What is Craniosacral Therapy?
It is a non-manipulative, gentle whole body therapy usually carried out sitting or lying on a treatment table fully clothed. The practitioner listens with their skilled hands to the body’s intrinsic movement, health, rhythms, pulsations and patterns of congestion and resistance.
Craniosacral therapy is deeply relaxing. It assists the body’s natural healing processes, increasing physical vitality and well-being.
It aids in pain relief and encourages the nervous system, organs and musculoskeletal system to balance and heal. Craniosacral therapy is client-led, allowing the individuals system to set the pace at which the work progresses. In general a series of sessions is advised.
How does Craniosacral Therapy work?
The body’s tissues contract in response to all physical and emotional stresses, such as the birth process, injuries, sickness or emotional trauma.
Sometimes, particularly when the shock is severe, tissues remain contracted. This can restrict the body’s functioning and vitality and give rise to problems like chronic pain, migraines, digestive disorders, depression and anxiety.
Restrictions in the body show in the way craniosacral motion is expressed, allowing practitioners to identify problem areas. These are mirrored back to the client through the touch of the practitioner, encouraging self healing and balance in the body.
This releases stress and tension freeing energy previously used to hold restrictions.
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How can Craniosacral Therapy help me?
Craniosacral therapy can be helpful and effective with most conditions and useful in overall health maintenance; enhancing vitality and a general sense of well-being. It is gentle, suitable for all ages, including infants, the elderly and people with delicate, degenerative or painful conditions. It can also uplift those suffering from stress and anxiety.
By engaging the musculoskeletal, central nervous, digestive and fluid systems vital for attaining integrity and balance, craniosacral therapy offers a relaxing and holistic approach to assits the functioning of the body, internally and externally.
Is is safe for children and infants?
Examining the craniosacral systems of mothers and babies, pre and post natally, is beneficial. Compression and restrictions experienced during the birth process, may lead to common infant problems such as colic, poor feeding, excessive crying and breathing difficulties. Babies respond well to the craniosacral process and parents are encourage to be involved.
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy offers a powerful way to connect with the body’s natural wisdom. The body’s own priorities for change are listened for and encouraged to arise creating tangible adjustments that are physiological, energetic and psycho-emotional. The art of the therapist is to connect with the underlying forces of health and facilitate a process of natural reorganisation. These forces express as subtle motion of tissues and fluids that can be felt by sensitive hands.
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy takes a whole-person approach to healing and the inter-connectedness of mind, body and spirit are deeply acknowledged. In a typical treatment session the therapist will make contact with a light, receptive touch that produces a spacious relational field. In this space the body will reveal patterns of experience that the sensitive therapist will recognise through an experiential knowledge of the body’s anatomy and bio-energetic forces. The sensations generated by the contact are commonly experienced as an increase in internal and external space, a heightened sense of body tissue movements and a shift to stillness and deep relaxation.
The therapy is efficacious for many conditions and often results in a permanent dissolving of the symptoms. It seems to work particularly well with trauma, facilitating a safe resolution of shock and held experiences that has originated from recent events or much earlier ones. This makes the therapy a powerful way into many conditions that have their origin in trauma: such as birth, accidents, abuse, and illness.
How long is a treatment?
Weekly sessions last 60 minutes. The first session may take a little longer as we will go over your health history prior to treatment. It is important to remember that the treatment will cause lasting effects so you will continue to experience re-balancing and integration for at least 24 hours after the actual treatment. Monthly sessions are 75 minutes.
How much does a treatment cost?
Regular weekly 60 min sessions are $100, click here for specials and packages. You can book your session online by credit card or pay by cash or check in person at your session.
75 minute sessions are $125.
How many treatments will I need?
This varies according to why you are coming for Craniosacral Therapy. Generally speaking the longer a person has had a problem the longer it will take to treat. Most people with a specific complaint will have several treatments at weekly intervals until some definite improvement is maintained, before decreasing the frequency of treatment. After a course of treatment, many people will still choose to come for Craniosacral Therapy on a monthly or seasonal basis to maintain health.
What should I wear?
For a craniosacral treatment, clients remain fully clothed. Loose, comfortable clothing such as track suit or trousers are recommended.
How do I arrange my session?
To book a session please use the contact form. Please contact me to arrange your session.
The best way to reach me in general is by email. I am sensitive to cellphones so I use it only for texting. Often when I am doing trainings I am unable to keep ontop of my voicemail messages. If you don’t hear from me within a day, send me an email or use the contact form on this site.
You can pay for your sessions online. You can also pay in person with cash or check.
Where does Craniosacral Therapy originate from?
Life expresses itself in motion. All living tissues of the body ‘breathe’ with the motions of life, producing subtle, rhythmic impulses which can be felt under the sensitive hands of a trained therapist.
At the core of the body the cerebrosinal fluid, which bathes and cushions the brain and spinal cord, expresses this motion in a tide-like ebb and flow involving all the surrounding tissues and bones. All bones, organs and other structures of the body follow their own particular rhythms. These help to maintain balance and integrity throughout the entire body, distributing the healing and ordering properties of the ‘breath of life’.
U.S. Osteopath Dr. William Sutherland first recognized craniosacral motions and their relevance to health in the early 1900s. Since then many practitioners including John Upledger, Franklyn Sills and many more have extended and refined craniosacral therapy into the subtle deep healing process which is available today.
What is the GAPS™ (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) Diet?
The GAPS™ diet removes all starches, processed foods, sugar and adds lots of broth and probiotic-rich foods. This heals and seals the gut and in doing so clears up a multitude of physical and psychological disorders. It is a gentle but deep method of detoxifying the body and healing and nourishing our nervous systems and brains. The GAPS™ diet is a powerful healing protocol developed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride based on the belief that our digestive system holds the root to our health and that GAPS™ conditions stem from an unhealthy gut.
Going on the GAPS™ diet can be overwhelming, confusing and time consuming. As a certified GAPS™ practitioner, I am here to help support and navigate you on your journey. It is also helpful to join a GAPS™ group.
What is the GAPS™ Nutritional Protocol used for?
Autism, learning disabilities, psychiatric and psychological disorders, immune system problems, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, celiac disease, diverticulitis and various types of chronic diarrhoea and much more. It is also helpful for people with mold issues, fibramyalgia, lupus, lyme disease, diabetes, chemical sensitivity and other sensitivities.
Detoxification with the GAPS™ protocol
The GAPS™ protocol will detoxify the person, lift the toxic fog off the brain to allow it to develop and function properly. In order to achieve this we need to clean up and heal the digestive tract, so it stops being the major source of toxicity in the body and becomes the source of nourishment, as it is supposed to be. As more than 90% of everything toxic floating in our blood (and getting into the brain) comes from the gut, healing it will drop the level of toxicity in the body dramatically.
Where did the GAPS™ Diet come from?
The GAPS™ diet is based on the SCD (the Specific Carbohydrate Diet). SCD has been invented by a renowned American paediatrician Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas in the first half of the 20th century. Dr. Haas and his colleagues have spent many years researching the effects of diet on celiac disease and other digestive disorders. The results of this research were published in a comprehensive medical textbook “The Management of Celiac Disease”, written by Dr. Sidney V. Haas and Merrill P. Haas in 1951. The diet, described in the book, was accepted by the medical community all over the world as a cure for celiac disease and Dr. Sidney V. Haas was honoured for his pioneer work in the field of paediatrics.
Unfortunately, when celiac disease was defined as a gluten intolerance or gluten enteropathy, the SCD got forgotten as outdated information. It was brought back to life by Elaine Gottschall. Following the success of the SCD with her daughter, Elaine Gottschall over the years helped thousands of people, suffering from Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, celiac disease, diverticulitis and various types of chronic diarrhoea. But the most dramatic and fast recoveries she reported in young children, who apart from digestive problems had serious behavioural abnormalities, such as autism, hyperactivity and night terrors. She devoted years of research into biochemical and biological basis of the diet and published a book, called “Breaking the Vicious Cycle. Intestinal Health Trough Diet.”
I have been using SCD in my clinic for many years. Having accumulated valuable clinical experience I had to make several adjustments in the diet appropriate for my patients with the neurological and psychiatric conditions. Through the years my patients named their dietary regime – the GAPS™ diet.