Street Smart Craniosacral

considerations for the practicing therapist

Why Embryology is a Central Study for

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapists
Posted on November 30, 2013

I was cleaning some boxes out of my closet this week and I found a few transcriptions of lectures I
gave many years ago. It was fascinating reading these, as I was reminded of how timeless the
foundational concepts of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy are. Today I am posting a segment from
one of those lectures, given at a weekend training at Phoenix Therapeutic Massage College in 2006.
When I visited this discussion again, part of it grabbed my attention because it illustrates well a
question I am often asked: Why are craniosacral therapists so interested in embryology? I hope it is
useful for you in some capacity:

RYAN: Hello everybody. I am glad to be back with you today. I really enjoyed the time we spent
together yesterday exploring the fluid body as both a concept and an experiential perception. I think
we should start today by addressing the question asked at the end of class about why biodynamic
therapists place so much emphasis on the study of embryology.

Firstly, to begin answering this question, I would like to revisit some of the comments you shared after
our hands-on exercise in which we learned to palpate the body as a continuous fluid field, a sort-of
tensegrity field. Do you remember some of the words you yesterday to describe your experience of
feeling the deep fluid systems of the body?

We heard words like “strange,” “different,” “floaty” etc. Jennifer summed it up nicely with her
comment “That was just weird!”

CLASS: laughter

RYAN: She is right. For most of us, when we first encounter the fluid body, it is just weird. My
question for you is: Why?
After all, the movements you were feeling in and around your partner’s body have always been there,
just beneath your perceptual threshold. They are a part of being human and are always with us. So I
ask you “Why was it weird to experience this inherent part of yourself and your partner?”

STUDENT: “It is not how we usually feel each other.”

RYAN: Yes. That is true. Manual providers tend to emphasize tissue palpation. What we did yesterday
is quite different. It allows for softer palpation and invites you into fluid states of perception, which is
very different for many of us.

STUDENT: “I could tell something good was happening, but I wasn’t really doing anything and that
felt strange to me. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

RYAN: Yes. The passive attitudinal posture we take elicits change in a pretty mysterious way. We
aren’t doing “nothing,” though. We are listening – and in doing so we are synchronizing with deep
healing resources that express themselves through movement. You may come to see, over time, that
synchronizing is very powerful in and of itself. But most of us have to develop a new vocabulary to
describe this experience.

STUDENT: “What I was feeling just didn’t make any sense to my mind.”

RYAN: Aha! Yes. You are getting to the heart of the matter and the point I want to make today. These
types of movements do not make sense to our minds. But why?

Let me get to my point:

The movements you began to feel yesterday do not make sense because of the model of the body
you and most healthcare professionals have been taught. You have been taught a mechanistic model
in which tissues are the primary structures of interest. You are taught that the groups of tissues follow
certain rules of cause-and-effect. For instance, if a psoas muscle is tight, then the QL’s will have to
compensate, the lumbar vertebrae might be placed under unilateral strain, and so on and so forth
with different tissue groups compensating for each other – one situation causes the other with the
ultimate result being pain. This is a likely scenario for low-back-pain and something we see in many
people. The tissue-mechanistic model that came up with this evaluation feels very good to our
logical, Cartesian minds. It gives us the feeling that we know where pathology comes from and helps
us feel armed to counter the negative forces present in order to prescribe a course of action to return
tissue groups to proper relationship. And at a certain level, this is true.

But the fluid body you encountered yesterday does not follow the clear-cut rules that we are taught
govern the tissue body. It is pervasive and comprehensive … and It follows different physical laws
than we are used to. So we call it “weird” But the fact is it is not any more “weird” than the
mechanistic model. It is just different!
It is a matter of perspective.

People who regularly work with the fluid body take an interest in embryology because it offers a
model of understanding that fits the spatial movements they perceive in their clients. The mechanistic
tissue model is simply inadequate when dealing with the pervasive non-linear nature of fluid in the
body. So when we enter into this realm, our human minds seek a framework to make sense of the
sensations we experience. The embryo gives us such a framework. I think ultimately we study the
embryo because it gives us a sense of safety … that there is some precedent for many of the foreign
spatial motions we see in the client and feel in ourselves. But more clinically, embryology also gives
us a map to explore the relationship between different fluid fields of movement that lie deep within the
metabolic interactions of the body. Traditional anatomical education largely ignores these
relationships.

You are, unknowingly, in this fine institution, being funneled into a limited way of perceiving human
embodiment. Your education will serve you well in the current healthcare environment, but it robs you
of experiencing the deeper realities of the living organism you are. Over time, many therapists
encounter a deep frustration because of the limited thinking that shaped their educational foundation.
Therapists all around the world are looking for a way of better understanding the deep forces holding
their clients in compensatory patterns. The fluid matrix is a fruitful frontier of exploration in which
many people find greater depth in their therapeutic interactions.

A few of you shared that you felt pressure building in different planes of your bodily experience. Some
felt condensation along the midline, and some felt as if they were being stretched to their periphery
by the fluid forces. When we look closely at embryology, we see a precedent for these fluid
experiences. For instance, in the third week of embryological development, cells migrate through the
fluid medium to the middle of the developing body in a process known as gastrulation. There is a
focus on internal movement. This serves to orient the development of the nervous system and
subsequently the individual’s sense of self.

At other times resources are shunted to the periphery to establish boundaries, implant into the
mother, and explore the outside world in general. We are “stretched” to physically connect with
another and feel the expansiveness of our embodiment. The fluids can have different goals in mind,
and the biodynamic therapist seeks to understand and support these goals with appropriate timing.
These are very simple examples, but hopefully you can begin to see why embryology is helpful to
orient the therapist to developmental forces and hold these forces in a broader framework.
Understanding these movements allows us to know what the formative intelligence of the body and
consciousness is up to … what it is trying to renegotiate and balance in the client. Not only does this
give us a sense of comfort in “strange” territory, but it helps us understand how to support a natural
impulse of the body/mind complex. Traditional anatomy gives us little to work with in these realms.

STUDENT: “How is working like this useful? I mean, how do you bring about change in a client with
that kind of work?

RYAN: How did you feel when you left class yesterday?

STUDENT: “Well … I noticed my vision was a lot clearer. Things just looked sharper when I drove
home. And I slept well. I had an interesting dream about bees spreading honey inside my heart.”

CLASS: laughter

RYAN: Okay. I would call that a good initial therapeutic response. I don’t know what kind of physical
issues you deal with, but we just simply did a listening exercise yesterday. We didn’t really discuss
your process or label your experience, but from simply being listened to at the fluid level for 20
minutes or so, you noticed a positive change in your nervous system. You experienced precision and
clarity in your senses and your CNS opened up a world of deep rest because this style of work resets
the autonomic nervous system. It seems like your heart sweetened up a bit too.

CLASS: laughter

That is just the beginning of what this style of work can do for suffering clients. Specific tissue
changes and lesion corrections are commonplace events when this style of work is applied with skill.
Working with the fluid body gets clinical results in some pretty surprising cases.

I often say that we “go back in time” with this work. We consciously access the early formative forces
that shaped our bodies as embryos. The paradigm we are working under now says that the forces
that shape us as an embryo still maintain our physicality and offer solutions to our health challenges.
At this point in my exploration of the model, I am comfortable agreeing with that viewpoint. The fluid
body of the embryo precedes the tissue body. It is there first. It is primary. It holds greater authority
than the tissue fields. I have come to accept this as a fact. The fluid body is given coherence and
form by intelligent potencies that far surpass our current understanding of how humans are put
together. Therapeutically, the potent forces in the fluids work multi-dimensionally to unlock incredibly
complicated lesion patterns that you or I could never figure out with the traditional tools given to us
by our basic education.

STUDENT: You seem very comfortable saying “I don’t know.”

RYAN: I am. Because day after day I see the inherent forces in the fluid matrix liberate multi-tissue
strains that surpass our anatomical understanding. These strain patterns run in spatial shapes that
do not honor tissue barriers. The fluids act as a kind of all-pervasive medium that connects seemingly
disparate tissues. Fluid work teaches you that the human body truly is a “whole.” and that breaking
down the human substance into separate, independent fields is not always the best approach for
manual therapy.

I find it curious that it is so hard for us to just sit behind our clients and comfortably palpate them as a
whole fluid entity. Our mind doesn’t know what to do with the experience of wholeness in a clinical
setting. We are taught to immediately break the body down and play detective in order to find an
insightful solution to the client’s situation. We can, of course, do this. But I have yet to meet a
therapist who can accurately define the client’s problem multi-dimensionally as specifically as the
forces in the fluid do as they accesses states of balanced tension. I’m not talking cosmic
consciousness here or alternate realities. By multi-dimensional I mean that strain can run from a
muscle through surrounding fascia, periosteum, and actually twist osseous tissue … and that may be
directly tied to local or systemic metabolic dysfunction … and yes to emotional and spiritual
displacement as well.

When we cease viewing the body solely as an anatomical snapshot and start viewing the body
developmentally as a continually evolving embryo, we encompass more history and greater depth in
the client’s embodiment. It is not just a collection of parts that walks into our office. It is a story that
may go back decades, a story holding strain in the fluid field that can only be understood by
understanding how we are spatially shaped when fluid dominated our corporeal body.

I will resist getting ahead of myself. We have talked very little about the nature of Primary Respiration
so far. That is the next step. Primary Respiration is the intelligence that is orchestrating the adaptive
responses and ultimately the healing events that take place in the client. It is a slow natural
movement that continually offers gentle spatial coherency to the individual. By learning to relate to
Primary Respiration in an authentic and humble way, we can facilitate freedom and peace in
struggling bodies and souls. We have to get out of the way with this style of work, and that is another
skill set that must explored. I would like to talk more about that today…

Ryan Hallford is a craniosacral therapist and educator. He offers certification programs in basic and
advanced cranial work through the Craniosacral Resource Center in Southlake, TX.
www.cranioschool.com

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