Cranial-Sacral Therapy Session

I'm in the Firehouse Coffee Roasting Company coffeehouse awaiting some long-deserved breaks - er, I mean brakes - to be done on the truck. The vibration when braking was finally getting to me, shaking me apart and spilling my tea. Had one estimate of over $700 for both front and back (my drums were warped from towing horses for the last three years without a brake controller... who was supposed to tell me I needed one?!?)

So thought I would share something I wrote after one of my sessions with Lucy from Portland, a very kind soul who practices Cranial-Sacral Therapy and probably other things... enjoy.

The therapist burned sage in the room before I arrived, and the light level was pleasant. She had some music on that sounded Native American in beat but had other elements to it – and it reminded me of Sedona, Arizona for some reason. So at the conclusion of the preliminary chit-chat, she had me lay on the table, pillow under knees, the lights dimmed, and she began just laying her hands on my feet.

I put my superpowers to work, focusing on the drum beat, and imagining I was there in Sedona, drumming alongside musician Nicholas Gunn inside a sacred circle of rocks, perhaps at one of the vortices, overlooking the beautiful red rock canyons with its salmon-coloured hills topped with foresty pines and large boulders. She picked my feet up, gently swaying them a bit, letting their weight rest fully in her hands, as if to say “I’m here to catch you. Rest on me.” So I did.

As she moved around the table, putting hands on various areas, I could feel sparks of energy sometimes make my body twitch and jump. Not a lot, but a small current of energy just enough to be noticeable. I could hear parts of my body talking, like it was an amalgamation of individuals, discussing their feelings! One was commenting on something, another was practically arguing about it, and another was curious about what was going on. I had to put the chatter away, though it was a new and interesting experience. I wanted to get back to the drumming circle, which has been increasingly populating.

Soon the music began to change perceptibly; still it was similar, and I imagined all of the instrumentalists around me phasing in and out of sight and time – and phasing in and out around us were all of the people who lived and died there in that valley in Arizona. They were listening, and began to play and dance with us, all the while fading in and out like mirages.

The music changed again, into something not conducive to my previous imagination, and so I changed with it. This time riding one of my horses, my youngest, red and white spotted, through those same desert sands. Now and again some outlandish scene would flash before me – a snapshot of a South Park episode, chips and salsa, even one brilliant little flash of what I think was me, naked and yelling HEY at myself. I am present enough to gather that I’m having somato-emotional responses to some of the energy work she is performing. I acknowledge the scenes but move on. That is always key to experiencing these energy awakenings, or meditative visualizations, is breathing through one moment to get to the next, not getting stuck in (what are arguably the most interesting) moments. Once that ability is achieved, the mind is free to release LOTS of things, and it will, so that one may experience several flashes of visions in a single second. Without some kind of brain device to capture them all, they may never all be remembered but that is hardly their point. They are only coming up to be digested, or to show your conscious something – and on deeper levels, I swear the images and messages are answers from Jung’s Collective Unconscious. Things you would never even know to ask, things you have never heard of or studied, suddenly will become supernaturally clear. Even if only for a moment! Which is the rub. But the more one exercises their mind to this type of activity, the longer and more one is able to hold on to the really important things.

But alas, this session follows my last Cranio-Sacral session, or even acupuncture (which has a similar effect on me) by 7 years, and I am just happy enough sliding through moments, leaving the remembering for subsequent sessions. At this point, I have imagined that I and my horse are one – not in some freaky bodily part exchange, but as though our bodies had been beamed together in some sort of Star Trek transporter accident. Looking at my horse walking, I can almost see my legs as his front legs, and shadows of my torso show through his chest and neck as he moves through the chapparal.

Again this changes, we exchange positions and now I am walking through the desert, but I see his spotted pattern showing through on my ankles, his mane wafting in and out of my hair in the breeze, his white underbelly is my belly…

And so this goes until I’m phasing in and out again, on the back of this animal, and again followed by other people doing the same, until the people and the animals fill the hillside. Soon I see bits of bark and fur, rock and water, and the energy has lifted me into some realm where it is all I can do, with all my concentration, to stay present and awake, because I could have easily slid into sleep and dreams, tottering on the very edge of consciousness.

So I decide to guide my awareness to simple things. I think of celery. And cheese. And oranges. Soon the food is too hard to remember, and all I know are shapes. The shapes fade away too, and I am left with blobs of color. Brown, chartreuse, teal, and then… it all goes gray. Gray with little bubbles… like the essence of me has been reduced to something that looks like boiling water in a stainless pan. Little, magnificent, consistently sized bubbles. And it occurs to me that I am looking at my atomic self. Funny thing was that once I arrived there, I no longer had to try very hard to concentrate on not falling asleep. I don’t even know if I was conscious. At one point I heard a noise that raised my awareness to room level, and realized my throat was vocalizing a barely audible squeak of some sort.

But beyond that, I reached some state of awareness where I just knew that the bubbles were me – and that there were other, variated bubbles that were probably the table, or the wall—or the practitioner. We were all just bubbles, side by side, not one ended but the other began—and it dawned on me that, like in the Matrix code, once a person’s mind sees things on this scale, it all makes sense that none of us are whole by ourselves. It made sense to see the pieces of fur, rock, and tree because they were pieces of me. That moving around in a crowd of people were like the moving bubbles, all connected. I was aware of where the therapist was, and what she was doing, the whole time, but as seen down a long reflective tunnel. Not in a visible sense, either, if you can wrap your mind around that. More like an astronaut at the end of a life line…

Then the individuals returned. And the big realization of the day. One of the body part bubbles was complaining that it didn’t like always being in this soup swimming around with the other bubbles. Sometimes it wants to be alone. Like me, as an individual. I love being around people – laughing, working, experiencing – but I also need time to myself. Now having gotten the whole “all things are one” philosophy in 3-D, this is what my soma is telling me? Sometimes I just want to be an individual, and not like all the other bubbles. So what do I do with that?

Breathe through it. Like every other moment, every realization. Because on the heels of one comes another. And if you’re ready for it, yet another. So it went on, a few minutes longer, listening to what my psyche had to say, my body parts, what the unconscious collection of information circling the globe had to impart to me next. Too many things and I was worn out from the last 60 minutes.