Hello out there. At some point you've raised your hand that you’d like to stay in contact with me. Going forward, I plan to create weekly persuasive editions about different things I have learned that have made a positive impact on my health.
I’d like this to be a very intentional, like-minded community of health seekers, so if your health is something you value and you’re interested in joining, participating, trying new things, and most importantly, reporting back and sharing your own experiences of what works, I encourage you to upgrade.
Why pay money to be a member? You’ll receive first access to the way I analyze, package and deliver health promoting insights. But you’re really setting a long-term intention. You will absorb, at a reasonable pace, new perspectives and possibly even adopt a few habits that help steer how you age toward robust rather than frail.
We know that the knowing isn’t always enough; getting ourselves to do the things is a whole other matter.
Subscribing also demonstrates that you value the now years and thousands of dollars and thousands of hours I have invested in massage school and other education experiences toward a comprehensive knowledge base in SALUDOGENESIS, or the origins of health.
Now, I’d like to share a preview of my next book.
What follows is the introductory chapter to The Assisted Nap: What Is CranioSacral Therapy and Why You Need to Try It.
Warmly,
Heather
THE ASSISTED NAP: WHAT IS CRANIOSACRAL THERAPY AND WHY YOU NEED TO TRY IT
Welcome, I’m glad you’re reading this
When it comes down to it, I’ve chosen to write a whole book about CranioSacral Therapy because it has impacted my life so profoundly.
But to show you a session, to even give you a “free sample” of a session doesn’t entirely do it justice. A CranioSacral Therapy session just doesn’t look like much!
It often looks like, well, an Assisted Nap.
And yet, there is potentially so much more going on just below the surface of what you can observe or even tune into experiencing one session alone.
That’s why I had to write a book about it: There are not enough people aware of CranioSacral Therapy and I believe many lives could be transformed if people were aware and gave it a try.
I know because it happened to me.
My experience was so transformative that I’m now a practicing therapist myself. I’ve met so many other people for whom this therapy has been restorative to transformative.
While it’s not a massage, many of the people who practice this kind of therapy have massage licenses in order to be able to offer the service of therapeutic touch. That is the path I’ve taken. There are also registered nurses, chiropractors, speech pathologists, physical therapists, other professionals, and even members of the general public who are simply interested in the method who attend the training courses and learn CranioSacral techniques.
As a client seeking body pain relief, I spent upwards of $20K on treatments and fitness instruction before experiencing this therapy. I had explored many types of therapies in search of relief for intense pain in my right hip and right shoulder, but no one I came across offered or suggested I seek out this therapy.
Yes, other things were helpful. Absolutely.
But this is a pain turnaround story. And the lynchpin treatment in my story came after the physical therapists, chiropractors and talk therapists. It came after dozens of professional massages followed by my enrolling in massage school, thinking the 3 to 5 massages you receive a week would sort me out.
After 5 months, my pain was lessened but still significant.
One day, my good friend, knowing my struggles and efforts and walking together twice a week suggested I go see her neighbor. She didn’t know what he did, but she knew people traveled from all over the country to see him, that he used to be a musician and that he mostly helped older musicians though he also saw locals like me.
I went to see Dave on a Sunday evening. I had filled out an extensive online questionnaire and I offered details of the open abdominal surgery I’d had and where I felt my pain. He had also thoughtfully asked about any trauma I had experienced. I wore loose clothing and after a brief hello and recap of my intake questions, I was asked to lie face up on his treatment table.
For an hour, Dave lightly touched me.
I was not impressed.
In my mind I thought, “What sort of bullshit is this? This is a job?”
And yet, It was relaxing.
So wouldn’t you know it, I went again.
I mean, Dave also constructs trumpets. He’d been commissioned by Wynton Marsalis, the famous musician, to build a trumpet. He studied Feldenkrais, deeply, which is a slow, full range of movement methodology. And now he does these light touch therapy sessions, mostly with older male musicians who, like himself, had bodies that had become “like cement,” in his words. Musicians' bodies, he told me, develop misalignments over years of holding an instrument as well as tissue constrictions that naturally develop over years of stress and tension from the demands of performing.
His clients would learn of him from word of mouth and come to Portland to work with him for several days, several hours per day. I guess I was a little mesmerized by his curious background.
I entered the second session feeling even keeled; nothing was out of the ordinary. Yet within five minutes of starting the session, I experienced a powerful cathartic emotional release. For me, this came up as an hour of crying, sobbing, weeping. All of this sadness and grief poured out of me.
I thought I had worked through and cried it out in talk therapy, discussing the three suicides among my family and friends and the sudden aneurysm and cancer that took other important people from me. But there I was, lying on some table with just some gentle touching that seemed to exorcize grief from deep inside my body.
This session was a turning point for me. From this point forward, my body pain began to noticeably recede. I thought Dave was a warlock for eliciting an hour of tears while only gently touching me.
I became consumed with learning just how this therapist took me from even-keeled to releasing the profound grief trapped below the surface.
It takes a good deal of time to master the techniques that facilitate emotional release. And the client must be ready and feel safe with their therapist.
NASA physicist Neil Mohon is quoted in the level three Upledger Institute Somatic Emotional Release course book :
"If we can store a symphony on a piece of plastic tape, and a video with sound on a little more complicated but still molecular simple piece of plastic tape, it certainly seems reasonable that something as complex as a piece of muscle or liver could store the memory of an experience and its attendant emotion."
This to me begins to shed light on the “magic” of CranioSacral Therapy. It is a way to tap into the complexity of the human body to release all types of restrictions, whether they be from football concussions, car accidents, the grief of losing a friend, or the anger of being treated poorly.
Most of us, myself included, are walking around with an incomplete understanding of how our mystical meat sacks really work. And while we are highly willing to take a pill if a person wearing a white coat says so, thankfully more and more of us are questioning the blind trust in pharmaceutical solutions.
But that does not make navigating the many options among holistic healing modalities easy at all. Most practitioners who get into holistic-healing study many modalities. It is difficult to understand what they do let alone parse out how skilled they are at doing it.
I never knew CranioSacral Therapy existed until I was 42 years old. I’m pretty sure Pfizer and Cigna and McDonald’s don’t want any of us to know. Carrying around old patterns of misalignment and constriction as well as trapped emotions can only make us buy more pills, policies and happy meals. We don’t have to know anything about biochemistry to know those things aren't always helping our bodies toward robust health.
My naturopath, Dr. Diane Fong, estimates 25-75% of her patients’ eczema, IBS and migraines resolve through emotional release. So yes, getting rid of the toxins, moving our bodies, and getting the right nutrition is all important.
But my assertion in this book is that perhaps the most profound thing you could do for your health is some light-touch manual therapy called CranioSacral Therapy that looks and feels like a nap facilitated by a practitioner. What I’m calling The Assisted Nap.
There’s a lot more worth knowing about it. So if I haven’t yet persuaded you to find the most trained practitioner near you on iahp.com and schedule your own assisted nap, allow me the opportunity to tell you a little more of the story.
Note from Heather: Thank you for reading! I would love to know your thoughts and appreciate any comments shared here or via email to share your feedback.