Craniosacral biodynamic therapy: connect with your breath of life

According to Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, father of osteopathy, the body is a unit in which everything is interrelated. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle already said: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” and this same idea guides the lesser-known branch of osteopathy, biodynamic craniosacral therapy.

Lessons from indigenous tradition

During the American civil war, in 1864, Andrew Taylor Still lost his wife and four children. His disappointment with the medicine of the time was so bitter that, after this tragedy, he dedicated himself to studying other alternatives for human health. The art of bone setting practiced by Native American healers was one of his inspirations. As a result of this research, osteopathy was born in 1874.

The first steps of this new discipline were very difficult: Doctor Still had to become a traveling doctor with his new family of seven children and his second wife. In 1890, four years after settling in Kirksville, he officially began practicing as an osteopath, using this word.

hands that listen

Still’s method takes advantage of the body’s natural ability to self-heal and return to its optimal state. The osteopath is trained to listen with your hands to the “living anatomy” of the body, that is, the bone structure, tissues, movements and fluids of the organism.

This new method so fascinated the young journalist William Sutherland who, when he arrived in Kirksville in the late 19th century, joined Dr. Still’s American School of Osteopathy (ASO), graduating as an osteopath in 1900.

A skull in a display case caught the eye of the young student Sutherland. The bones that formed it were slightly separated to offer a better view of its structure. “As I was looking and thinking about Dr. Still’s philosophy, my attention was drawn to the bevels in the joint of the temporal bones. Suddenly a thought came to me, like an intuition. The skull was bevelled, like the gills of a fish, as if they were there for activate a respiratory mechanismhe himself said years later, as mentioned by his wife Adah Sutherland in her biography.

It was still unknown at the time that the cranial bones could move, so Sutherland began experimenting with the apparently fixed parts that make up the skull. He conducted research on his own bones and his own body for more than fifty years. Osteopathy in the cranial field developed from his experimentation, as well as the body therapy that today is known as craniosacral therapy.

Two basic approaches

He biomechanical approach works structurally and gently mobilizes the cranial bones, vertebrae or sacrum. It focuses on the rhythm of the cerebrospinal fluid to stimulate the self-healing of the body. It is the methodology that Sutherland used in his early years.

He biodynamic approach it was born in the last years of the work of Sutherland, thanks to his correspondence with the investigator Rollin E. Becker. They both observed how the “Breath of Life” carried out corrections in the organism by itself, without their intervention, in various parts of the patient’s body. All the therapist had to do was listen to the body and accompany the process. For this reason, the biodynamic approach places emphasis on the health of the organism instead of pathology.

“Within the cerebrospinal fluid there are an invisible element which I refer to as the Breath of Life. I want you to visualize this Breath of Life as a fluid within a fluid, something that doesn’t mix and sets it in motion. Is it really necessary to know what makes the fluid move? Visualize a power, an intelligent power, smarter than your own human mind,” Sutherland wrote.

breathing without lungs

Sutherland’s most important discovery was understand how the membrane of the falx cerebri breathed, as well as the movement of the cerebrospinal fluid that fluctuates between the brain and the spinal column. He also found that the sacrum is affected by the different states of the cranial bones.

A “primary respiration”, not proceeding from the lungs, was discovered in this way by Sutherland. He found that the Breath of Life constituted the foundation of a respiratory system of the body in which the lungs do not participate absolutely.

This subtle movement, which runs from the cranial bones, brain and intracranial membranes to the hip and sacrum, it resembles an inhalation and an exhalation. In addition, Sutherland observed that this respiratory mechanism already occurs in the embryo and governs the development of our entire body, contributing to the formation of the neurological system, organs, bones, and limbs. This force is expressed as the movement of the sea, as a tide that moves through the entire organism.

Connect again

We start from the basis that the body has its own intelligence and memory, practically from conception. The first heartbeat occurs in the embryo at approximately 20 days and in the third month of pregnancy the cerebral amygdala begins to function, which registers the stages of stress and emotions. For this reason, accidents and traumas can remain encysted in the nervous system, hidden and locked in different parts of the body, whose main objective is always survival.

One of the advantages of craniosacral biodynamic therapy is that it does not require knowing the personal history of each one. In this way, you can offer relief to those who have survived very adverse experiences. It helps to get out of the mind to reconnect with the body and feel complete and present in oneself again.