I try to get on a craniosacral table every two weeks or so. I love what it does for my body and nervous system and I find my work is more refined and deeper if I am keeping on top of my own system. A couple of weeks ago I had one of those magical sessions where you feel like a miracle has occurred.
I have been having a right hip problem for a while now; a chronic niggle that I’ve been ignoring so I could pretend that running wasn’t bad for me. A few months ago I woke up and the hip was too sore to run. This time it was speaking loud enough so that I would have to take it seriously. My first strategy was a good deep glute stretch. Not a good idea. The right hip was extremely tight and didn’t want to externally rotate. My hip flexibility has always been good though, so I thought I would just take it slow. With patience and breath, I moved into the full stretch, a bit of pain, but nothing too drastic. I was even hopeful that it might help put it back into place. It didn’t.
By that afternoon I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t lift my leg and I was limping terribly. The pain was severe. It felt like the bone was out of place and the more dramatic side of me was convinced I had dislocated it. That night I didn’t sleep. Rolling over in bed was impossibly difficult and painful. The next day the pain had escalated so much that it was making me feel nauseated. I am not a drug or doctor’s type of person but that day found me at the pharmacy looking for the strongest anti-inflammatory available. The drug helped, a little, but the pain was still there and I was still limping.
It was four days before I could get on a cranio table. When I laid back with the pillows under my knees I was sceptical that the session would be able to help. Even my friend, the craniosacral therapist who was working on me, said, ‘This is going to be a process Sarah.’
She released my sacrum, my hips, my sacroiliac joints and the dural tube in the sacral and lumber region. Then she unwound my right hip. The theory with the unwinding process is that the practitioner takes all of the weight of the effected limb and then allows it to move in whatever direction it needs to, to unwind the trauma it has experienced. My friend was unaware of how I had overstretched my glute, forcing my hip into an extension it wasn’t comfortable with. Immediately though she bent my knee and started taking my leg back towards the position it had been in when the severe injury had occurred. Slowly and gently with lots of small circles, bending and lengthening, she extended my hip flexion until it was almost exactly back to the place where I had injured it, this time though without any pain or restriction.
After the unwinding was complete. I started telling my friend how I thought there was an emotional issue stored in there. We talked about what was going on in my world and she said to me, ‘It sounds like you want to kick someone.’ And that was it! That was the truth of it, the epicentre of the injury.
The healing after that was as if by magic. The next day the hip was seventy percent better, my limp was gone. It continued to improve, to the point where the chronic niggle I had been dealing with for months is no longer there and the flexibility is better than before I hurt it.
The combination of the unwinding and emotional identification of the problem can sometimes help a restriction or trauma to disappear, as if by magic. It is truly one of the humblest and beautiful places to work, the craniosacral space. If you’ve got an injury or restriction that you think might benefit from being unwound make an appointment and we will see what sort of magic we can conjure up.