The treatment experience

Cranial Osteopathy is ideally suited to anyone who prefers both a non-traumatic approach to treatment, and one that assists in fostering their body's own capacity for healing.

When placing hands on a patient's body, an Osteopath perceives more than simple bone misalignment and muscular tension. Every aspect of a person - their traumatic history, organ function, emotions, spiritual/bioenegetic patterning - are all wired/connected into and expressed through the nervous and circulatory/hormonal/immune systems. Each patient's body tells a different story, because each person's history is completely unique. For more information about trained perceptive skills, see "spontaneous healing" under Change.

Osteopaths are particularly interested in a patient's unresolved traumatic history, since this provides a resource for therapeutic change. This traumatic history slowly reveals itself in time, as layers are peeled away through ongoing treatment.

Cranial Osteopathic treatment can be experienced a variety of ways. At one end of the spectrum the patient may experience (or feel) nothing. At the other, a patient can experience sensations such as falling, rolling, of internal releasing/unwinding, a gentle recollection of past events or trauma, localised or whole body fluid movement, temperature change or an increased awareness of body regions. The degree of sensation perceived during a treatment is not directly related to the amount of therapeutic change that occurs: often the deeper more significant changes are very subtle indeed.

When lying completely relaxed during treatment, a patient's body can make a number of subtle shifts. As an example, a one sided release or lengthening of hamstring fascia will result in the nerves supplying that tissue sending information to the brain saying that change has taken place. Under normal conditions, the brain doesn't receive such information without actual body movement occurring: it assumes therefore that movement must be taking place. The brain can interpret this subtle change as a much larger movement: perhaps as a spiralling twist of the whole body. The manner in which the brain interprets information through the nervous system, does not necessarily reflect it's nature or point of origin. This phenomenon is similar to that experienced with referred pain.

Patients who experience changes inside their body whilst lying relaxed, often wonder how this is possible when the cranial practitioner uses the softest, barely perceptible touch. An explanation of this phenomenon is offered in "Spontaneous Healing" under the subject Change.

Finding Health

Health refers to an animating vitality that initiates and sustains life.

"It is the objective of the doctor to find health, anyone can find disease".
~ Andrew Taylor Still (The Founder of Osteopathy, 1874)

Finding health is at the foundation of Osteopathic philosophy and practice. The process of finding health is a very different experience to "achieving" or the pursuit of health; to achieve health assumes a deficiency to begin with. Finding health is a process of uncovering a vitality that never wavered, and that has always been present.

Health itself can never be anything less than perfectly vibrant; a shining light that never dims. When viewing a patient from a context of health - disease, pain and disability are the result of a person't inherent health being covered over and forgotten - not the result of it 's absense. Perfect potential therefore exist throughout a person's life to experience the joy of health: even the terminally ill patient can reconnect with the essense of their being and experience a sense of peace and completeness.

"Happiness arises before the cessation of painful symptoms, not after."
~ Healing Tree Osteopathy

Health is present and undiminished at every stage of our lifecycle. It was present before we where born, when we where a small collection of dividing undifferentiated cells and also during and before the moment of conception. Health is even present after death. At death we enter emptiness, the same emptiness from which we entered at birth; not a vacuum, but a conscious emptiness of infinite potential.

"Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable".
~ Carl G Jung

Some practitioners (and teachers) choose to use such terms as the "Breath of Life", "Divine Spark", "Living Light", "Emptiness" and perhaps even "Love" to define their experience of health.

"God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being".”
~ Genesis 2:7

Ultimately however the experience of finding health is one that can never be adequately described, since the mind is incapable of comprehending it. The mind cannot conceive of health, since health pre-dated the brain's development - no memory or concept has ever existed to define it.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and science".
~ Albert Einstein

In the practice of Cranial Osteopathy; "Having one's consciousness shifted" (Dr James Jealous ~ founder of Biodynamics of Cranial Osteopathy) refers to the perceptive skill necessary to directly perceive and work with the Health. This perceptive skill is founded in the willingness and ability to surrender.

"“You don't surrender, you are surrendered".
~ Adyashanti

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it".
~ Albert Einstein

The perceptive skills associated with Cranial Osteopathy develop with time and experience - that is, the ability to work in co-operation with the Health, and so allow a patient to fully express their inherent vitality and joy.