And yet, I feel safe, despite the pain. I have confidence in the practitioners, their training and skill. They can feel each other’s hands through my body. Thanks to their training in CranioSacral Therapy, they are fluent in a common language and are all, simultaneously, communicating while listening to my cranial rhythms. By its presence, absence, intensity, and distortions, the pulse-like rhythmical widening/shortening, narrowing/lengthening of my body tells them where to work, when I’m on something significant, when I’m going deeper and when I’m not, and when a particular piece is finished.

Moreover, they didn’t put my neck in this neck-breaking position, my neck did. Had they forced the position, I’d probably already be paralyzed. The trade calls this a “therapeutic position,” meaning that the body has positioned itself in such a way that the stored trauma now has an avenue of exit. Typically, therapeutic positions are identical to the positions the body was in when the trauma entered.

As usual, while I wait for a memory or image, my over-active mind tries to make sense of my awkward position: When did this happen? What was happening? Was it an accident, or was someone trying to break my neck? Who was it? “Stay with us,” says Zannah, intent on bringing me out of my head and back into my body. “You’re doing great. Breathe slower, deeper.”

I focus on breathing deeper, but it feels like it’s all I can do to maintain an airway. And I’ve been in this position for at least 20 minutes! At some point, I become aware of the absurdity of the situation – namely, that I’m paying a significant amount of money for the privilege of having my neck almost broken. I can’t help it, but I laugh, at least to the extent that you can laugh when you can barely breathe. This laughing seems familiar somehow, in an odd, twisted way, the way you laugh when someone gives you a charley-horse. And within seconds, the tears come as I finally acknowledge how much pain I’m really in.

As I continue to cry, waves of heat rise from my body. Erin reports that my coccyx, once twisted and side-bent, is releasing and moving toward the midline. “Wow, your whole head is softening,” says Zannah. “Your sphenoid is decompressing, too.” “Things are softening in the left lung,” says Beth. Merrill leans back to avoid whatever energetic gunk emanates from my liver. An hour, and several more releases later, we are done—at least for the day.

Though I get bodywork regularly, that was the first time in years, I’d had an overt emotional release. This is not unusual. For many of us, survival required stuffing trauma, and we became very adept at doing so. As a result, some colleagues had long since concluded that I wasn’t serious and found other trade partners. But that wasn’t the case. I was simply very resistant and guarded—and the session just described offers some clues as to why: Prior to that day and setting, I didn’t feel sufficiently safe, but I’d been edging closer for several years thanks to the colleagues who had stuck with me. It was the presence of four highly-skilled therapists that was finally enough to tip the balance.

Some people can contact old emotional trauma easily, others only with the greatest difficulty. Though many people say that they “would rather be caught dead than do emotional process work,” I suspect that very few actually feel this way in their core. All living creatures are homeostatic (designed to heal), and who honestly and truly enjoys their emotional baggage? For those of us in resistance and those whose internal resources have been so drained by chronic health challenges, healing deep trauma often requires extra help.

That extra help is essentially what you get from multiple hands-on therapy. Instead of one therapist and the resources he or she can lend you, you have the energy, intent, support, love, and collective wisdom of two, or more. From a practical standpoint, the impact of additional hands is more than additive, more than multiplicative: it’s exponential. For most of us, most of the time, it’s a luxury. But for those with chronic illness, entrenched resistance, repeated injury, and complex histories, it can play a critical difference.

Multiple hands-on therapy offers more than sheer horsepower. Often problems in one part of the body (such as restrictions, adhesions or stored trauma) are energetically and mechanically linked to problems in another part of the body. In such cases, it is most expeditious to treat the entire linkage at once. This can be difficult when you have only two hands. Why? Working on one piece of problem at a time runs several risks. First, the client’s subconscious can shift these treasures to another site, leading the therapist on a wild-goose chase, if he or she is even aware of what’s going on. Secondly, if the whole complex isn’t treated, the restriction may return, as happens when you fail to get all the roots while weeding.

Despite the pain I experienced in my session, I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have encountered Zannah and her team when I did, especially given that I went to Vancouver on other business and found the clinic by serendipity. For starters, the trauma they released from my neck and head had been creating neurological problems and a gradual, but perceptible, loss in overall vitality. A process of calcification had started in one of my intracranial membranes, the falx cerebri, which divides the brain into right and left hemispheres and plays a critical role in evacuating venous blood and metabolic wastes from the brain. Had the calcification continued, I’m quite certain that my health would’ve failed and allopathic medicine would not have helped.

Now, two years later, I still don’t have any more information about how my neck was almost broken, but it hardly matters. I’m alive and well. Thanks to additional multiple hands-on treatments, the neck trauma seems to be gone. Best of all, I’m now in a position to provide multiple hands-on therapy here in Southcentral Alaska. These sessions are not always emotionally traumatic or physically painful, but they’ll get you moving if that’s what you need—and are ready—to do.