Tag: Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy

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Trauma & Poetry ~By Naomi Chuah, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist & TRE Practitioner~

shoes, socks and glasses removed to relax by the ocean
relaxing by the ocean

Mary Oliver opens her poem Wild Geese with “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles repenting. You have only to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Being raised steeped in deep dysfunction and guilt, this poem guts me every time. Mary Oliver herself grew up in a dysfunctional family with early abuse and would escape out her window into the woods where she found her own personal salvation. She says of the trees “I would almost say that they saved me, and daily”. 

Ten years ago I went back to school to study Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. While the therapy is more than this, facilitation of trauma integration through and from the body perspective is a part of its scope. The course is cleverly set up making it almost impossible to graduate without looking into one’s own dark corners. It opened a lot of questions, questions I’m sure I’ll never fully answer. 

While the course has a focus on grounded presence and non judgment, anatomy is also studied and how the body physically moves through stages of activation, stress, and calm. The big question is, “Can we, and how do we move through states of stress and trauma? Can we heal these things?” 

I started my career excitedly wanting to “fix” anyone and everyone. My family and I had experienced great things with this therapy. Things like less allergy symptoms, less chronic pain, and for myself greater capacity in life. 

Many people experience this therapy as deeply relaxing, coming out of a session feeling like they’ve “returned home”. I started noting though that for some, as body tissues soften and open up, stored trauma suddenly has space to show itself. This only happens because in some sense the body feels safe enough to start laying down its defenses. The paradox is, that feeling safe can feel pretty alarming when a nervous system isn’t used to safety. The sensations that arise can be pretty uncomfortable. 

My question has always been, how do we navigate this in the safest possible way, avoiding retraumatization when at all possible? Sometimes the body does enter deeply relaxing states that allow for things to process easily and effortlessly. What happens though when something opens up, and it feels messy?

A lesson for me, with both myself and others, is that we can’t always save ourselves and others from deep pain. Usually the thing causing the pain has already happened, often long ago. As much as we are averse to sitting in pain, sometimes we have to sit with ourselves and each other up close, in very uncomfortable states. At times, it can be incredibly overwhelming and that’s when we need to reach out for safe connection and to whatever other resources, professionals, and help available, as we’re not always able to get out of these states on our own. 

Mary Oliver’s poem continues: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscape, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.” 

When we have received help, what from there? What of our endless search for healing? How do we keep healing? Are we ever healed? How do we embark/continue on this journey with the least amount of harm? 

I found it so easy to get caught up in the “If only I dig enough, if I can find and express all of my trauma, if only I cry enough, purge it enough, it will be gone and I will be healed.” The model of trauma catharsis is a model of trying to dig it all up and express it through emotional states. Where this model gets it right is that when the nervous system gets caught in certain trauma states like freeze, flop and dissociation, it can become averse to feeling and expression as a form of self protection. This is often very protective while still in the adverse situation. When we move out of the difficulty, these states are no longer needed and can be difficult to leave behind. Learning to feel sensation and express emotion are incredibly useful skills to possess and is often a step in healing. 

But what if it becomes a dopamine hit chase, a goal to complete, to catharsis, excise all? I am so grateful to the Body Intelligence school I attended for Craniosacral Therapy for introducing me to the thought of being wary of catharsis and emotion as a goal in and of itself. “Seek not, forbid not”. It is against our code of ethics to push for emotional release. It happens and that is within our scope to support, as release can be incredibly helpful and sometimes needed.

I continued to roll with the question, “what is actually helpful?” Over the pandemic I was mentored with Steve Haines, Author of “Trauma Is Really Strange” while taking the TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing) course. Steve Haines brought home the point over and over again that this was not about seeing how much trauma one could excavate and emote, instead it was about how to support the nervous system to come back to center and regulate. When trauma does come up, as it can very quickly with TRE, the skill then becomes to catch it early, and introduce the body and nervous system to simple tools of regulation. Many people are surprised at how fast the body can come back to normal, that it doesn’t have to stay stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation for hours, days, or weeks. 

Steven Porges, author of the book “The PolyVagal Theory”, says you can predict which babies will be resilient based on how they react to normal stimuli. Resilience is when the nervous system goes up but comes back down in a reasonable amount of time. Staying up for a long period, or having no reaction (think of the super calm baby), were both considered to have less positive outcomes when it comes to resilience. 

Our bodies are made to react, and then come back to baseline. This serves us. Trauma happens when our abilities to react and respond are overwhelmed. These experiences can imprint us, and serve us for a time. Have you noticed, different people have naturally different coping strategies? Fight, flight, freeze, and dissociation can protect us when in overwhelming situations. Sometimes these situations last for years. And when these adaptations no longer serve us, we want to learn to come back to center. 

Recently I had a full circle aha moment, reading a paper by Michael Shay, PhD LMT where he talks about the model of self regulation, where self containment and regulation are the goal, versus emotional release. After grappling with these ideas for years, something clicked for me. Trauma therapy can be about acknowledging our activation, having space for that, and learning how to come back to center. Examining my feelings more closely, I think I felt like I was abandoning the wounded parts of myself when I had a choice to self regulate and move on. But we can learn to pause, reach out for help, and move on when the time is right.

We start to walk differently with ourselves, hurt parts included. More gently. As we heal, we learn to come back to the present, and feel the goodness of our own bodies and surroundings. 

Mary Oliver’s poem finishes: “Whoever you are, however lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting- over and over announcing your place in the family of things”

While May Oliver’s poetry doesn’t deny pain and trauma, it does offer the simple practice of coming back to the things that ground us, over and over again. 

The path leads upward. The air is textured and warm, the horizon meeting my eyes with a dazzling array of pinks and oranges. Everything is different as my body exhales into this world that has come to meet and hold me, and I am once again undone.

Dedicated to my siblings, my OG’s

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Bodies Are Good ~Naomi Chuah, RCST & TRE Practitioner

In our clinic, we are in the business of taking care of bodies. We take care of our own bodies, and spend a lot of time thinking about and putting into action supporting other bodies. We help bodies remember their own capacities to heal, move, and work the best they can in their given situation and place in time.

Right now I would like you to stop and take a minute. Turn your attention inside your own body. How does it feel? There are no right or wrong answers. There are though, definitely comfortable and uncomfortable answers.

Bodies are good, plain and simple. We spend our whole life in these fleshy, physical bodies. Bodies that are a biomechanical/psychosocial wonder of motion, emotion, and connection. We are ever breaking down and renewing and evolving. We are ever adapting to our physical/psycho emotional situations that we are in. Our bodies let us know when we are not happy, and they also bring us pleasure and contentment when we are happy, healthy, challenged, supported, and connected.

Not all of us have grown up with this message. For reasons as various as you can think of, many of us have been taught to distrust our body, and/or think of it as “bad” or somehow at fault for our own ills and for the ills of society. Or we may have had painful life experiences leading to physical discomfort and pain, leading us to view our body as something to be mistrusted.

This body is where it all lands. The comfortable, the uncomfortable, and the challenges. No matter if it’s physical or psychological (perhaps not separate?), the effects always end up in the body. Feel how your body retracts when frightened, strains forward in interest, gets weighed under an intense work load, and then melts into the embrace of a loved one. Do you feel the shapes and different tensions your body moves into and through?

At the end of the day, I feel for a lot of us, our body is the last frontier of facing our fears. After all the blame, the caring for others, the striving, the serving, the fighting. When we finally stop and quiet our minds: “Am I really ok with myself, how I feel in my own skin?”

Sometimes, I liken this fear to feeling a dragon behind us, always scaring us. We fight it, we avoid it, we try to subdue it. Then maybe we lock it up. That makes us feel a little safer, but still on edge. What if that dragon turns out to be the fear in our own nervous system? What if that dragon is part of me? What if that dragon (your nervous system) was looking out for you this whole time, and desperately trying to protect you? And you learn, that just maybe, you can go into that room slowly, and start to befriend it. Learn to feel. Learn to listen to the queues: when to slow down, listen, or maybe move faster, or get help. And learn to feel the contentment of a relaxed body that knows it is safe and capable. Your body will carry you through so much. And feel not only pain, but joy and pleasure as well.

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Radical Acceptance: Embodiment

When I hear the term “radical acceptance”, what comes to mind is social justice and the acceptance we extend to others around us, even if those people are different from us with a different lived experience. Lately I’ve been mulling these words over, trying out how they feel when it comes to our bodies and how we feel in them. I think when we are able to accept ourselves in a radical way, this leads to embodiment. This hugely informs my clinical practice. When asked about what I do, I’ve started saying “I help people be in their bodies”. 

While feeling sensations in our body is indeed our own lived experience, our sensations do not always live up to how we want to feel, how we think we “ought” to feel, or how others think we should feel. Before I go on, a little disclaimer: this article is not saying that we shouldn’t have goals for how we want to feel, or that helping ourselves or others to feel better is wrong. In fact the alleviation of suffering, whether physical and/or emotional, is a lofty pursuit. Instead I am offering that feeling in the present moment can be done without self-condemnation and judgement, that there are moments when we can simply “feel”. This would not only be radical acceptance of ourselves, but a definition of embodiment. 

This practice of feeling without judgement has been a journey for me, and continues to be so. It often involves slowing down, taking a deep breath, and consciously paying attention to my inner sensations. When I try to manipulate my sensations into someone else’s ideas of what I should be feeling, in other words judging myself, my fascia will often tighten up more, creating more physical restrictions within my body. Try simply noticing what sensations are happening in your body in a given moment, or notice the moment when you start to judge the sensation. And try not to judge the judgement! Or simply, accept the sensation and the fact that you are judging yourself. And then see what happens. 

If you are feeling a particularly tough sensation, close your eyes and gently ask your body, “what is this about?” And gently let go the quick answer your brain might send you, instead awaiting the answer that may arise from your body tissues. The answer might come in the shape of the intention of gesture, an intended body posture, or perhaps thoughts or memories that arise from the sensations of your body. Another question you can ask your body, after doing the above (or after doing the above several times), is, “what do I need?” And remember if the answers are not forthcoming, continue to be patient with yourself, as the answers may come another time. And remember to not necessarily trust the quickness of answers in the form of stories coming from your brain, but see what arises in sensations from the body. It’s more about deepening into an aligned relationship with yourself, than getting a quick fix answer.  

To cultivate this culture of radical acceptance in ourselves and others, I believe we need to build a tolerance to sensation, even when that sensation is discomfort. First, let’s qualify the difference between overwhelming sensation and a medium sense of discomfort. We all need help when overwhelmed, whether that be in the form of support from family and friends, physical and/or emotional therapy, and/or biochemically. I think the confusion happens when we equate discomfort with overwhelm, and it brings new understanding and depth when we are able to differentiate the two. As we build tolerance to discomfort, not only can we start to be present long enough to bring new insight into understanding ourselves and others, but I believe it is also an opportunity to gain physical and emotional resilience. It stretches the capacity and flexibility of our nervous systems and enables us to stay out of overwhelm and in the window of tolerance a little more easily. 

Some of the most profound moments of sensation happen when we fall into that place of just feeling, letting go of all the stories and reasons we have accumulated over our lifetimes. It’s a vulnerable place, and can take practice to stay in that feeling for any length of time. Suddenly reasons don’t matter, we stop fighting, and there is surrender, as we fall into the connection of everything. It feels a lot like love. When this happens in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, generally you’ll experience an opening of physical restriction in your body, often changing how you relate with the outside world.

Photo Credit: Jan Kopriva, Unsplash

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Stress

I’ve been ruminating for a while on what to write about, and the subject of stress keeps presenting itself. I like to be positive, but I’ve learned the value of naming a topic directly for what it is. As we come out of the past few months of heightened virus awareness, it seems very few have remained untouched in some way. There are those affected directly by the virus with all the ramifications. Of us remaining there has been uncertainty in a variety of ways: whether around the virus, around work, school, finances, and when and how to connect with those we love. How does this affect our bodies? For a lot of us, stress!

I have spent a good deal of time devoted to the study of trauma, but for the purpose of this article I will mostly use the term stress, as stress does sound slightly more positive and not everyone would describe their stress situation as trauma. Even so, a build up of stress in the body can produce a similar physical symptomology as trauma.

How does our body process stress? First off, stress is a normal part of life. We are wired for it. And to be alive is to experience stress, anxiety, joy, excitement, anger, contentment, love, peace, and all the other emotions that are present in a well lived life.

On a normal day we run on aprox 70% fight/flight nervous system. You may ask, “Isn’t that a scary part of our nervous system, a part that we want to stay out of?” Well, it’s also the part of our nervous system that gets us out of bed in the morning, lets us do our work, get excited, and care for those we love. This system has also recently been coined “attend and befriend“. Originally the research was done on white males only, but as more research comes to light, we are understanding of the variety of ways of how we express this system. So when stress revs up, oftentimes there is a drive to connect and soothe others to find safety(attend/befriend), or a reaction deep in the brain that jacks up our diaphragm, starts our heart racing, and pumps blood to our limbs that enables us to fight or flee. Most of our modern life doesn’t call for fighting or fleeing, so this urge can turn into a driving anxiety- a physical drive that can be verbally aggressive and/or an anxiety that drives us to “do” something about our stress. Even when we know we have done all we can do, the brain may go a hundred miles an hour and the body can have trouble slowing down.

Another part of our nervous system is called “freeze”; the part that kicks in when the caring, fighting or flight has not been able to resolve our perceived danger. Our fascia contracts, our body become less fluid, and it becomes harder to act; a kind of numbing or dissociation that happens when the body tones down sensation to “wait out” the perceived danger. Again, the freeze part of our nervous system has great diversity and also exhibits more pleasurable sensations called “freeze without fear”. This happens when we enjoy a good meal in good company, and also with procreation and when nursing a baby.

What I’ve often noticed in life and when doing cranio is that generally the lines are blurred. Each person has their own way of reacting when stressed. One person may go straight from normal to freeze when stressed, and another person may live much of their life in a semi ramped up fight/flight state. Or another may be living with the brakes and gas on at the same time, fascia clamped down around bones in freeze while nerves are shooting flight messages like grinding sparks.

I think it is important to honor our bodies and how we have survived. Even when it’s not what we currently want to feel, these nervous system states have got us this far, and they are legitimate ways of being.

Understanding stress, trauma, and how our nervous systems are fundamentally wired to attune to safety by checking in with others, whether by touch or by being profoundly seen and heard by another, is foundational to how Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy works. Our fascia literally responds to our environment, and will soften when it feels safe, allowing more blood flow and informing our central nervous system with softer messages.

A very primal way of understanding stress and the effects that attuned and caring touch have on a very physical level, is to ponder what happens to a baby’s body during birth.

Babies when born only survive when touched by a caregiver, and only get nourishment through the attunement of another. First let’s remember that it’s a healthy baby that gets to scream their discomfort and distress upon their entrance to this world. Then, as baby wriggles up the front of their parent and suckles the breast, bones in the baby’s head that were so recently squashed, overlapped and retracted in fascia from the monstrous effort that is birth, suddenly soften, expanding outwards as embrace between parent and child set off cascades of oxytocin and endorphins. At the same time the suckling of milk exerts a gentle internal pressure, also expanding the bones outward. We perceive ourselves through the touch of another.

What are all the ways to acknowledge and soothe stress? Probably there are as many ways as there are people. Learning how to tolerate and even befriend internal sensation is important. Connection to nature is huge and can bring healing to both us and land. We learn to come to terms with our stories by telling our stories and by hearing the stories of other’s. Craniosacral therapy, massage, reiki, and counselling, are all high on my list of favorites. Dancing, yoga, and walking, are all ways for us to feel our bodies and to help us build a healthy sense of embodiment.

Finishing a hot shower with a cold blast, we wake up, reminded that we can tolerate the comfortable and the surprising in a renewed surge, gulping lungfulls of air and stepping forward into life.

Written By Naomi Chuah, RCST, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist

Some recommended reads:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indiginous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Ways to connect to and learn from Nature)

The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD (Understanding Trauma)

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Connection

The quiet ache propels me out of doors. I round a corner, and once again my eyes rest on bark, roots, fungus, and moss. Tiny fairy kingdoms, worlds within worlds, the miniature touching my eyes. I know, once again, that I am okay.

Legs moving, feet padding, led onward, deep into the pale green and whites and browns of cottonwood forest and paths, springy sappy scents opening my nose and lungs.

An inner knowing propels me off the trail, and I am sitting by the water listening to my inner rhythms. Reminded once again to trust my body. Coming to peace sitting on mud, gazing into a high tide river knowing to its muddy depths.

As humans, we keep asking the question, “What makes us feel ok?”. We wade through hundreds of pages in search of heady knowledge. And then, falling back to sensation, we once again become acquainted with ourselves. A pleasant gurgle moves through the tummy, a brush on the arm from a friend, the whispered caress of wind on the cheek. We even start letting in unpleasant sensations, letting ourselves feel, knowing that we are, or might be one day, okay.

Some would say spirituality makes us feel okay. Brene Brown talks about spirituality like this: “Our expressions of spirituality are as diverse as we are. When our intentions and actions are guided by spirituality – our belief in our interconnectedness and love – our everyday experiences can be spiritual practices”. Might I venture further to say that one doesn’t have to call it spirituality to feel connected; to family, community, animals and plants.

Falling into awe of the starry universe or the miniature of a tree bark’s mossy ecosystem, both somehow reassure our senses that yes, we are real, and there is more going on than just our internal sensations.

Conversely, at times when I cannot connect, and surrender to being myself, suddenly the extra stories fall away, bittersweet, and I just am, as the world comes rushing in to meet me.

Written by: Naomi Chuah, BCST

Photo Credit: Jay