Karen O'Shaughnessy CranioSacral Therapy

12/02/2021

You don't have to fix anyone's problems. You don’t have to save them, heal them, or urgently get them to take on your favorite beliefs, theories, and techniques.

Just be there with them so that they feel felt and understood. When they look up at you, you are really there.

Listen, to the story they are telling you, of how they are making sense of their experience. Listen also to the somatic story, to the secret, sensitive language emerging from their body and their heart.

And also listen carefully to their story of safety and what makes them feel safe. This story is told in the language of the nervous system and will speak to you if you attune to it.

Momentarily bracket your beliefs, ideas, and systems of change. With the poetic beauty and power of your mirror neuron system, enter into the miracle we-space with them, where they can know for just one moment that they are not alone.

I'm with you. I'm here. I feel you. I understand you.

Extend to them a soothed nervous system, a sanctuary of holding, a field of permission where their experience can unfold without any pressure for it to shift, change, or heal. Remove the burden that they become someone or something else in order for you to stay close.

For just a few moments, resist the temptation to “teach” them, but instead “reach” them.

The mind will doubt if this is enough… but the body knows. The heart knows.

We are able to do this to the degree with are in touch with the orphans of soma and psyche that dance out our own unlived life – the unmet grief, the untouched sadness, the unmetabolized rage.

If we are not in conscious, embodied, and compassionate contact with these ones, we will not be able to recognize and hold them as they surge in the interactional field, and our friend will not feel safe to access, articulate, and integrate what is alive within them.

The Other – whether manifesting outside us or taking internal form – is not in need of new information, strategies, techniques, or beliefs, but longs and burns for you… your presence, your tenderness, your raw unfiltered being, your love.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki

30/04/2019

When I use the term “somatic,” I am referring to bodily-based experience, raw sensations in the body in contrast to thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, or even emotions (which can often include a narrative component).

If we drop underneath the interpretations of immediate experience, we find a very alive world of sensations such as contraction, expansion, freezing, speed, pressure, excitement, numbing, intensity, flatness, nausea, constriction, spaciousness, dullness, warmth, and cold. We can experience these on their own as well as components of more complex conditions such as anxiety, depression, and trauma.

In a moment of emotional activation – say with panic, despair, shame, or rage – it can be helpful to temporarily set aside these words and make direct contact with what is unfolding in our immediate experience. In doing so, we may discover that we cannot find “anxiety” or “shame” (these are already interpretations of a particular configuration of experience), but instead we discover a very unique assembly of specific thoughts, feelings, and impulses.

For many of us, the habit is to turn from this material, to exit into interpretation and other forms of dissociation as we have come to associate certain self-states with being unsafe, overwhelmed, and on the brink of being thrown outside our window of tolerance. However, many have discovered that is the turning from themselves in times of need that is the actual root cause of so much additional suffering and struggle.

In moments of activation, we need ourselves more than ever, to encode new pathways of self-care, replacing the older circuitry of self-aggression and self-abandonment with the slower responses of empathy, attunement, curiosity, and compassion. No, it’s not easy. But we can go slowly, one moment at a time. Just one second is enough. More than enough. And from that “one second” a new world is born.

In addition to the thoughts, feelings, and habitual behaviors, there is often a lot happening in the body at the level of raw sensation. Most of us were not trained to attune to this level of experience and it can take some practice. There is valuable information in the body which presents itself during moments of emotional intensity and it is both wise and also kind to tend to it as part of our inquiry.

To be sure to include the body in our work and not stop at the thoughts/ beliefs or even pre-labeled, generalized emotions or conditions. To be curious during challenging times and drop down into the body to make contact with the life that is surging there. Not necessarily to privilege the somatic over the other layers, but to include it, to use everything we can in our experience to understand and care for this precious human form.

It is incredibly important, intelligent, and compassionate to attend to each of the dimensions of our sacred human experience. All are holy in their own way and as a system are a true miracle. Especially in times of suffering, confusion, and struggle, it is an act of kindness to consider each of the levels and what they may be trying to share with us. Perhaps this is the true meaning of integration, to bring the layers together in one act of mercy, wisdom, and love.

In our world and in these crazy times, perhaps it is especially important to remember the body, the vessel, for it is a sanctuary of immense intelligence and majesty.

Photo by Rene Rauschenberger

29/04/2019

A wonderful reminder that not everything of value comes in a beautiful box with a glorious ribbon. The greatest gifts often arrive in the unlikeliest of packaging ...

The pressure to be happy, to be in a “higher” or “more positive” state, to always be “growing” can weigh on us in ways we might not be consciously aware of.

When our entire psychic effort is placed into “being happy,” we lose touch with other shades of the spectrum – other voices, perspectives, and dimensions of soul that are trying to reach us. These ones are not always syntonic with ego-image, with the way we’ve come to imagine ourselves, others, and the world. Thus, we scramble to transcend, heal, or cure them, sending them away into the shadowlands.

There is vision within the dark not available in the brightened state. Insight, discoveries, and realizations buried in the core of doubt, confusion, and uncertainty that we cannot contact in a whitened and clarified landscape.

For many of us, what we mean by “healing” is a steady state where we experience only those feelings, moods, images, sensations, ideas, impulses, and experiences that we “like,” that our spiritualties, teachers, families, and culture have said are okay or the “highest,” those which have come to be associated with a societal, solar fantasy of happy, white, and certain.

If other, blacker, browner, lunar, more complex thoughts, emotions, and experiences come, this is evidence that we are not “healed,” that we’ve failed, fallen short, lost contact with some sort of magical “secret” or “law” and all the rest of it. But is this healing? Or something else?

Non-happy, non-whitened, non-high, non-joyful, non-clear, non-certain experience is not evidence you have failed, but that you have a human nervous system, a heart filled with blood, and you have taken birth in a star that is full-spectrum. Welcome.

Despite the heavy burden we can place upon ourselves and the fantasies of a culture that has lost contact with shadow and its richness, soul will continue to look for us, never giving up.

The soul is not in us but we are in it and it will continue to send its allies, emissaries, and representatives of the vast, in order to remind us of how immeasurable, majestic, and brilliant the human heart and form truly is.

17/03/2018

Usually when we talk about parts of ourselves that we have disowned and placed into the shadow, we're referring to less desirable material such as fear, rage, shame, and despair. The shadow is seen as the dark repository for all of the so-called negative aspects of ourselves, i.e. our unhealthy dependency, unacknowledged narcissism, unmet hopelessness, and the looming ghosts of our unlived lives.

But it is not only negative aspects that we defend against, dissociate from, and place into the unconscious. Many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, sexuality, intimacy, and connectedness.

While it is a bit harder to wrap our minds around, some of us have disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. For example, if the very natural, raw, human experience of joy constellated complexes in our parents – say it brought up anxiety in Mom, anger in Dad, or caused others to shame or pull away from us – we learned quite quickly that joy is not okay, and even potentially dangerous. This reality can be very confusing as we come to associate the experience of joy with being unsafe.

As a little one, with a developing brain and nervous system, we learn to disown or dissociate from any state of mind which has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures. This capacity of repression is intelligent and creative, and in many cases saved our lives. But many of us long to know joy again, to feel alive, to fully participate here.

To re-train ourselves to feel joy is not an easy path as by definition we will have to step back through that anxiety, panic, and sense of annihilation that the repression of joy has served to protect us from. But it is a path well worth exploring. To allow ourselves, as part of our inquiry, to see the ways we have placed not only “negative” material into the unconscious shadow, but how we have split off from the positive as well.

23/06/2017

IT IS OKAY TO HAVE A NEED

Many I speak with have come to the conclusion that it is not okay for them to have a need. Or that it is certainly not very “spiritual.” As little ones in our families of origin, expressing a need wasn’t always very safe and often met with dysregulating empathic failure. We learned that having a need was the fast path to hopelessness, disappointment, and shame, watching as attunement, contact, and affection was removed from the field around us.

Because it was too anxiety-provoking to allow for the reality of any sort of limitation in our caregivers, we defaulted to the conclusion that there must something wrong with us and that we are not worthy of having a need. While that realization was painful, we could temporarily rest knowing that someone was there to protect us … all the while shifting the blame to ourselves, laying the foundation for the deep shame that so many experience later on, especially in intimate relationship.

As adults, often this core belief gets validated by teachings which confirm that having a need is a sign of lack of progress on the path, evidence of not enough faith or trust, too much attachment, failure to “stay in the now,” to understand the teachings on “no-self,” or that we are lost in the “ego.” The shame and blame continue, but with flowery spiritual language replacing the voices of the original bad other.

Let us stand on the rooftop and shout out together, with the sun, the moon, and the stars as our witnesses: There is nothing wrong with having a need. It’s so human, to have some yearning in the heart, some longing for connection, to be met in presence, to be seen, to be heard, to be touched, to be held. We are relational mammals. We will not be overriding millions of years of evolution anytime soon, in the wake of learning some new teachings.

While having a need is perfectly natural, the reality is that it is unlikely your needs are ever going to be fully met, especially by another. With your heart open, make requests to your lovers, your friends, and your family. Know that they will sometimes be able to meet you, to see you as you are, and provide what you are asking for. When they do, you can rejoice and give thanks. And when they do not, you can likewise rejoice and give thanks, for the opportunity to tend to yourself in a radically new way.

At times we will feel complete, resting in the wholeness that we are, and not in contact with any particular need or desire. At other times we will be drawn to assert a need, to ask for help, to enact a firm boundary, to honor a longing in the body or heart, to state very clearly what we want. We can stay committed to both of these experiences as perfectly valid and authentic expressions of our true nature, willing to be utterly chaotically gloriously human, without apology.

Please continue to make requests of your lovers and friends, in all of their forms, while simultaneously remaining committed to the empowered, alive realm of self-care, no longer willing to abandon yourself, even if you are abandoned by another. To dare to be your own best friend, to attend to your body and your heart and your soul in wild and wise ways, even when the other is nowhere to be found.

And when some of your needs do go unmet, as they inevitably will, to no longer be seduced by the ancient conclusion of the little one who deemed herself unworthy as she longed to make sense of an environment that could not hold her as the mystery that she was. Instead, to slow down, breathe into your lower belly, open your senses, and step into the sacred world which is here now. To honor the power and holiness of the relational field, which is not oriented around meeting all your needs, but revealing how whole you already are.

23/06/2017

New craniosacral therapy research shows that it works for neck pain...

22/04/2017

If you’re questioning the rightness of your desire to pick up your baby when he cries, or lie beside him as he falls to sleep, read this.

10/04/2017

The beautiful journey of birth.

05/04/2017

To be really met, seen, heard & our experience witnessed & acknowledged without judgment is a truly cathartic gift in life.
An ancient tribe used to circle those who had something to say about a happening/experience that had a profound or traumatic effect on them; to provide them with totally focussed attention, respect, time & to really, really listen to what they had to say. The person was given up to three opportunities to share their deepest hurts, traumas, feelings with the tribe & to be 'held' in this way. After the third time the tribe would turn its back on the person & their story, refusing to 'feed' any further sense of hurt/injustice/getting 'lost' in the story itself.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
~Peter A Levine

13/03/2017

CranioSacral Therapy works on the membranes of the brain & spinal cord to ease restrictions and facilitate the movement of Cerebrospinal fluid around the brain. A gentle non-invasive way to support a key physiological function.

Children diagnosed with autism at the age of two had substantially greater amounts of extra axial cerebrospinal fluid at 6 and 12 months. Additionally, the level of increased CSF at 6 months could be correlated with the severity of autism symptoms displayed at 2 years, a new study reports.

12/03/2017

A ton of research backs up the claim that you literally cannot spoil a baby. In fact, holding babies is vital for their health and development.

25/12/2016

“It is so very revealing how change can be so uncomfortable, confusing, and threatening for those around us. I suppose that this is one of the strongest reasons why most human beings remain uncomfortably within the box that others see as appropriate for them. True autonomy is lived only by standing on your own two feet, and walking wherever they take you.”

~ Adyashanti

"The Philosophy of Enlightenment" Study Course

23/12/2016

"At the core of so much of our suffering is separation, a separation that was caused by literally turning away from our own innocence and completeness very early in life as a coping mechanism to deal with painful and overwhelming situations. By turning away from our own completeness we try to become who the people around us want us to be. For a while it helps us to cope and get by to some extent, but later leaves us with the sorrow and/or rage of being disconnected from our own self. We can either blame ourselves or others for our turning away, but that simply disempowers us and leaves us depressed, anxious, and angry. We need to see that we were all simply doing the best that we could to cope with the challenges we faced, and have some compassion for such an innocent action. We also need to intuitively turn back toward the innocent completeness that we turned away from. For our completeness never goes anywhere and can never be taken away from us. It is exactly where we left it. When you feel the sting of separation inside, simply turn inwardly and intuitively around one hundred and eighty degrees and there will be your innocence, your beauty, your completeness. It may seem impossible, but give it a try until you reconnect with what in truth you never lost."

~ Adyashanti

"The Way of Liberating Insight" Study Course

20/11/2016

“It’s important to realize the difference between responsibility and blame. To take responsibility is to begin to shift your own emotional life, to see that it is our own conditional ideas and viewpoints that cause the majority of our suffering. If we realize that our own emotional reactions are what is making us suffer, if we’re willing to move out of a victim space, we may be able to play a conscious role in our own healing. Part of emotional healing is to come to terms with the unavoidable tragedies of life. This is what enlightenment is, what freedom is, and what it is to be a human being. There is a dimension of our being that’s never touched by anything, but that is not the totality of our being. Reality is vast, and it includes the totality of our experience. Many of the woundings that are most problematic happen to people very early in their lives. But for the most part even that sorrow is mostly caused by how we’re relating to the past. You start to realize, ‘I can’t change what happened then, but I can change how I relate to my own experience.’ It probably won’t happen overnight, but you can then begin to act upon it.”

~ Adyashanti

"The Way of Liberating Insight" Study Course

07/08/2016

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24/07/2016

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10/07/2016

What is 'Stress'?

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08/07/2016

What exactly is stress and how would you know if you are suffering from it?

In spite of the feelings we associate with stress such as feeling overwhelmed, irritable, having poor sleep, anger, stomach or bowel upsets, headaches, difficul...