24/04/2023
Dr James Jealous RIP
“Fluid Body”
According to a précis by Jealous (personal communication, 2004), “Cranial osteopathy is not about the cranium. It is about Primary Respiration.” Sutherland’s move from the CSF to the Fluid Body began with a technique he called “automatic shift- ing.” Paulsen (1953) described Sutherland’s sensation of a “mo- tor” starting in the CSF and then carrying on of its own accord, generating a healing force that treated several lesions around the body. “The core of this work is perceptual,” wrote (Jealous 2001), “We learn to sense the Whole. When one meets a patient, one sees the Whole—a very rare event in our modern world.” When a patient achieves a Neutral as described previously, the CNS becomes quiet (the person often falls asleep). With the CNS “out of the way,” the whole person—the CNS, CSF, all other fluids, and all other tissues—merges into the Fluid Body. Within the protoplasmic Fluid Body, motion is purely metabolic, re- sponding freely to the outside presence of the natural world and the BoL.
To harness the potency present in the BoL as expressed in the Tide requires ever-more subtle techniques. In the final years of his career, Sutherland stopped all motion testing of the head, and applied no forces to osteopathic lesions. He worked with fulcrums in still points, and stated, “treat not with techniques but gentle contact” (Sutherland 1990). Working with the Health is a BOCF imperative, echoing Still (1899), “To find health should be the object of the doctor. Anyone can find disease.” Jealous (1997) described therapeutic changes requiring an “ab- original and instinctual consciousness” on the part of the prac- titioner, not intellectual or even intuitive, “The moment is filled with the effort to be present with the Health in the patient and the story as it unfolds into its own answer.”
