I settled into my midline, my sit bones anchored in a comfortable chair, my back supported by a cushion, feet aware of contact with the ground. My whole body notices the air, and the qualities of the field more than my conscious cognitive self does. It knows when to make contact because of a palpable readiness resulting from this client's response to my invitation to drop in and resource. This liminal relational knowing is essential to biodynamic craniosacral work. There is always much more than bodies in touch with each other through light practitioner hand contact.  Our knowing matches ..read more

Once again, I asked a few of my Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) colleagues and teachers in the field to contribute to my meandering journeys into the depths of our work as it relates to the fields of life. This time the orienting midline of creative formation was my last blog post The Crucible and the Wandering Line in which I explored the role of BCST in re-making or restoring Relationship (to borrow Rollin Becker’s habit of placing capital letters in front of words to enhance their scope and bring out their essence) in the troubled times we live. At least this is what the responses I ..read more

I’ve often reflected on and enjoyed the ways in which biodynamic craniosacral therapy is a ‘wandering line’ away from the dominant paradigm. BCST is a deep listening through gentle hand contact which supports and facilitates the natural expression of our bodies' inherent wisdom or Intelligence. This statement alone defies our habitual temporal and spatial boundaries. How do we listen to bodies? What is this wisdom at play in our organisms and how do we access it never mind support and facilitate it? Surrendering to what is often intangible and invisible deeply challenges the common perception ..read more

Imagine your body were a country, how would you rule it? Would you listen to its many ‘citizens’, including its many non-human ones, and allow for what you feel is naturally emerging to run its course, creating the ‘best’ circumstances for this facilitation to take place in ways that feel supportive, grounded in easeful presence, and unhindered by disruptive interventions intended to force a resolution from the outside in rather than in multiple reciprocities? In other words would you hold the whole as well as its many parts and would you also relate it to its history, its geographical and soc ..read more

I sometimes wonder how much dissociation created me. By automatically freezing ‘unwanted’ material and letting this constant reorganisation between absence and presence decide how I show up in life, how I meet it and relate with others and the world around me. I often wonder whether we are defined by these default states of protective numbness and how much they deny us too. For they work on assumptions that the past is the present, stored as so many silences in our tissue, ready to grip us whenever triggered appropriately. How much do you operate on automatic going about your every day routine ..read more

Did you know that Hummingbirds resonate with each flower’s sweetness as they fuse within the same ‘love field’? They will not go near a flower that has less than 15% sugar content apparently. I recently heard curandero (what spiritual healers or shamans are called in South America) Rocío Alarcón speaking about the ‘spiritual co-evolution of hummingbirds and flowers”(1). Rocío has a very special relationship with these wonder creatures, the largest family of birds in the world. This doctor in philosophy and ethnopharmacology from University College London dedicated her life to creating a place ..read more

We always place freedom within a very strictly human container in our discourses, don't we? Our freedom of expression is inscribed in social, economic, cultural, and political confines that limit them. Yet the chaotic collapsing of a much vaster, borderless ecological meltdown forces us to revisit the biodynamics of freedom, to re-introduce them within the world of domains, as defined by microbiologists, thus ushering us back into Earth's super organism. Our consciousness hasn't yet caught up with the liberating force of this massive ecological transformation. But what most of us currently, an ..read more

As I begin to write on All Hallows’Day, la Toussaint, the Dia de dos Muertos, the Day of the Dead, in front of a candle lit in memory of my ancestors, I wonder whether they called me into this life. Have you ever felt you were? I was unplanned, a ‘surprise’, an unwanted gift. Both my parents were studying at the time and I could not have come at a more potent yet uncertain time. I feel I wished to incarnate, not as a whirlwind tumbling into the world of flesh but as a determined sentience invited to the conception dance hall. I really like how Dutch embryologist Jaap van der Wal tells the sto ..read more

Exploring the role and impact of holds and holding, the very hallmark in many ways of our beautiful craniosacral practice, became a necessity following a road accident and a workshop with BCST and author Michael Shea. My body remembers being held wholly under the sacrum and the brainstem in a way it craved to be held, in a way it had never been held before under the circumstances that pervaded the field at the time. The fourth biodynamic craniosacral session at the end of a three-day workshop at the Elmfield Institute broke me open. It laid me down truly at the feet of surrender, grief; to rel ..read more

The past lives within us. A universal and undeniable experience whether we abide by the unproven hypothesis that memory is stored in the brain or we side with body workers’ and clients’ felt sense that our fascia(connective tissue, blood, bones, and muscles) and our fluids bear stories from the past as processes with which we can engage through the therapeutic holding. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance would support the latter, more dynamic view of memory as the enmeshment of fields nestled within other fields of presence/resonance (1988, 2nd edition 2011). (Lilly pond, Sophie Ri ..read more