What is BCST
BSCT is a gentle therapy using a light touch to support your body’s innate ability to balance, restore and heal itself, reduce stress and build energy. With a trained touch, Maureen, the therapist, engages with the expression of health in your body. She listens to the rhythm and flow, along with patterns of holding and congestion in the tissues that may be from recent or long past experiences. This quality of attention and touch can support your body to reset and integrate body and mind to its optimal state of health and connection.
The nervous system can be supported to help it regulate itself, resolving conditions that have resulted from held patterns, stress and trauma. The therapeutic presence can bring a feeling of being acknowledged and a sense of safety. When there's a sense of safety, the brain is more able to switch from fight or flight to rest and repair. In this state, the body’s natural orientation to heal and balance can activate to its fullest, reducing held patterns and stress and allowing change to take place.
This therapy uses a ‘biodynamic’ approach, meaning that the therapy is led by the client and works with the body’s own intelligence to heal and self-repair. Your system sets the pace at which changes and adjustments take place and what your body needs to balance or address at that moment. The underlying principal is that health is always present and our body intelligence will seek to optimise and balance this health.
BCST is derived from the latter work of William Garner Sutherland, the founder of Cranial Osteopathy. His orientation was to the deeper forces forming us, the forces that interact to create symptoms or tissue patterns - headaches, back pain, anxiety, depression, low energy etc.
Support with pain
BCST can support a sense of safety and a letting go of tension and fear which, in turn, allows the experience of pain to change.
Scientific research into pain and neuroplasticity informs us of how pain is created and continued in the nervous system, how it can become chronic, and how it can change when addressing the fight or flight response. There is great value in understanding this and allowing a greater sense of safety for reducing pain.
Support with trauma
When experiences are too overwhelming to cope with, they can stay locked in your body in a state of fight or flight or freeze. Whilst these states may initially be a healthy response, if they continue past the period needed, they can lead to dissociation, stress or hyper-vigilance and develop into illness and disease. Clients have reported BSCT to be very helpful in gently and safely supporting the resolving of shock and held experiences.
What to expect
On the first visit, you will be asked about your health history, how you are right, and what concerns you may have. Then you will lie down or, if you prefer, sit. Maureen will make contact, gently touching your feet, head, base of your spine or other areas, and listening to your body. Her trained sense can notice contractions or restrictions held in the tissues and fluids of the body as well as the body's flow, potency and health. The body functions as a whole, so it may be that at times Maureen focuses on areas other than where your symptoms show.
The treatment is conducted fully clothed and a session generally lasts an hour.
How it may feel
Clients report feelings of release, movements, adjustments, changes in temperature, and, very commonly, a deep sense of relaxation or relief, ease, clarity or peace.
After a session, you may notice adjustments or changes continuing for a few days. This is part of the healing process. The session may have worked at a very deep level, releasing and integrating very old or early patterns, so it is good to be mindful of what and how you are feeling. Maureen really welcomes you to check in with her regarding how you are doing both during and after the treatment.
This video link shows how a treatment might be and how people have experienced it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-mLstQUKQ0
Background & development
BCST has its roots in osteopathy, developing out of the work of Dr William Sutherland, an important figure in cranial osteopath, working with the rhythm within the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) that expresses our health and bathes the nervous system. This work has been developed further to include influences from neuroscience, human development, pre & perinatal psychology, and trauma resolution.
For more information
To find out more about the therapy, look at the website of the professional body PACT, Pacific Association of Craniosacral Therapists.
The ‘resources’ section has helpful videos.
https://www.biodynamic-craniosacral.com/
