Poetry » Bruno Malta Ferreira

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
- William Wordsworth

Newborns are some of my favorite clients for craniosacral work. As William Wordsworth put it so well, we all come into this world trailing clouds of glory, arriving from a place which we cannot see but we can recognize.

It is at this place that craniosacral work aims. A craniosacral therapist works with the tissue, with the bones, with the lymph, the nervous system, the craniosacral fluid, the fluid body, and with systems that he or she can feel but cannot name, however, the aim is on that place, the origin, what the founder of cranial osteopathy, William Garner Sutherland, termed: the Breath of Life.

He, William Sutherland, called it: God, The Mind of Nature, or Primary Respiration (The Breath of Life).

Another William, John William Coltrane, in his “A Love Supreme” poem, the same poem he sung on his saxophone in the album of the same name, said:

“God breathes through us so completely…so gently we hardly feel it… yet,it is our everything.
Thank you God.”
- John William Coltrane

Working with newborns is a pleasure and a gift; to once again be in the deep gentle presence of that trail of clouds is rejuvenating and refreshing. It is also essential for the newborn, for thought they may have arrived from a place of glory they immediately being to be shaped by the forces that brought them here, the forces that gave them a physical form. They are immediately exposed to lights and sounds and expectations and manipulations that compete with the sense of peace and wellbeing from where they came.

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”

Work with a baby touches on the essence of craniosacral – the Breath of Life. It is my view that in no other field (except very likely craniosacral work with the dying, though I cannot speak to that from personal experience) is the craniosacral treatment plan more defined by the focus on the Breath of Life.

“When we work with a baby we are looking for the health, we are building on what is already healthy and we are simply removing the obstacles that are in the way of that health being expressed.”
- Benjamin Shield, PhD

It is certain there are trout somewhere
And maybe I shall take a trout
If but I do not seem to care.
W. B. Yeats

And likewise I do not seem to care. I find it best to not seem to care as I rest my hands over the client’s tight shoulders.

We sit together, them lying on the table, I sitting on the chair, as in meditation. The purpose of this sitting is not to reach enlightenment, there may be trout, it is certain that there are…

Bony shoulders dissolve into spaciousness and sensation. I again find my hands dipping into The Ocean Within. It strikes me how clear and strong this Ocean’s tide is, like a secret hidden in plain view. It is here, within us, all the time, though rarely are we still enough.

The ebb and flow becomes clearer and I sink into its rhythm. I seek its frequency, its amplitude, its preferred directions. I’m curious about how eagerly it pulls or how harshly it pushes, whether it sings a soft song or a chaotic tempest.

Then I say “and here I am”.
I watch its dance.

Then I say, “and here I’ll follow you and follow you and follow you and when you start to lose strength I’ll step in and let’s see where we end up”. We spiral in, joined forces, steady.
That is when the well of white light opened up, two continents and a divide, and the Heart shone.

I feel like stepping back and seeing this client from 30,000 feet. So I start with their feet today.

I ignore who I am. I ignore what I am supposed to be doing. I let me hands be simple, my face passive, I hold the feet like I would hold a piece of bread as I sit by a city lake, allowing the city sounds to wash around me, the afternoon sun reflecting off of the water and onto my face and hands, my hands holding the bread that I may throw to the ducks.
Lazily and present.

I notice that the feet mean little to me still, I am reminded of when my daughter exclaimed that she did not notice any individual smells while walking in a forest; so we encouraged her to go slow. I encourage myself to go slow.

I begin to notice the ebb and flow, a magnetic force, gentle yet unmistakable, pushing and tugging at my fingertips.

I am reminded of words I once heard from an old athlete: “Don’t focus on what you think your body is doing, focus on what you feel.” Those words stuck to me then and come back to me now.
I don’t feel my fingers, or hands, I focus only on sensation until the ebb and flow is throughout me. At this point, when my beingness is part of the same web that makes up the client, do I ask what is going on.

I then travel the web with the inner eyes of the physicist, with the instinctual gut of the animal, and with a gentle caring heart.

The quality of relationship that exists between the client and the therapist is a key factor in the healing process.

In fact, I will venture to say that the quality of the relationship may very well be the essential “technique” for healing.

Here is a short clip highlighting the quality of interaction between therapist and client.

Annular Solar Eclipse – May 20th 2012 – Credit: Charles Medendorp

On May 20th you and the rest of us 6.8 billion Earthlings were part of an astronomical syzygy, an aligning of three celestial bodies — the Earth, the Moon and the Sun. Together with this celestial alignment came an eclipse, a moment of living in shadow; the temperature of the air changed, a breeze started to blow, birds began singing their dusk songs and people were brought into quiet introspection.

Carl Gustav Jung

Is it any coincidence that Carl Jung chose this same word — syzygy — to refer to a meeting of archetypal opposites?
We frequently strive for alignment in our personal lives. To align our deepest joy with our work; to align our mind with our soul; to align thoughts with words, and words with action. But how do we know when these instances of alignment occurs? How often do we find ourselves in that very moment of syzygy?
Would you identify an eclipse as the indication of that alignment? The darkness that you may typically shy away from as being the actual moment you have strived to achieve?

Partial Lunar Eclipse – June 4th 2012 – Credit: DANIEL MCVEY

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our greatest treasures.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

As we now approach another celestial alignment — that of Earth, Venus and the Sun — shift the idea what your own syzygy should look like. Make room for the cool breeze, for the introspection, and for the shadow.

Transit of Venus – June 5th 2012 – Photograph by David Cortner, Galaxy Picture Library/Alamy

A craniosacral session is the perfect space for you to work on your deep inner alignment, your meeting of opposites. Where you can have a safe space and an attentive guide for your conscious journey towards meeting your dragons.

SusanSeddonBoulet-Bear-Woman-Dancing-DateUnknown

Work in the invisible world
at least as hard
as you do in the visible.
– Jelaluddin Rumi

Bear-Woman Dancing by Susan Seddon Boulet

Rational thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos
– John Nash, Jr. (Nobel prize winning mathematician, author of “A Beautiful Mind“)

I put together a small clip in an exploration of showing the inner voyages that a client may go on during a craniosacral treatment. Voyages populated by archetypal images, places and sounds.

I’ve been playing with guided visualizations for about 8 years and fully appreciate their hidden potential. Here is the first of many to come.

Frontal Bone

In this post I want to slowly introduce the use of archetypes as a means of seeing clearly and, in a very connected way, suggest the use of poetry as the language for clear seeing.

The Poetic Potential

We are not accurately represented by Descartes’ view that the body is a machine, disconnected from the mind; we are clearly not satisfied by situations and interactions in our lives that disregard our emotional and spiritual needs; we more and more intensely yearn for what has been termed a holistic approach, or, better still, a wholistic experience of and interaction with the world we live in. This is where poetry can come to our rescue, acting as a bridge between two shores; on the one side is the land of reasoning, of science, of logic while on the other side is everything we cannot quantify, our emotions, our gut feelings, our spiritual needs, our love. On that bridge stands the shamans, the poets, the archetypes.

(The Golden Gate Bridge from the website “The Best Travel Destination“)

Consider the movie “Awakenings” starring Robin Williams as a physician in a hospital struggling to understand and communicate with survivors of an encephalitis epidemic which live with locked-in-type symptons (awake and aware but unable to communicate). At one point one of the patients manages to briefly communicate with the physician and simply refers him to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. The following poem called Der Panther – The Panther:

The pacing past the bars, the steady stare,
A tiredness grown so nothing holds him here,
of a thousand iron bars he seems aware,
a thousand bars, no world beyond this sphere.

With supple strength, with soft and gently mode
he turns in smallest circles about his flank.
It’s like a dance of power around a node,
his great volition standing stunned and blank.

Sometimes his eyelids rise so he can sense
a picture spread across the moment’s chart
descend through limbs of sinew, silent, tense
and thinning, fading, cease within his heart.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Gerald Duffy
(This is a different translation than the one in the movie Awakenings, but it is one that I appreciate more and that more closely follows the same cadence as the original German poem. See Gerald Duffy’s video).

What better way for the patient to help the physician to clearly see what it was like to be living in that condition?

Seeing with Archetypes
A poetic way of seeing others can bring us to a more accurate representation of who they truly are at the same time as bring us into empathic contact with them. The patient is neither literally a Panther nor literally behind bars, yet to describe him as locked-in, or comatose, or paraplegic in no way brings us close to understanding them.

The archetype of The Caged Panther: a potential of strength, power, balance, agility of motion and grace locked and confined to a small space in which it has been pacing for so long that it’s essence, it’s life has become numbed.

Set aside 10 minutes each week for poetry. Read a new poem and commit it to memory. Recite it to yourself. Let it shape the way you see the world.

Bruno Malta Ferreira

Infant Craniosacral and the Breath of Life

Sessions – Trout Amongst the Bones

Sessions – 30,000 feet

A Healing Relationship – A Craniosacral Clip

Syzygy

Explorations of an Inner Journey

Guided Visualization – Frontal Bone

The Poetic Potential – Seeing with Archetypes