Come in rested, available, and prepared to drop into the stillness within your core self. The session is about reconnecting deeply with your source - your heart of stillness - and letting it inform you. During the session you will be invited to descend from your head into your body, and then to rest in your heart and sense from there.

Depending on your needs, your practitioner may teach you whole-body breathing; she may give you a practice on how to abide in your midline, which is the core of your body; or, if you have received many sessions, she may tell you how to give yourself a session.

While resting in your heart stillness, you may encounter memories, emotional issues, thoughts, feelings, and spiritual insights. When they arise, understand that these are the exact aspects of yourself that consciousness has chosen to bring to your awareness, and by remaining neutrally present to them, these separated parts will rejoin the wholeness that you are. See if you can allow whatever arises just to be here as it is. If something feels too intense, let your practitioner know, so she can modulate her contact to help you be with any aspect of yourself in a relaxed manner.

After the session, take an unhurried walk before going back to your normal routine. Over the next week, see if you can remain mindful of the felt sense of the session-the quality of the atmosphere in the room and in your body-you can recall it by recalling the feeling-tone that you sensed at the end of the session, which your practitioner will point out to you. You might try to imagine yourself on the table at the end of the session to help bring up the felt memory again.

To maintain your felt contact with the unfolding of your bodily expression into the depths of Self, you may continue the practices you were given (whole body breathing, resting in the heart, midline practice, or giving yourself a session).

These sessions are about reorienting to the health within you and remaining in direct felt contact with its expressions in your body.

Ego naturally resists the Breath of Life because it places you in direct bodily contact with wholeness.

You may notice right after the session how calm, centered, embodied, and how deeply you feel your real Self. However, this is threatening to the personality structure, so subtle stories may arise from your thinking mind that, if you are not mindful of the ego's strategy, will distract you from the remembrance of this direct contact with yourself. Furthermore, you might experience intensified feelings that have long been repressed-anger, grief, fear, self-loathing, insufficiency, and so on.

In this case, the bad news is good, because these repressed energies are being liberated by the Breath of Life-yet it is often not comfortable to encounter these aspects of yourself. If you need support, ask your practitioner to assist you in discerning if this is a natural response on behalf of the ego when it directly contacts wholeness, or non-separation, which is the very opposite of what it "thinks" its job is (maintaining a separate sense of a self). It may also behoove you to receive council from a body-centered therapist. To restore a dynamic balance of healthy function; to appropriately respond with vitality to immune challenges and stressful experiences, and to reconnect to that which evolves our consciousness. Nutritional deficiency, toxic exposure, prolonged stress, and traumatic incidents (accidents; childhood trauma, parental abandonment, abuse; death of loved ones, divorce, moving a home, fearful threat) brain injury-all have the capacity to create permanent impressions upon the nervous system. Based on the clinical experience of thousands of osteopathic physicians, naturopaths, and bodyworkers over the last 50 years, the craniosacral pulsation is the organizing force behind the function of our nervous system. So, anything that disrupts the harmonious flow of the craniosacral system has the potential to affect the functioning of our bodies. Headaches; low-grade anxiety; the vague feeling that "something's wrong" or "missing"; low energy; sleep disturbances; recurring colds, rashes, and low grade infections; lack of mental clarity; dizziness upon standing (also a sign of adrenal stress); digestive difficulties; depression; TMJ problems; mysterious body pains; generalized muscle tension; inability to relax; a compulsion to always be on the go, inability to be still.

Our cultural environment can contribute to feeling the effects of sympathetic hyper-arousal, or feeling "stressed out." The speed with which an automobile travels, the number of images flashing on the TV screen, the constant invisible barrage of electrical and magnetic signals from cell phones and wireless internet, our consumption of caffeinated drinks and alcohol, perceptually operating exclusively from the brain rather than the heart-all contribute to the "hurry, worry, overwork" compulsive pressure of our cultural context.

One difference between Biodynamic Cranial Touch Work and craniosacral therapy is in the goal. Generally, the end goal of craniosacral therapy is health-related; to restore balance between the sympathetic fight/flight side of the nervous system and the parasympathetic nurturing side. It is our ability to access the nurturing side of the system that enables us to heal and repair tissue, build immunity, and restore healthy function throughout the body. That is the end function of craniosacral therapy; however, it is the beginning of Biodynamic Cranial Touch, which includes building our health, yet it also revolves around the evolution of consciousness. In 3 sessions you can expect to access "neutral," which begins when the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system are in balance. As the neutral deepens, the craniosacral system becomes available to the effects of the healthy motion of "primary respiration," which is the organizing healthy pulsatory pattern of the craniosacral system. Beyond neutral, in 4 to 6 sessions, your body acclimates to a direct connection with primary respiration, which reorganizes the stuck patterns that have inhibited our healing resources and restores them to health. Accessing primary respiration creates whole-body readjustments with repercussions into all levels of metabolism, function, and nourishment. It distributes harmonious information that breaks up patterns of fixation throughout the musculoskeletal, immune, and neurological systems, affecting the cellular level of metabolism and growth. An uninjured, "normal" person with average stress problems will reach high functioning in 4 to 6 sessions. A highly stressed person can expect to need 6 plus sessions. And, in the case of moderate to severe trauma, ongoing work will support your system until it stabilizes. Modified from: STILLNESS: Biodynamic Cranial Practice and the Evolution of Consciousness, Charles Ridley, North Atlantic Books: 2006 Neutral is a state, or disposition, that occurs after you relax into your body in a receptive state of equanimity. When your bodily relaxation deepens into stillness, it decreases the brain's vigilance and calms the stress fight-or-flight reflex; meanwhile, the separate, non-coherent, disjointed parts of your body will quiet until you sense a seamless, whole-body, fluid motion throughout the bodymind that feels as though it is floating in stillness. After you have sufficiently acclimated to your felt-sense of bodymind union, or wholeness, you may sense a healing presence that gently ebbs and flows in graceful, delicate waves that feel like breathing, but it is your whole body that breathes. This ebb and flow is primary respiration, which transcends, yet synchronizes with the breathing of your lungs so you feel as if you are breathing as a whole body. You may feel as if your bones, tissues, muscles, and organs merge and become one unified, sensuous protoplasmic flow. This subtle, breathing presence is the "wisdom of the body" that reconnects the parts and unites your bodymind into one whole unit. When you directly contact primary respiration, and you feel your fluid body breathing in this sensuous manner, you may say something like "I feel connected to my body, I am whole, and my heart feels intimately connected to life. I am myself again." Resting in neutral quiets the addictive physiological noise of the ego (inner buzz, rapid vibrations, and "static" in the body, and a sense of inner compulsion to "do," coupled with an inability to be still) that is created by stress. While the stress patterns are settling, your body connects and synchronizes with the ebb and flow of the sensuous motion of primary respiration. This emanates a resonating field of healthy motion that gently entrains your body's metabolic fields, which are caught up in the stuck patterns of fight or flight. This entrainment gradually unlocks the repeating stress patterns, and rearranges the submicroscopic nutritional substances, returning them to balanced, free-flowing homeostasis. Primary respiration changes these metabolic fields, rich in "ground substance," from an stress-induced gel, which moves in stuck, staccato patterns (inertial) that give us the bodily sense of "buzz," into a free-flowing liquid that accurately reflects the sensuous motion of health. The resulting healthy motion restores the original function, shape, and position to the cells, organs, and structures of your body. This restoration will increase nutritive function; raise energy levels; open blocked acupuncture meridians; promote mental clarity; strengthen immune function; balance the cardiovascular, nerve, and hormone systems; and more importantly, increase the coherent function of your heart. Ground substance, the ocean in which your 50 trillion cells float, provides direct contact between the rhythms of life and your bodymind. Ground substance is a liquid, connective tissue substance that is around and between all cells. Its job is to transport nutrition into, and waste removal out of, the cells, and ground substance is the medium for healthy communication between the immune, vascular, neurological, and hormonal functions. A living matrix, it is comprised of metabolic fields that behave like a liquid crystal through which your whole body intercommunicates with life. It responds like a mirror or photographic plate; ground substance is remodeled within minutes when exposed to very weak signals of stress. So, even if only one infinitesimal part of a cell is subject to stress, the entire cell acts as a coherent whole. Since each cell is coherent with all other cells, via ground substance, any change in one cell affects all the cells in the whole body. Stress initiates a protective vascular, neural, hormonal, and immune response that contracts the ground substance, turning it into a rigid gel, which impedes the flow of primary respiration. This rigid, staccato, inertial motion alters the transfer of information that is vital for healthy cell function. Conversely, when immersed in a neutral, the gel-like ground substance reverts to a free-flowing liquid that accurately mirrors the motion of primary respiration, which promotes coherent healthy function. As you relax in neutral, you can sense the fluidic ebb and flow of primary respiration throughout your whole body, strengthening your heart's electromagnetic field, which amplifies its ability to maintain bodily coherence. As the potency of your heart field is restored, it reawakens an ancient capacity of your heart as an organ of perception that operates as your body-felt sense. Your heart is a multidimensional organ that is central to every aspect of your functioning - physical, psychic, and spiritual. Your heart is not only the organ that moves the blood; it is a non-linear electromagnetic generator that emanates a holographic field containing encoded information about how your body is formed-its history, present function, and future evolutionary imperative. The heart, as an endocrine gland, releases hormones that regulate bodily function; the heart produces neurotransmitters that synchronize the central, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems; and the heart has its own nervous system-over half of the heart fibers are neural-that interconnects the entire somatic system of your body directly to the brain, both to the newer frontal cortex and the older limbic system. The heart senses electromagnetic waves that emanate from as far out as infinity, as well as the quantum particles comprising each cell in your body: the heart is an organ of perception that coherently maintains balance both with the universal holographic matrix and the depths of your personal bodily matrix. The heart receives, processes, and responds to a complex series of holographic, electromagnetic patterns, signals that contain encoded information-hormonal, neurotransmitter, immune, bioelectric, magnetic, and chemical messages-as well as information about temperature, blood pressure, and blood flow to the brain. Throughout the body as one unit, it monitors and adjusts the status of your body's physiology and synchronizes it with the environment and with the internal milieu. This includes assisting the passage of red blood cells through the tiny capillaries by decreasing the diameter of the red blood cells, while, at the same time, increasing the diameter of the capillaries in a whole-body, rhythmic dance that defies understanding. All these varied functions of the heart combine to maintain coherent function and health, which sets the tone for the way you think and how well, and what and how you feel, which cumulatively determines the quality of your consciousness. In short, your heart is an organ of perception that conducts the symphony that is your life.