My approach
4 Bodies, one conversation.
Every CranioSacral Therapist brings their Upledger training together with their own life experience. This is how I work, and why.
You don’t need to understand any of this for a session to work. I love explaining how the body works, so I share it here. But this is mental information, and CranioSacral Therapy works on every level of you.
Photo: hands resting, waiting
Listening with my hands
Holding, waiting, and letting your body decide.
CranioSacral Therapy is a manual therapy. I use touch to feel the different textures and layers of tissue in your body. When an area feels “off,” I hold my hands there until I feel a change.
I think of those layers as fascia, and I mean all of them. In the Upledger course CST Touching the Brain: Stimulating Self-Correction Through the Glial Interface, taught by Tad Wanveer, LMBT, CST-D, we learned that fascia isn’t just one tissue among many. It’s the entire Physical Body: one continuous network connecting every muscle, organ, bone, and blood vessel. That’s why a release in one place can be felt somewhere else entirely.
That holding and waiting is a conversation without words, between my body and yours. As I notice an area of tension, your body acknowledges it, and then your body gets to decide what it wants to do.
Dr. Upledger called this dialoguing with the body. I don’t direct the outcome. I follow.
Inner wisdom
Your body knows more than any of us.
CST grew out of Western medical research, but its spirit leans East. Western medicine diagnoses, then treats what it finds. CST starts from a different place: your body has its own wisdom about how it works and what it needs.
Your body is the living embodiment of homeostasis, the constant work of staying in balance. Its purpose is to keep you alive. If you’re reading this, it’s doing its job to the best of its ability.
Doctors and practitioners still matter. My point is simply that healing works best when we listen to the body instead of overriding it.
How the body compensates
If you were born with an imbalance, or injured at birth or at any point in your life, your body balances itself around that injury to keep you functioning. If it can’t fully release the injury, it creates a compensation pattern.
That pattern means your body works a little harder every day. You may not even notice, because it’s doing such a good job.
Life brings more experiences and more injuries, and your body keeps adapting. Eventually it can’t keep up with the extra workload, and you start to notice: pain, fatigue, a sense that something is out of balance. That’s your body asking for help. Something about the way you’re living isn’t working for it anymore.
The 4 Bodies
Balance isn’t only physical.
Your body isn’t just balancing your Physical Body. It’s also balancing your Emotional, Mental, and Spiritual Bodies, all occupying the same space and all communicating with you at once. When one is pulled off center, the others feel it too.
Physical Body
Your fascia, tissues, and nervous system, and the patterns they hold. It’s always anchored in the Present Moment.
Emotional Body
The charge you feel before any meaning is attached: a jolt, a rush, a heaviness. Your gut instincts live here too. Its balance is neutrality, not numbness.
Mental Body
Your thoughts, beliefs, and expectations. It names what you feel, helps you navigate the world, and can pick up other people’s scripts without you noticing.
Spiritual Body
Your awareness. It’s the part of you that steps out of the Present Moment: daydreaming, zoning out, checking out mid-conversation.
How they work together: an example
Say you’re anticipating a confrontation with someone, or you’ve had one and keep thinking about it. That replaying is your Mental Body at work.
As the scene loops, you feel a charge building. That raw charge is your Emotional Body. Your Mental Body puts a name on it: anger.
If you can’t let it go, your Physical Body joins in. Your sympathetic nervous system switches on fight, flight, or freeze, as if the confrontation were happening right now.
And your Spiritual Body? Caught in the replay, you’re not fully here. You zone out on your commute or lose the thread of a conversation. Your awareness has stepped out of the Present Moment. Your Physical Body can’t leave with it. It stays right here and counterbalances, holding the strain in its fascia and tissue.
Fight, flight, or freeze is designed to get you out of danger, not to stay on all the time. When it doesn’t switch off, your ability to rest fades, and over time it wears down all 4 Bodies. Sometimes checking out or falling asleep is simply your body insisting on the rest it needs.
On the table, I often feel that strain in the tissues under my hands. The light touch of CranioSacral Therapy gives your body a chance to calm the overload and shift into the parasympathetic state: rest and digest.
Trust
It’s all about trust.
To reach that rest-and-digest state, you have to relax, and relaxation can’t be forced. That’s why I talk about trust with every new client.
When we first meet, we have enough mental trust for the appointment to happen. Physical and emotional trust aren’t there yet, and they shouldn’t be. We don’t know each other. That’s normal.
Trust builds over time. The deeper the trauma, the more time it may take for those areas to release. The first step is simply your first session.
Between sessions
Working with the 4 Bodies on your own
The 4 Bodies are also the heart of 4Q Boundaries, the program I created to help people notice what’s theirs, let go of what isn’t, and protect their personal space. If you’d like to practice between sessions, the first tool is free.
4QBoundaries.com
Stop thinking about it.
You don’t need to understand anything on this page. Come in and have a physical experience. It’s the only way to know what CranioSacral Therapy can offer you.