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Details

This Continuing Education class is open to practitioners of Structural Integration who have graduated from an approved IASI school.

One of the main purposes of the cranial requirement prior to the Advance Training is to explore a broader range of contact skills and to expand your perceptual skills. These skills can then be built upon in the Advanced Training.

To do this, we will explore Inherent Motion (IM) in the cranium and throughout the whole body. Inherent Motion is present, as an organizing force, in the embryo, and throughout life. You will learn how to discern and synchronize with its rhythms, flows, and pauses in order to augment this organizational potential.

Much of this class will be oriented toward exploring the felt sense of “presence” and how it can expand your perceptions. We will practice presence in ourselves and in relationships throughout the class.

As Rolfers®, we learn to use our hands for doing. Perceiving IM requires shifting your frame of mind from doing hands to receiving and listening hands. This will allow you to experience broader tensional patterns, that may be invisible to your eye. You will develop a more comprehensive perception of fascia, encompassing more than myofascia alone. As you practice these presence and contact skills you will improve the effectiveness of your doing hands, while at the same time developing your listening hands. Your hands will become more sensitive. Not only are these skills necessary to perceive Inherent Motion, but they also help to balance the autonomic nervous system.

The cranium can be very sensitive. In the first days of class, you will develop your contact skills off the cranium so that when we move to the cranium later in the class, your touch will be much more refined, effective, and safe for your student partners.

Bones can get tight! They can be considered highly specialized fascia, with the qualities of fascia. They can twist, bend, and compress to manage injuries and daily activities. Receptive and listening touch will allow you to decompress and untwist bones. We will practice this.

You will begin to expand your perceptual skills by learning how to optimize support and core connection from the feet to the sacrum. You will learn how the Interosseous membranes have a direct connection to the respiratory diaphragm and spinal organization.

We will then move to the sacrum/pelvis and you will learn both how to balance pelvic/sacral torsions and to recognize and work with spinal distortions. All of this affects support, spinal organization, and ease in the cranium. I tell all of my students to become experts with the sacrum!

As we progress toward the cranium, your ability to decompress bones will allow you to experience how the clavicles can bend and twist, affecting the sternum and the superior thoracic aperture, via the first 2 ribs. You will learn how the pericardium and mediastinum have a huge influence on cervical organization and the cranium as well.

We will then move on to the cranium where you will experience how the cranial bones float on the "dural water balloon of the cranium". Instead of balancing bones, we will balance the membranes and fluids of the cranium and the bony relationships will change.

You will learn how the visceral cranium actually hangs off of the ethmoid bone. Doing nose work, from the outside utilizing the ethmoid bone, will help in organizing the face and will enhance the goals of the 6th and 7th sessions.

This is not a class in Cranial Sacral Therapy, though we will explore some of the main aspects of that modality from a Rolfing® perspective. This is a principles-based class. Every time you touch, you will be practicing the three principles, developing a keener understanding of the relationship of the whole body with the cranium, and how to enhance the goals of the 10 series.

About the Instructor

Thomas has been a faculty member of the Dr.Ida Rolf Institute since 2004 and has been a Rolfer^® for 35 years. He has studied and practiced craniosacral therapy since 1993 and has over 1400 hours of training in Biodynamics.