What is Visionary Craniosacral Work?

A visionary is someone who can do four things equally well, and hold all four things as equal in importance. The four are:

• First, they can perceive the entirety of the client's anatomy and physiology.
• Second, can perceive the parts of their anatomy and physiology, and notice which parts have left concert with the whole. ·
• Third, they can perceive the client's inner spiritual journey, emotional state and energy level, and hold no judgment about what they perceive.
• Fourth, they can perceive their own inner spiritual journey, emotional state and energy level, also without judgment.

Craniosacral Work is an evolution out of Cranial Osteopathy, a specialization of the osteopathic profession that was introduced to the world in the 1930s by an American osteopath and visionary called William Garner Sutherland.

Craniosacral work has traditionally focused on the 22 bones that make up the human head, the vertebra and sacrum, and also on the brain, the central nervous system, the cerebrospinal fluid and the system of membranes inside the cranium and spinal column.

Craniosacral therapists often focus upon optimizing the position, fluid movement ('wave') and energy (piezolelectric charge and chi) of these parts of the craniosacral system. Or they may focus on bringing the craniosacral system back to balance in the central line of the body, called 'midline.' Some schools focus on differing wave states, tides, and opening to the arrival of stillness.

The visionary school takes its genesis from a pivotal event in the life of Sutherland.

In 1899 William Sutherland was studying in the first osteopathic school to be set up in the USA. It was founded in 1891 by the man who coined the term 'Osteopathy,' Andrew Taylor Still, in Kirksville, Missouri.

The path of Sutherland's professional development was forever changed by his witnessing of his mentor's gift of perception. Sutherland, the grandfather spirit of craniosacral work, was later to recount it this way:

Still was like the X-ray: He could look right through you and see things, and tell you things, without putting his hands upon the body. I have seen him do that! Time and time again. When some of the early teachers had a clinic up before class, hunting for the lesion, in would come the old Doctor from the rear,"Here's your lesion." How did he do it?

All schools of craniosacral work have something to offer. The visionary school encompasses all ways of understanding and working with the craniosacral system - biodynamic, energetic, mechanical and visionary.

VCSW offers a way of inner and outer personal development, so that you as a therapist may be of service to people by seeing them clearly, sensing where they need to be touched, and working with the sublime mysteries of the craniosacral system.