Category: Blog Post

What Is Distance Craniosacral Therapy?

Distance Craniosacral Therapy is a holistic therapy that re-ignites the body’s self-healing ability to relieve pain, stress, and dysfunction. To understand it, it helps to first know a little about the hands-on bodywork it’s based on.

What’s the bodywork foundation?

My distance work is based on Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), a subtle-touch form of bodywork.

I often tell clients that watching a BCST session is a bit like watching paint dry. From the outside, it looks like nothing much is happening. The practitioner might simply hold the head (or feet, or elsewhere) for a long time. That’s because the action’s all on the inside.

Beneath the practitioner’s hands, a dance is happening. They’re feeling through tissue to bones and alignment…through the web of fascia to its pulls and bunches…through fluids moving in tidal motions to energy flow and congestion. This awareness holds up a mirror to the body. And in response, the body wakes up and makes changes.  

How’s it possible to feel all this?

Everything in your body is connected to everything else by fascia. Tug gently on someone’s heels and, if your palpation skills are subtle enough, you’ll feel the pull of fascia all they way to the head. Hold someone’s head and you can feel not just the skull bones, but all of the membranes inside the head that connect to those bones.

So, it is possible to feel really subtle things inside the body. And…at a certain point, a deeper sensing comes online, one that blends with and surpasses palpation skills alone. Call it intuition. Call it a sixth sense. My craniosacral instructor called it a form of remote viewing. Regardless, for a person trained in subtle palpation, it greatly deepens and enriches perception.  

How’s craniosacral done at a distance?

It’s not a great leap to let this extra sensory process lead the show, especially if, like me, you have years of hands-on experience. In person, the entry point to the body is palpation, which gets extended by heightened perception. Over distance, the entry point is heightened perception, which gets translated into a felt-sense in my hands.

Put another way: I’m already listening through tissues using heightened sensing. It’s not much of a stretch to extend that listening over more distance.

Here’s how it looks in practice. After checking in by video or phone, you’d lie down comfortably while I tune in, which involves softly placing my attention on you. If appropriate, I can then intend to hold a part of your body, like your head. Soon, the connection syncs up and I actually feel your head in my hands. From there, I can track all of the same shifts and healing processes that I would in person.  

What’s the bottom line?

Regardless of entry point, what matters is that my awareness is able to provide a clear witness for your system. That’s what kicks off your healing power—it wakes up in response to being seen. And distance is no obstacle to perception.

How do I learn more?

I offer Distance Craniosacral Therapy sessions based on biodynamic craniosacral therapy and somatic dialogue techniques for trauma. To learn more or schedule an appointment, visit my distance craniosacral therapy page.

My Journey with Being Empathic

Nowadays, info on being empathic is everywhere. But twenty-five years ago, when I was first grappling with this ability, there was precious little on it. I remember late nights surfing online, digging up scraps to try to understand what I was experiencing. And boy was I struggling.

The “am I losing it” years

At some point, I realized my fast-changing moods and sensations didn’t always make sense. I’d be fine one moment and then, boom, inundated by some strong emotion. Or by hunger pangs when I’d just eaten. Or by dizziness when a co-worker nearly fainted. It took ages to pop my head above this raging inner sea and look around. The idea that I might be feeling someone’s else’s feelings just seemed…preposterous. Then.

I started taking the idea more seriously the day I walked through a crowded mall and distinctly heard myself think, “When I get home, I’m going to get my gun and shoot myself,” heralded by a wave of despair. I stopped dead in shock. I didn’t own a gun, and just moments before, I’d been planning dinner. I spun…frantic, helpless, as people streamed past.

The “mucking around” years

Slowly, I accepted that I was empathic. But I had no idea what to do with that. One moment I’d be happily writing in a coffee shop, the next, swamped by a wave of anxiety. Or something stealthy, like sadness, would creep in like fog and leave me lost and bereft before my brain could catch up. I had no sense of where the feelings were coming from. No way to shut them out.

Hunger and lightheadedness were my constant companions. I’d be out with people, get super lightheaded, and then feel ravenously hungry. Eating was my only way to stabilize.

So, I decided to learn “empathic skills.” Back to the Internet, two available books, and various energetic training courses. I bathed my aura in golden light, painted it pearly silver, and built brick walls with my mind. None of that helped. I sent yucky energy down grounding cords. That gave temporary relief but I felt like a vacuum cleaner.

Mainly, I resorted to mechanical means of finding relief. I’d talk to people if I could, try to find out how they were feeling. (I got some strange looks.) If I found the “culprit,” I’d try to make them feel better, usually by listening compassionately. All so I could get relief!

It was unethical…and disempowered. Plus it didn’t work well because, as I learned, most people I asked had no idea what they were feeling. They were divorced from their bodies and emotions. And the more disconnected they were, the more they broadcast their feelings.

So, how did I improve this mess?

The “starting to have a clue” years

I’m not going to lie and say I found a quick or simple solution to empathic overload. I didn’t. But as I progressed on my healing journey, my relationship with empathy also transformed.

My biggest growth edge was learning to be in my body. Turns out, if you’re ungrounded and not “home” in your body—occupying it with your awareness and energy—then it’s immeasurably harder to keep someone else’s stuff from sweeping you away. I needed a daily embodiment practice. For me, this started with massage school.

How bodywork helped…

Bodywork training taught me how in my head and out of my body I was. I remember sobbing once with an instructor because I didn’t know how to ground. The simple capacity to feel my pelvis, legs, and feet, and the energetic connection to earth that follows…nope. Plus, I could barely feel the knots and tensions in others, let alone the subtler craniosacral rhythms, because I couldn’t feel my hands.

I was fiercely determined to learn, however, so I just kept falling down and getting back up. You’re not grounded, an instructor would say for the hundredth time. Ugh, stomp my feet. Feel my legs. Where’s the ground? I know you’re touching me, but I can’t feel you there, a classmate would say. Ugh, I checked out again! Where am I? What am I doing?

I adopted an embodiment ritual before every session. I’d call myself back in energetically through my crown, tracking as each part of my body became more weighted and alive, until I could feel all of me. Plus, the constant physical touch of massage really helped bring me back into my body. Slowly, it got easier to be home.

How awareness helped…

With embodiment came more self-awareness. And awareness is its own empathic skill. I could feel me, so I could finally differentiate between mine and not mine. And I could recognize sooner when something wasn’t mine. Sometimes that awareness alone was enough. The emotion or sensation would evaporate once I realized it wasn’t my stuff.

Other times, becoming aware I’d picked up stuff meant I could ground it out, or better, envision returning it to the owner, whoever they might be. I learned it’s not my job to process someone else’s emotions and, in doing so, I was robbing them of their journey.

Picking up someone’s energy also drew awareness to unhealed areas in myself. I realized that the things I struggled with most in myself—stress, anxiety, hunger, exhaustion—were also the frequencies I most readily resonated with in others. Picking them up became a signpost: Hey! Attention needed here.

How trauma healing helped…

Ultimately, the “dysfunctional” presentation of my empathic abilities had deep roots, reaching back to childhood trauma and the need to feel safe. Being able to sense others’ emotions and intentions gave me advanced warning when I was in danger. And being able to absorb others’ big feelings helped prevent emotional hurricanes. In that context, my empathy was highly functional. Now…not so much.  

Ongoing somatic therapies have been crucial for my healing. Much of my growth with embodiment and self-awareness needed to happen in the presence of a safe other. And slowly clearing out the trauma load has opened more space for my own life force to flow and fill me.

The “working with it” years

Teaching craniosacral classes was what really stretched my empathic abilities. I’d practice tuning in to student pairs from a distance. Were they grounded? Embodied? Okay? It was like rotating a radar dish and narrowing its listening field. For the first time, I could sense where feelings were coming from. This laid the groundwork for the distance work I do today.

Now, using my empathic sense in sessions is so innate I’d feel lost without it. It lets me tune in to clients from a distance. And it lets me sense, with permission, whatever the body chooses to show and work on. It’s an indispensable guide, though one I always check against the client’s own perceptions.

Do I still struggle with empathic overload sometimes? Sure. People I’m close to are harder. My partner’s the hardest. But I’m light years ahead of where I started. I still feel all the stuff…there’s just more distance, less drowning in it.

Now, there’s more me.

What is Somatic Experiencing®?

Somatic Experiencing® is a dialogue-based technique that focuses on the body to heal trauma. To understand how it works, it helps to understand how wild animals stave off trauma.

Wild animals are rarely traumatized

You see that zebra in the picture? It’s in trouble. That lion has ambushed it and it’s seconds away from death. At the final moment before the lion pounces, the zebra collapses…plays dead. And physiologically it is close to death. It’s frozen. All of its life processes have drastically slowed and it’s numb to pain—a mercy.

But it’s this zebra’s lucky day. This death feigning is so convincing that the lion is tricked into walking away. The unhurt zebra gets to live. Next comes the crucial bit.  

As the zebra comes out of freeze, it starts to tremor and shake. It’s discharging all of the pent-up adrenalin and power that got buried under the freeze. It might also stand up and buck or kick to dispel the urge to fight back that got trapped in its limbs. Then it calmly returns to grazing—not traumatized.  

But humans…get traumatized

Ideally, after coming out of a collapsed, helpless freeze state, we would do exactly what the zebra did. We’d shake. We’d kick or punch or run. We’d let all of that massive survival force move through and dissipate. But…we don’t.

Instead, we tamp down these natural urges. We stop the shaking. We don’t punch or kick or run. And that survival energy implodes inside and starts cycling through our nervous system, where it slowly creates havoc. We become traumatized.

Somatic Experiencing® can help

All of the body’s instinctive ways of releasing trauma are still there. They just need a little help to emerge. Somatic Experiencing® practitioners (SEPs) “talk” directly to the body physiology—where both trauma and resilience are stored.

The body speaks in sensations and feelings, in imagery, movements, and symptoms. So, trauma may be sensed as a buzzing energy, as tension or compression, or as a flash of imagery. There may be terror or rage layered on top.

Practitioners and clients use attention and dialogue to track this somatic language together, starting with anything that helps ground and stabilize you, like a calm feeling in the belly. From there, bite-sized pieces of trauma can process.

Once you can safely tune in to the way trauma is holding in your body—say, as constriction or buzzing—it will typically transform. Trapped energies discharge, frozen parts thaw, and defensive urges move through the limbs.

Trauma can heal. It is not a life-sentence. 

Learn more or schedule

I offer remote Somatic Experiencing® sessions combined with craniosacral therapy from western Massachusetts to people everywhere. To learn more or schedule an appointment, visit my Somatic Experiencing page.

Moments of Presence

I remember being on a family road trip once and stopping at a picnic ground. My 11-year-old self stood overlooking a pond encircled by weeping willows and geese. I took a bite of my cheese-and-mustard sandwich…and the flavors exploded in my mouth. The sharp creaminess, the sourness. How had I never noticed how good cheese and mustard tasted? I felt so awake, so alive. I savored each bite in slow motion.

Most of us can probably remember a moment like this, when our chattering brains quieted down and something else came forward, something profoundly alive and aware. A moment of presence, of being. These moments were easier in childhood, I think, easier before adult responsibilities, before trauma took its toll.

Boulders in the path

For me, it’s been a long journey back to moments of presence. One of my biggest obstacles was trauma.

Trauma drove me out of my body for a long time. When I finally learned to come back, I found my body revving like a race car, ready to jump at the slightest sound, mind and nervous system scanning ten steps ahead for danger or freaking out over stuff that made no sense…now.   

Unresolved trauma makes it so hard to be in your body—versus your head or the stratosphere. The body is where the aftermath of trauma is stored. Why would you want to hang out with that? But the body is also where life happens. Where now happens. Without awareness in your body, there’s no presence.

Bodywork helped me

My first time trying to meditate went about as well as you’d expect. I was jumping out of my skin. I needed more help than sitting alone with my trauma symptoms. I was fortunate to find bodywork, which helped me safely re-connect with my body, and craniosacral therapy specifically, which became a lifelong practice in presence.

Craniosacral therapy is, fundamentally, about being present with my inner stuff—both the luminous and the painful—in a grounded and coherent enough way that I can be present with your inner stuff. I was terrible at it at first, but I loved it so much I kept trying. Eventually, I improved.  

Over the years, somatic bodywork has opened me up to positive experiences in my body—pleasure, empowerment, wholeness. And from these bigger, more comfortable, more regulated places, it’s been easier to sit with and transform the trauma pieces.

Slipping into being

Lately, I find myself more often slipping into a different state of being. I would have called it lazy before. Now it feels languid. Like there’s room to breathe.

I can sometimes float back to my 11-year-old’s ease, marveling at how good the rain smells through our window screen, slipping into being.

Allostatic Load

Maybe you can identify. You take decent care of yourself…eat your veggies, sleep okay, exercise, and don’t overindulge. And yet, you’re often exhausted. Even if you rest all weekend, you sometimes don’t recharge. What gives?

The answer will be slightly different for everyone. (But spoiler alert, it’s stress and trauma.) And the intricacies can best be explained using the model of allostatic load.

The cost of doing business

Think of allostatic load in terms of the price you pay each time your body responds to a stressor. Every time you fight a virus, argue with family, struggle with pain, or even just exercise, you’re expending energy. And then you’ve got to eat, drink, relax, and sleep to recharge.

In an ideal world, we’d fully recharge each day. But this modern world is not so ideal for our ancient organism.

Instead, chronic stress typically whittles away at our energy. Day by day, we add a bit more debt to the load and slowly get depleted. So, allostatic load is this cumulative wear-and-tear that chronic stress takes on the body.

How this often plays out

Let’s say you’ve got decent reserves, so most days you handle the load just fine. But then comes a particularly stressful day, where you barely eat or drink, let alone sit down. At a certain point, you splutter out. Now it’s going to take much more rest and fuel than usual to recharge.

What if this happens day after day? Or you start out depleted? Like if you live with…

…unmanaged chronic infections like Lyme or covid
…unresolved trauma
…ongoing, systemic stressors like racism

What if the demands pile up overwhelmingly high? Welcome to overload.

Allostatic overload

At some point, too many demands will outstrip our ability to replenish. Then, no amount of food, drink, or sleep can keep up with the output. We’ve reached allostatic overload.

We either keel over or pull the energy from somewhere. That somewhere is the fight-or-flight system. So, all the stress hormones and changes meant to help you lift a car? They’re now helping you go to work.

But this “fuel” has a high cost, especially over time. Eventually, tissues break down, chronic fatigue sets in, or chronic diseases appear.

Giving ourselves a break

Many of us have been fueling on stress physiology our entire lives—we’ve had to. It feels normal. So, when we “reset” after a stressful period, it’s back to a baseline that’s still quite draining.

And then we wonder why we’re still tired. It’s because we are tired.

The paths out of these cycles are many, but the first step is trusting your body. If you feel tired, you likely are. There are reasons, even if you don’t know them. So start by giving yourself a break. And then, really, give yourself a break.

Wishing You a Very Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays from snowy Massachusetts!

I’ve moved my life and practice from the west coast to the east coast. It took a while to cross the country and find my bearings, but I’m finally settling in.

Along the way, I stayed in an historic mission home through a California heat wave, crossed the Mojave Desert in 112-degree heat, slept in 6 motels with my cat, decompressed at a New England horse farm, and landed (finally!) in a snug house near Northampton, Massachusetts, home to Smith and neighboring Amherst colleges.

And now it’s a winter wonderland outside!

As someone who’s spent the last two decades in San Diego, I’d forgotten how breathtaking snow is. I’d worried about the ice and slush and cold, but overlooked the stillness and beauty. The other day, wind gusted snow powder off rooftops into a bright blue sky, where it billowed and sparkled like diamonds. It was stunning.

So, from this season of quietude, when the earth’s energy pulls deep underground, I hope you find stillness and beauty as well. And whatever your holiday traditions, I wish you warmth and joy!