It’s deep listening.
In our culture, we almost never listen to our bodies because our brains are in charge. In the CST world, we believe our bodies know things and will nudge us to get our attention. If we ignore the nudge, it gets louder. Pain is a nudge. Our bodies are saying, “Stop ignoring me. I’ve got something important to tell you.”
I can listen to your body rhythms and let your body speak its truth while your brain is off on vacation for a bit.
True story: a woman came in with a finger so swollen she could hardly bend it. This was interfering with her computer use at work and was painful. We listened to the subtle rhythms in her finger, and the woman started remembering that months earlier, she had canceled a trip to her favorite vacation spot to take care of a work crisis. Her finger was rebelling against that bad decision.
True story: a woman had low back pain for years. The rhythms in her low back were not happy, and during the work, she started feeling that her back was a tight spring. The spring was very old and had protected her when she was a child in a bad situation. She told the spring how much she valued its protection and asked what job upgrade it wanted now that the danger was past. Her back pain went away.
More weird stuff:
Energy cysts. We believe that remnants of trauma can be stored in our bodies and attached to connective tissue (we don’t know why). Let’s say a ball hits you. Sometimes, not all the energy of that impact gets dissipated as movement or heat or whatever. Sometimes, a little bit of energy can stay in the tissue. The body surrounds the foreign energy, shrinks it, and stores it somewhere. Now it has to work around the ball of chaos. We find that when connective tissue starts unwinding, it can release that stored energy and let your body work how it wants to, without the roadblock.
I didn’t believe it, either, when I first heard about it. I thought the teachers were pulling my leg. But it’s real: we can find energy cysts, and when they release, they emit a burst of heat, or cold, or buzzing, or coughing, or a sort of wasabi-like whoosh.
True story: A guy came to me with a painful knee after a bicycle accident. He said he had to bike with one leg because the other leg hurt too much to use force. I worked on his knee’s connective tissue, releasing many strong energy cysts. The next day, his knee felt better, and he could ride with both legs.
We can get as weird as you want. If you want to call in saints or angels or ancestors or guardian spirits to help with the work, I’m fine with that. If you want to meditate on the table or do shamanic journeying, you’ll find that the “cranio trance” will help.
There’s just something cool and life-on-the-border about CST. It can be a powerful way to heal.