A Craniosacral Practitioner We Love: Bronwen Williams
The posts on this blog are based on my personal experience and are not medical advice.
Continuing our series on concussion recovery strategies, here's the third craniosacral practitioner we love:
Like myself, Bronwen Williams started her practice after experiencing trauma and injury. Her work is based on healing arts, shamanism, and yoga philosophy and her practice includes craniosacral therapy and bodywork. Here's what she had to say about the positive health effects of craniosacral therapy:
Although CranioSacral Therapy comes under the banner of “Bodywork” it is actually quite different from most bodywork modalities. Coming from the Osteopathic field, Visionary CranioSacral practitioners are working with the Osteopathic philosophy that the body has an internal intelligence and drive toward healing. We are assistants to the body's own healing intelligence. It takes great mental concentration and focus to feel, follow and listen to the tissue, bone or fluid. Our fingers are listening, feeling, thinking devices that respond and react to information provided by the body. Visionary CranioSacral Practitioners are also using other perceptive skills to gain information. Those perceptions are empathic skills, physic skills, listening from the heart, inner ear or seeing with the inner eye. In comparison, massage and bodywork are practices that are working from the outside, in. During a massage and bodywork session the practitioner is working with the skin, connective tissue (fascia) and muscle to retrain, re balance and, in some cases, remold in order to relieve muscles, nerve and ligaments that may be in trauma or causing pain or discomfort. CranioSacral work is working from the inside, out. During a CranioSacral session the practitioner is working with spinal fluid, blood and bone to relieve trauma held in the tissue. Visionary practitioners will also be working with the clients spiritual journey.
CranioSacral work is especially helpful for head injuries where the brain has been impacted by a force and ricocheted against the skull. The practitioner very gently and lightly re calibrates the brain (which is buoyant in spinal fluid) and helps to reestablish a flow of spinal fluid around the brain and down the spinal cord. Helping the body to re balance and heal.
I believe that my path of working for many years, first as a yoga teacher, and then as a massage therapist, has helped me in practicing Visionary CranioSacral therapy. A good understanding of anatomy, touch and nature of the mind have been extremely helpful in my practice.