Healing Crisis - Lessons from the Sessions, Chapter 5
One of the best parts of advanced cranial work as taught by the UI is that the training requires you to do your own work. It is with the help of others who are learning and willing to do their own work, that each of us has an opportunity to look at ourselves from different angles offered by the gentle urgings of the CS rhythm. Having said that, it is our decision and ours alone to look or not to look, at what our bodies are showing us.
I was reminded by a patient today about healing crisis. It refreshed memories of my own healing crisis and essentially the healing that took place because of it.
In my case, I was working as a physical therapist director of rehab services in a small hospital, part–time home care therapist, columnist for a local newspaper, school board member, volunteer fireman, sheep farmer, husband and father. To say I was unable to recognize that my life was too hectic was an understatement. So my body tried to help me.
In order for me to see the light, my body gave me a healing crisis. First, I came down with gallbladder disease. So I said, “okay, take it out and I’ll stay home a couple weeks, but then I gotta get back to business.” I went back to my schedule and came down with mononucleosis. “Okay”, I said, “I’ll rest a couple of weeks, but then I gotta get back to work. “I’ve got places to go and people to see.”
Then my body became more impatient. I came down with pneumonia, and I couldn’t breath. My body was telling me I had to change or go home. No amount of medication or medical intervention in the past twelve months could persuade my body to stop getting my attention. By the way, the pneumonia caused me to cancel a scheduled continuing education course on fascial release work. If someone were to look at my life back in 1987, they would have seen a very successful, committed, highly functioning, individual who was taking part in his community and prospering. But the fact is, that life was killing me.
So, I finally realized that I had to alter my life. I was doing too much, moving too fast, and not taking time to balance my life with work, rest, and play. My wonderful body wouldn’t stop until I learned this lesson. It needed the length of
time it took to break me down. My recovery from pneumonia also coincided with the next available class of fascial release work in my area. The year was 1987,
and it was sponsored by an institute I hadn’t heard of before. It was the Upledger Institute. So began the process of my healing that forced me to rise out of three
health crisises to redirect my life. I now know that moving from my very data base, high stress institutional setting to having a small CranioSacral practice in an old farm house brought me full circle. Had rapid recovery from my physical problems been achieved with medications, I might not have had the time I needed to process the stress factors in my life, nor discover my passion for the work known as CST.
The lesson from the session here is, it’s okay if all of your patients don’t have immediate positive response to your treatment. They may be in a healing crisis. Their bodies may need you (the therapist) to be unsuccessful in order to allow the patient more time to process the issues of their life. Pain may be a gift from the body encouraging them to change. If we never knew pain, how would we
know pleasure? If we never learned bad, how could we recognize good? If we didn’t have night, how could we know the absence of darkness is day? How arrogant are we that we think we know what releases need to be released and what emotion needs to be emoted for the greatest good of the patient, and at what time and place this is to occur??
Sometimes the very best we can be; is present. The best we can do; is listen with our hands and facilitate the body to do what it needs to do for the patient. It is well to realize that sometimes the best thing we can do for the patient is nothing. Wish them a happy life and move on. In other words, being of no help may be exactly what the patient needs at this time.
As we interact in each other’s life, it serves us to realize we can only know that we are somewhere along the patients’ path of life. Whether we are on the path or at the crossroads is the great mystery that can only happen when we observe the present moment. Sometimes it is our role to encourage the body to show the person the beginning or the end of their path. It is the young expectant mothers’ healing crisis that causes her cervix to finally give way and the uterus reach a threshold which begins contractions in an effort to expel the fetus. Sometimes it is the fetus who has a hesitancy to come out of their place of comfort and shelter.
As a P.T. specializing in CST I occasionally am asked to try CST on an infant considered hopeless. These young souls all have great trouble in landing here on Earth. I consider them great teachers, considering the fact that most of them are less than 6 months old and already they have confounded the greatest medical centers in the world by their very survival.
I held one little man expected to die in the first week of life. He was born with severe anoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) after a 40hr. home delivery. He required oral suction every 20 minutes. I held him at 9 weeks old. He came to a still point, arched his back, and moaned for 20 minutes. His moan was a heartache and sorrow for his circumstances. He moaned like an old woman that had just lost a son in the war. It came from his solar plexus. His lips puckered, his brow furrowed, his fists clenched, and his little body stiffened. He moaned for his circumstance and then for his right to exist. All of us in the room (mom, other therapist, and myself) felt a chill in our spines as he voiced his healing crisis. He is now 11/2 years old, moving all fours. His eyes track. He laughs. He coos. And who’s to say he shouldn’t live and continue to teach us that life is precious.
Sometimes a healing crisis is the entrance to our exit here on Earth. As it relates to transition, a healing crisis sometimes is the most moving event to allow the notion of death to descend on the person. You know when there is no more life left to live, death (or transition to another existence) is a wonderful alternative to lingering, suffering, and progressive loss of function. When a person is worn down by age or infirmity and fatigued by sleeplessness and exhausted by struggling for breath, there is a gentle curtain that descends and the person quietly resigns. Struggle stops, pain, and the grimacing face subsides and softens. The mind moves from conflict to acceptance and vision seems to transcend physical space. Often the person in process sees beyond this physicality and describes the great mystery beyond as bright, warm, and pleasant, with friendly loving faces awaiting.
The healing crisis is the catalyst for awareness shift, in that the stimulation doesn’t quit, until the patient does, and then there is calm, peace, and transition. And from personal, first hand witness experience, I can tell you, after the last breath, and the heart stops, the last physically perceivable movement in the entire body is the cranial rhythm that trails off to a whisper and is gone.
The Chinese express crisis with 2 symbols, one for danger, and one for opportunity. Another lesson from the session here is, we are charged as CST therapists to stand with the patient in the perceived moment of risk and watch for the opportunity to understand and experience this life. Ours is not to know if they are coming or going, only that it is sacred.