Craniosacral Biodynamics (aka Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, BCST, or Biodynamic Bodywork) is an inquiry into and exploration of your embodied experience for the purpose of increasing your health and wellness.
You may consciously engage awareness of your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experience during a session as a form of meditation. You may also simply relax and receive, letting your awareness shift between states that arise, including deep relaxation, sleep, dream-like states, and bodily sensations.
Craniosacral bodywork originated in osteopathic medicine in the early 20th century and became — and still exists as — Cranial Osteopathy, CranioSacral Therapy, and Craniosacral Biodynamics.
CranioSacral Therapy and Craniosacral Biodynamics are bodywork modalities that do not require a medical training but do require specialized advanced training. Both modalities pertain to the body’s craniosacral system (the bones, membranes, and fluid surrounding the central nervous system — the brain and spinal cord), which impacts the whole body-mind-energy system.
Both CranioSacral Therapy and Craniosacral Biodynamics stem from the work of one osteopath, Dr. William Sutherland (1873-1954), originator of Cranial Osteopathy. CranioSacral Therapy is based on discoveries and applications from earlier in his career and has tended to focus more on biomechanics.
CranioSacral Biodynamics derives more from Dr. Sutherland’s experiences during the later years of his practice, when he became aware of the more energetic and spiritual nature of the healing that can occur in this work.
How Craniosacral Biodynamics helps you heal
Craniosacral Biodynamics is a gentle bodywork modality that encourages your autonomic nervous system to move into a rest-and-repair state. In this parasympathetic state, your entire system has more resources for healing than it does when you are experiencing stress — a sympathetic state that prepares you to take action (often called fight-or-flight).
Nobody ever healed in fight-or-flight.
Source: unknown
Biodynamics increases coherence within and between the subsystems of your whole body system: your endocrine, nervous, immune, lymphatic, and other systems. As coherence deepens, these systems work together with more harmony and efficiency, and you may experience a state of peaceful integration and wholeness.
When a person is in a more coherent state there is a shift in the relative autonomic balance toward increased parasympathetic activity (vagal tone), increased heart-brain synchronization, and entrainment between diverse physiological systems. In this mode, the body’s systems function with a high degree of efficiency and harmony and natural regenerative processes are facilitated.
Source: HeartMath Institute.
Biodynamics sessions often include stillpoints, pauses in the rhythmic flow of cerebrospinal fluid that allow your physiology to optimize for current conditions and your life force energy (potency) to increase.
Training in Biodynamics includes techniques to work with organs, nerves, bones, tissues, fluids, energy, strain patterns, inertia, and more.
Another way Biodynamics facilitates healing is through the inherent healing process, when the instinctive healing energy inside us actively seeks, finds, and releases areas where inertia exists in our systems.
Everyone has multiple areas of inertia, because life can include unexpected challenges that our systems contain energetically to keep the chaos from spreading when our resources are overwhelmed. Inertia functions as protection during overwhelm.
Trauma, stress, illness, injury — any form of “too much, too soon” — contribute to inertia. Releasing inertia is key to recovery when protection is no longer useful.
The instinctive intelligence in the inherent healing process knows when inertial areas are no longer serving our well-being, and given support, the system releases inertia, returning that freed energy to the rest of our life force, thus increasing our sense of well-being.
In this way, Biodynamics helps the system reorganize and optimize into a stronger, more resilient state of wellness.
This inherent healing process is one reason clients find that receiving regular sessions is beneficial to their well-being. Releasing inertia from the past increases health and well-being in the present, and the benefits experienced in each session often become cumulative with regular sessions.
