CST for post spinal surgery

This summer at Craniosacral-East

This summer brought some very interesting clients into my office. The most technically interesting was a young Croatian man coming in with a Chiara (or Kiari) malformation in his spine.

This means he'd had a malformation of the bone making up the bottom part of his skull right at the spinal cord entrance to the cranium (the Foramen Magnum). This bone malformation most likely occurred when he was an early embryo or infant and caused a bubble of spinal fluid, a Syringomyelia, to slowly develop within his spinal cord instead of surrounding it.

Notice on the right side image above there is a blue bubble of spinal fluid creating pressure within the spinal cord. As you can imagine, this created pressure and affected his nervous system. He'd been experience strong shooting pains in odd places in his body due to the pressure. When it was finally diagnosed in his 20's the doctors recommended he have it surgically fixed. So he did.

However, some of the pains returned following the surgery, including burning sensations around the back of his head, exhaustion, loss of balance, and a real sense of defeat in his medical circumstances. Physical activities had been reduced, some days he could not really leave his apartment. Many of these symptoms were the exact ones the doctors had hoped would be fixed by the corrective surgery.

So he came to me quite a few months post surgery with the mentioned symptoms. As a part of his assessment, I noticed his occiput (the lowest part of the cranium where the malformation had been) and his brain stem had a lot of tension. Also the dural sheath around the inside of his skull and along inside of the upper spinal canal was very taught.

One day while talking before the session as we usually did, I noticed that the feeling of the tension in his head and brain stem in particular, was similar to the pressure I felt in the room while we were talking before the session.

He had a very strong need to be thoroughly understood. I instantly felt that we might have an opportunity to release the whole system if he could feel this similarity and start to help reduce it simply through awareness. He was a bright and self aware person so I shared the observation and he immediately recognized that how he might be recreating some of his own tensions with his own urgency.

We started working together to notice during our pre-table talk time moments when he felt really easily connected to his body, compared to other moments when he'd get into very intelligent, yet stressful discussion. We developed a freer energetic and physical awareness of the tension created just by thought and communication.

Working anywhere near his head, at first, even with the lightest contact could cause an outbreak of burning sensation afterwards. Just as a note, working with anyone in this condition has to be done with the utmost of caution as there's actually more space with the malformatin for the brain to fall down the through the spinal canal. That's a gross over simplification but don't ever try an Upledger style occipital release on someone with one. The hard part for me was he wanted relief of the pressure and pain in his head so much, it was hard to set up a really spacious biodynamic approach to his head. He'd ask for me to somehow find a way to work on it. But the fix it approach never helped him for a second due to the burning response he experienced so we tried the more spacious approach I'd been suggesting.

We made a plan that I would only make contact with his head for a few minutes in the middle of the session, sometimes not even touching his head. He suggested he lie on the side for some of the session which took pressure off the back of his head where most of his pain was. The benefit of our more spacious approach was he left the sessions feeling fine, and holding onto the releases that had happened. His hope about the process improved immensely.

During the sessions, I used Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, exclusively with him. This entails connecting to the fluidity of his body, specifically in his case, the fluidity of the spinal fluid moving around his spinal cord and brain.

By doing this, we could work just as easily to improve the flow of spinal fluid from his sacrum (the base of the spine) as we could from his head. We would work on his head only a little and then more and more as his tissues softened. On the image to the right you can see where the spine enters the brain, there is a little brown colored cistern between the brain stem in front and the cerebellum behind. This is the fourth ventricle where Cerebrospinal fluid collects and flows. By helping this system come to stillness, at also has the ability to soften the brain stem in front of it. I would stay sometimes for 20 minutes at his sacrum visualizing how the spinal fluid moved through the spinal canal and around his brain.

Sometimes he would go to a very deep state of relaxation, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is known for. They call it stillness. Early Osteopaths had a near religious respect for the body's self healing ability when it entered a state of stillness.

After 6 or 7 closely spaced sessions, he experienced a greater freedom from his pains than he'd had since before the operation. He no longer felt burning after the sessions. His head, instead of repelling my hands, invited me to work and help the dural tissue around his occiput. He's been able to cut down his sessions, and found that his own awareness of his mental state has allowed himself to reduce the pains and tensions he experiences. As of now he comes in as needed. It feels like this work really helped his own body self correct and continue to return to equilibrium so the state of balance has been lasting.