I have been practicing Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) for almost four years now. It is interesting to me that, although I have worked on hundreds of people in that period, I spend almost more time trying to explain the work than I do in sessions with people. There are several reasons for this, one being the glorification of the rational in Western culture. If you are working with an intuitive modality, you may find yourself defending it a lot or trying to focus only on the scientific aspects of the work which, in my humble opinion, totally misses the point.
I am a very intuitive person who is fascinated by science, I like to know the why behind things. A paradoxical place to inhabit. People ask me, “How come you are so good at this work, so intuitive and sensitive, but you are at the same time so questioning?” I find that very hard to answer.
While I was working on this post a friend sent me this wonderful article, Einstein, Annie Lamott, and Steve Jobs on Intuition vs Rationality. It really brought things into into focus and helped me clarify my position.
Being an intuitive in this culture is a tough place to be, but if you’ve got it, know that it is a precious thing. I am learning to love that part of my nature. It truly benefits the work.
What I do as a practitioner is very specific, but the process can be mysterious. I find many BCST’s attempt to describe the work using either scientific or spiritual language, but the words always seem to fall short of the actual experience. The more we try to explain it the more confused and abstract it becomes. Whether we want to admit it or not, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy falls into the category of the unknown.
In my encounters with people I try to explain what I know: it is relaxing, meditative, quiet and profound. People sometimes want to know what is happening; how do they get to that quiet point, that stillness, what specifically is going on, and what I am doing. It is very difficult to say. I could explain how I am palpating the very subtle motions of the cerebrospinal fluid, and the bones. I could talk about mirror neurons, embryology, and the effect on our bodies when they settle into the parasympathetic nervous system. Sometimes these curious people drift out of the conversation confused at the barrage of unfamiliar terms. The truth is sometimes we don’t exactly know what is going on, or what exactly has caused the system to transform. This is a frustrating place to be for a Western speaker or listener.
In the West we are, as a culture, uncomfortable with the unknown, those things that fall outside of “defined” reality or what science can name. Yet, everything that has been proven scientifically was once unproven and vice versa. One scientific fact is toppled by scientific discovery over and over again.
In this, the Western attachment to facts
and logic is like the Tower card in tarot.
This cards meaning is based on the
idea that, the foundation you thought was so
solid crumbles beneath you because you were
too stubborn or blind to see it’s fallibility.
The deeper science goes, the greater the mystery, the physicists and astronomers keep finding smaller particles and further galaxies, but they still can’t seem to uncover the mystery of life. The scientists keep thinking they have found the answer to why we are conscious, they think they might just disprove God. It seems to me that science and God can live in harmony. Just because we have mathematic equations to explain the mysteries of the universe does that make them any less impressive or awesome? The fact that there is a language to explain these things just makes them more fascinating.
BCST is a holistic form of bodywork. One of the most basic principles involves the motion of is what practitioners call “The Breath of Life” or Primary Respiration which is described as a continuous flow running through all of nature , all life forms. The Breath of Life is itself unchanging, ever-present. The trained hand can feel this ineffable force, and within it we can feel other rhythms we call tides.
I equate the Primary Respiration and all it contains with the theory of flux, which is beautifully explained in the passages that follow by physicist David Bohm,
The best image of process is that of a flowing stream, whose substance is never the same. On this stream one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, ect., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behavior, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.
Of course, modern physics states that actual streams (e.g. of water) are composed of atoms, which are in turn composed of ‘elementary particles’ , such as electrons, protons, neutrons, ect. For a long time it was thought that these latter are the ‘ultimate substance’ of the whole of reality, and that all flowing movements, such as those of streams, must reduce to forms abstracted from the motions thorough space of collections of interacting particles.. However, it has been found that even the ‘elementary particles’ can be created, annihilated and transformed and this indicates that not even these can be ultimate substances but, rather, that they too are relatively constant forms, abstracted from some deeper level of movement.
One may suppose that this deeper level of may be analyzable into yet finer particles which will perhaps turn out to be the ultimate substance of the whole of reality. However, the notion that all is flux, into which we are inquiring here, denies such a supposition. Rather, it implies that any describable event, object, entity, ect., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totality of flowing movement. This means that no matter how far our knowledge of the laws of physics may go, the content of these laws will still deal with such abstractions, having only a relative independence of existence and independence of behavior. So one will not be led to suppose that all properties of collections of objects, events, ect. , will have to be explainable in terms of some knowable set of ultimate substances. At any stage, further properties of such collections may arise, whose ultimate ground is to be regarded as the unknown totality of the universal flux.
~Dr David Bohm Wholeness and the Implicate Order
Thanks for joining me on this long and winding blog post. Hope it explained something about the ways of BCST and inspired you to trust your intuitive side.
Until next time, Meow!
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