When you wiggle your toes they don’t
dance alone. In fact, your whole body gets involved. When the right
sensitivity is used, the echoes of that toe wiggle can be felt all
the way up to the top of your head. Why is this important? Because
if our toes are connected to, say, our collarbone, or if our pelvis
is connected to the top of our head, that means a problem in one
part of the line could indicate a problem happening in the other
end. Definitely, the whole line needs to be treated for a complete
recovery to take place. If an injury to one area of our body is
ignored or not treated fully, the difficulties developing in a
distant area of the body might be unrecognized. A good practitioner
has the training to pay attention to the body as a whole and treat
all the possible sources.
Let’s say, for instance, you stub a toe and don’t do anything about
it. “Oh, it hurts now, but it will go away if I just leave it
alone,” you think. You favor it because the pain could lead to an
interrupted stride or gait. Now, hitching along makes your shoulder
tight, which makes your neck sore, which gives you a headache. Maybe
you finally see someone for the headache, but you forget about the
toe because the headache is so bad. Though the practitioner makes
your headache go away for a while, a few days later it creeps back,
until finally your toe isn’t interfering anymore with your posture
when you walk.
The reason all this happens in such a cascading and interdependent
way is because we are linked throughout our whole bodies with an
intricate web of connective tissue. What’s connective tissue? It
isn’t the muscular system, it isn’t the skeletal system — however
important those are — but rather a filmy, strong, fascial web that
holds the muscles and tendons and ligaments and organs and bones all
together, so that actions taking place in one area
influences—sometimes faintly, sometimes directly—all the rest of us.
So, when we wiggle our toes, snap our fingers, hurt our lower backs,
or strain our ankles, we are indirectly yet profoundly affecting our
entire system. It is similar to what is called “the butterfly
effect” in Chaos Theory, which considers that the flick of a
butterfly’s wing in one part of the world might lead to a typhoon in
another location across the globe through a series of connecting and
escalating events.
Among the most important components of our connective tissue system
are the two cranial membranes. These membranes run horizontally and
vertically intra-cranially, or within the skull. The horizontal
membrane, the tentorium, basically attaches between the ears and
lies like a flat sheet behind the eyes, from the top of the nose in
front to the back of the head. The long vertical membrane, the falx
cerebrum, starts at the top of the nose and, like a dividing line
that bisects us into a right and a left side, goes all the way down
the spine to the tailbone. Through their relationship to the rest of
the connective tissue system, these membranes have a powerful
influence on our bodies — not only on our bones and muscles, but on
our organs too.
The two cranial membranes also act like a balloon skin. Back in
grammar school you might have done a science experiment in which you
stretched a piece of rubber or balloon skin between two or more
points. You could then write on the skin — a word or your name — and
observe how, when one part of the tight skin was pulled or pushed
down, all the rest of the skin was distorted, making it hard to read
the word. What happens within your skull is just like that: the
balloon skin is analogous to our cranial membrane and the stable
points to the bones of our skull. When there is a small distortion
in one cranial membrane it pulls at and tweaks the other one. An
important and frequently ignored fact is that a similar effect
transfers all down the line. A little torque in one part of the body
resulting from nursing an injury or from not recognizing an habitual
postural habit will, over time, pull at and distort some area
further along the connective tissue line and have far-distant and
seemingly unrelated effects. So when you have only one segment of
your problem fixed, it is possible that it will return over time.
Relieving the pressure on the cranial membranes can have positive
reverberations throughout the system. Cranial/sacral is so named
because the work deals with the cranium, the skull, and the sacrum,
the flat arrow-shaped bone at the end of our spine. The coccyx, or
tailbone, is at the very end of the sacrum. A good cranial/sacral
therapist will be able to feel and pass movement between hands, one
placed at the beginning of the cranial/sacral system (the occiput
bone situated at the base of the skull) with the other hand placed
underneath the sacrum at the other end.
Because it has such a powerful influence on our movement and system,
cranial/sacral therapy can be very peaceful. I have had clients fall
into a state of relaxation that isn’t quite sleep, but rather a deep
brain wave state. Correcting and relaxing the cranial membranes
relaxes the entire person. Another version of cranial/sacral therapy
“unwinds” the tensions in the cranial membrane system though
tracking and releasing memories of insults and injuries stored in
the muscle and ligamental tissues. Our bodies have a phenomenal
ability to hold onto non-verbal memories for a long time, sometimes
for years. I’ve helped clients release effects from events that
happened when they were toddlers, through working with the extended
cranial/sacral system.
A well-rounded practitioner looks at a client’s whole system and
considers what has an impact on the total healing process. Treating
the site of pain is very important, but it is also necessary to do
detective work in determining why a problem becomes chronic. What
else needs treatment? Where is the tug on the “balloon skin” of our
systems? Is there an out-of-balance place in another part of the
body? Is that unbalance having an effect on the area of complaint?
As strange as it may sound, sometimes it is a foot problem that
leads to a tight shoulder that leads to a TMJ issue that finally
makes an individual pay attention.
So, when you come to me with a sore neck, and I rock the ASIS
(anterior superior iliac spine) of your pelvis to check tilt and
tension in the sacrum, don’t assume I am off track. I’d be remiss in
my treatment if I didn’t think of each of my clients as whole
systems. One of the best ways to “read” the body is through the
cranial/sacral pathways, and that makes cranial/sacral a comforting
and peaceful finish to any successful healing session.
Jocelyn Paine is trained
in and applies four different modalities. She has enjoyed her
practice in Anchorage for over 30 years. Contact her at 907-276-8195
or
web.me.com/jocelynpaine/).
