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Massage Demonstration Cranial Sacral Therapy
>>ATHENA: Hello. My name is Athena Jezik
and I am a Licensed Massage Therapist
in the state of Texas
and I'm also a cranial sacral therapist.
Today we're going to explain to you a little bit
about what cranial sacral therapy is
and offer you a little demonstration.
Cranial sacral therapy works with the cranium
which is the head, with the skull bones,
all the different skull bones,
and the sacrum which is at the other end
of the base of spine.
The sacrum.
The two work together through a tube
that goes between the two of them
and we influence that structure.
So, how this works is
the different colors that you see here
are different bones of the head.
There are some inside the mouth.
This particular skull is falling apart
so he's slippery on the top.
Now where these bones change colors,
those are called sutures
and the sutures do not fuse together.
They stay mobile throughout your life
contrary to what has been taught
in a number of anatomy classes.
And these sutures expand
as fluid comes up through the membrane
and the contract as the fluid
disappears out of the membrane.
That's called the cerebral spinal fluid.
So the work is done by placing hands
on different positions of these bones
and it's a five gram pressure,
which is the weight of a nickel,
onto the different skull bones
holding them in place.
As the cerebral spinal fluid fills up
you can feel an expansion take place.
It there's been a trauma to the body
the bones are going to move in tilted manner.
They are not going to move straight on each other;
They are going to be out of alignment.
So by holding a five gram pressure,
as it expands,
the bones at the suture points
are able to find their way back
to the proper alignment,
or the position they are supposed to be in.
So the float on top of this membrane
and they find their way back
to the proper position.
That's basically how cranial sacral therapy
is working at the physical level.
You may ask why we would want
to do this type of therapy.
Well the therapy was origially designed
to deal with spinal column and head trauma;
any kind of trauma to the spinal column
or the head.
What had been discovered
after they worked on that with people
was that it took care of a lot of other issues.
It took care of pain in the back,
it took care of hip pain,
it took care of emotional problems, ADHD,
it helped with headaches,
restrictions of the neck and shoulders.
It began to, turned out to be
a very valuable therapy.
So that's why we want to do it,
because it relaxes the body down
and allows for self, correction to occur
along the core of the body,
which is along the spinal column.
So here, what we're doing first here is
we are doing what's called
a cranial base release.
We are at the base of the cranium
which is called the occiput,
right near where the spinal column is
and we're releasing the structures
the tissue between the occiput and C1,
the altas.
Right in that space between there.
So by doing that we place our fingers
in that space right there
and feel for it to be
right on the edge of the skull bone.
Lift the head up and balance it
on top of your fingers like a pedastal
and just wait for the tissue to soften.
The head tilts backwards
and the soft tissue is released.
There's a nice feeling of relaxation
as that begins to occur.
Next we're working on the frontal bone.
The frontal bone is this blue bone here
and the hand position is
across the top of the forehead
hooking into the edges of the brow.
With that, the hands, five grams of pressure are put
on the skull bones there
and there's a lifting action
where we feel like we are lifting the bone
upward and forward.
Just follow that bone up and it begins to
release along the suture lines, as it's lifing
it begins to release
and rotate slightly, and lift and rotate slightly
It's very small movements but it's very significant.
And that's what we're doing here,
we're lifing the frontal bone.
As this begins to lift,
people begin to fall deeper into a state of relaxation,
that's deep state of relaxation.
Their thoughts begin to move like a movie camera.
It just moves like a movie.
You are encouraged not to pull thoughts into their mind
or push them out,
but just let them roll past
so the relaxation can go deeper.
Often times there is sensation in other parts
of the body that they're focusing on,
and then different thoughts might come through the head.
But overall, the general is the people begin to relax
and begin to fall into a deeper state
of relazation and consciousness.
The next bone is the parietal bone, which is the green bone here.
We disconnect it from down here on the temporal bone
and how that is done is the hands are place on the sides of it
and there's an inward squeeze so that it can open up the space
at the temporal bone, so it opens up this space here
with an inward kind of squeeze.
Once we feel that there is some kind of
mobility in the suture
there's an upward pull to lift those bones upward,
so lifting those up toward the crown of the head
and as that lifts it opens up more of a space
with the occiput as well as the frontal bone
and also the temporal bone.
So the purple, the blue and the pink bone
are all separating in that space
as well as the a little bit of the sphenoid bone.
The next bone is the most significant bone
of this work in my opinion
and that is the sphenoid bone, and that is the yellow bone,
you can see it from the inside of the skull.
The pituitary sits right in the middle there
and underneath it also extends into the mouth.
It's a very significant bone.
Here where the purple and the yellow come together
is called the sphenobasular junction.
Here's what that looks like with just the two bones.
It's the occiput, where we did the occipital release
and this is the sphenoid bone
and this is if a person were laying on their back
with their feet coming out towards the camera.
Now the sphenoid bone sits on this,
this is a joint, and as the
cerebral spinal fluid is flowing through this,
this joint moves back and forth.
This is a very key indicator
as to the alignment of the body.
This is the fulcrum, the way we hang on a hanger,
So if we are off kilter any, this is going to have
misalignment at some level.
What we do here at the sphenoid bone is we check
to see the purity of the flexion and extention
then we also take the bone and encourage it
to go into a little bit of a side bend either way
to make sure that's on alignment
and into a little bit of a twarp
(***) INDISCERNABLE
Then we compress it slighlty and decompress it.
Now with Amy here we a had a little bit
of restriction going on, and it took some time
to even get into a flexion extension.
As I discovered later, I had asked her if she
had any head trauma.
She's had some whiplash which has tightened down the membranes
and actually locked this bone into place.
So it's taking a little bit of a while to open this up
and I will be going back to checkinf the flexion extension
to make sure that it stays balanced.
It's a very significant bone
and this is the bone that we want to have
in a nice corrective pattern,
moving back and forth with the occiput
in this type of a rhythm
so that the two bones are balanced
and the cerebral spinal fluid can move with ease
up into around the brain.
And then the last bone is the jaw.
We just pull the jaw slightly upward and then
push it downward and that will just align things.
You can feel all the bones fitting back into a new space
when the jaw begins to release down.
The person on the table finds it relaxing,
their jaw can be relaxed. It relaxes muscles.
And then there's one other little move that we often
times will do, where we are holding into the nasal bones,
lifting up, and that's a good one for opening up the
sinuses and just have a bit more space
coming into the front of the face
because as these other bones are moving
it's nice to open up that space, too,
and the sinuses around the eyes and things like those spaces.
Cranial sacral therapy is something that I would recommend
to everybody who is on a path of healing.
It's a good place to start, in my opinion,
for a lot of work. It's good for anything.
It can address almost anything,
so you just never know what is going to
come out of the work.
I've had people come in for a specific reason
and they've come out completely different
from what they thought they were going to get out of it.
So I would say that the reason you may want
to persue cranial sacral therapy
is just to see what you would get out of it.
You will get something change,
the measure of change, nobody knows.
but you will get a measure of change out of it.
If you are suffering from headaches, vertigo
or neck pain, shoulder pain, whiplashing,
any kind of spinal column injuries,
any kind of chronic pain, anything like that,
this type of work is excellent fot that kind of stuff.
Some of the emotional stuff, often times people
who are getting away from medications will come in
for support with their emotions.
It's a real vast area. It covers a lot.
It's therapy in its application.
So I would just say explore it
and see what you get out of it,
I think you will be quite surprised.
[pause][background voices]
If you would like more information
about where to find the work
you can check, if you live out of the Austin area
you can check with upledger.com
www.upledger.com
you can look it up and find a therapist
and go with a zip code and find somebody in your area
look for somebody who has taken several classes
in cranial sacral work.
If you're in the Austin area and you would like to try
a session from me, you can contact me at my website
www.acranio.com, or get ahold of me at White Crane.
How I got into cranial sacral therapy was
I began my work with massage therapy
and the type of clientele I was getting
was finding that massage therapy wasn't able to
give a lot of real outstanding results
and I got a postcard in the mail and
I thought I'd check them out.
There was something about that first class,
the professionism of it, the type of work,
the way I felt when I got out of it,
the theory behind it, the practice,
It was fantastic, so I began to practice it
to mind control, so, if you liked it
go ahead and click on me to enter
and I found the work brings results
I'd never thought possible,
so for my practice now,
I practice very little massage therapy.
Sometimes I will incorporate it
if there is a problem into the musculature,
but for the most part I practice
Cranial sacral therapy as my main modality.
If you want more information about this work
and you live outside of the Austin area
the best place to go is to the upledger website
www.upledger.com
If you would like more information from me
you can email me at
corehealing@earthlink.net
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