..read more

?️ VIPASSANA LEARNINGS: Sitting in silence for ten days with no phones or email, Vipassana (insight) meditation offers the opportunity to delve into the self and explore the mental obstacles holding us back from living freely. Guided by @YogiAshokananda, meditating for up to ten hours each day means no stone is left unturned. Old aches and pains, twitches and the urge to move surface initially as we face resistance to exploring what’s inside. The teaching is to just observe any thoughts as they come and go without reacting, simply witnessing. My senses became heightened, a bell is rung wheneve ..read more

I’ve often noticed that during Craniosacral treatments children and adults will move into certain positions, re-enacting where the body was once traumatised, where it became stuck, or where some form of movement is needed to prompt the nervous system into functioning optimally. The latter is often a sign of the ‘primitive reflexes’ attempting to integrate. The primitive reflexes are survival mechanisms which are present at birth and originate in the brainstem as involuntary motor responses. When they don’t fully integrate, there can be emotional and physical consequences such as anxiety ..read more

During or after a Craniosacral session children can often be seen to re-enact a part of their birth process.  This can manifest as curling into fetal position, spontaneous unwinding, or crawling through and under chairs or other tunnel-like structures. Children  may also feel the urge run around for short bursts to free stored tension. The body remembers what happened during the birth process and releases stuck memories, restrictions and trauma from the system. The body may also revert into the position it should have been in to avoid these restrictions, effectively re-setting the ti ..read more

The way we’re born can impact our bodies, emotions and nervous systems. The hormones released into the blood-stream by the mother during times of stress, the effect of interventions on our nervous systems and the environment which we’re born into can all leave their mark, affecting attachment patterns, perspectives and how we navigate our work and play. We may gather more layers as we go through life but birth and pre-birth tend to lay the foundations upon which our deeply ingrained patterns are unconsciously repeated. I was induced and premature and ended up with so much adrenaline in my syst ..read more

If you scare easily make sure you look after your bones. We can store fear in many parts of our body such as the kidneys, stomach, brain and even blood cells. But the bones seem to be particularly adept at harbouring fearful memories, and new research indicates they play a vital role in regulating our fight or flight response. Our bones are known to respond to vibrations more than any other tissue in the body. We can feel our bones literally shaking if we suffer a fright, and our bones are known to heal faster if vibrational therapy is used. Astronauts who spend months in space are susceptible ..read more

To maintain a healthy brain and nervous system we need to have clean and nourished cerebrospinal fluid. The cerebrospinal fluid that bathes our brains and nervous systems helps to cleanse toxins that cause inflammation and use up the essential nutrients we need to keep our brains functioning optimally. Neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and GABA are either amino acids themselves or are synthesised from them, and studies have shown specifically the amino acid Ethanolamine to be nearly 50% lower in depressed subjects compared to controls. Ethanolamine or EA is closely related to the e ..read more

Sir William Osler, known as the father of modern medicine during the early 1900s would often whisper to his medical students: ‘listen to your patient, he is telling you his diagnosis’. Today this is perhaps an art that is more readily adopted by complementary practitioners. Therapists listen to their patients in many ways, we palpate, listening to the body’s innate pluses and tides for indications of strengths and weaknesses, stagnation and flow. We feel into the fascia, the bones and the blood for restrictions, inflammation, heat and cold, stuck emotions and deeply held trauma. We listen to o ..read more

 I got interviewed by Candis Magazine (www.candis.co.uk) for their autumn feature on how Craniosacral Therapy works and what it’s beneficial for! The case study is one of my lovely long-term clients who describes his experiences of the therapy and its effectiveness for vertigo, sciatica and stress control. Come and try a session yourself to help navigate these uncertain times. Written by journalist Karen Evennett, photo credit @melindaedavies model @ijeoma_ndukwe  #craniosacraltherapy  ..read more