Visionary Craniosacral » Bruno Malta Ferreira

There is a moment between the decision to let go and the act of letting go when things soften.

Together we rocked right, together we rocked left. A tide pulled us further out and, after drawing us out so far that it felt endless, brought us back in. The movement always happened together, never one leading the other; in unison, in sync, in flow. Yet, it was boring, or became boring. Where were we going? What was the purpose? What was the meaning?
At some point I, or maybe it was you, or probably it was us both, found the boredom more interesting than the story we had been living and decided to let go. Let go of the other, let go of the precious flow, go our separate ways.

And isn’t that when we felt most together?

Suddenly there was a sense of vertiginous space where before the air was stuffy. The stagnant pond became an ocean and a tide so strong it put our efforts of trying to feel a tide to shame drew us clear across the universe and back.

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.

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.

The Heart of Craniosacral – Introduction

As my practice of bodywork and, particularly, craniosacral therapy deepened, I felt the urge to capture some of the essence of this healing work. Practicing bodywork is navigating a raft down a river during the night; much of what is happening is unseen; the cues for where to touch, which direction to move in, how much pressure to use come in at a very subtle level. How would it be possible to capture and show this through film?

In August of 2011 I took a step to capturing the unspoken essence of Visionary Craniosacral work (VCSW) as taught by the founder, Hugh Milne. As a test run, I filmed while participating in one of the VCSW workshops and put together a short clip.
This is an introduction, I hope it can transmit some of the key elements involved in this work. Key elements such as gentle touch, full presence, attention, caring as well as some mystery.

Please visit the section Craniosacral for more information and videos.

Enjoy the video:

The Heart of Craniosacral – Video