My client and I are doing a Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy session. But when I lift her head for a stretch, her neck unwinds quite luxuriously, and the nature of the session shifts into craniosacral work. I continue unwinding, letting her neck, legs and arms find their own movement. Although she is an accomplished yogi and has meditated for decades, she experiences a degree of spaciousness she rarely finds in her own practice. 

The beauty of craniosacral therapy in all its aspects is that it heals on many levels. It can be approached as a remedy for physical ailments such as TMD, or for its energetic benefits, such as releasing energies that stymie a client’s growth. As a yoga teacher and healer with a deep bias toward emotional and spiritual growth, one of the things that draws me most about this work is that it also functions as spiritual practice. For both the practitioner and client, it furthers the process toward the healing that spiritual traditions call enlightenment. 

Here’s my ‘definition’ of enlightenment: the absolute, unqualified understanding that one’s true self is pure awareness or Consciousness, and there is no separation between my consciousness and your consciousness and the consciousness of a plant and the consciousness of the farthest element in the farthest universe. There can be many words for this Consciousness – Yahweh, God, Goddess – but I tend to call it Spirit because for me, ‘Spirit’ connotes an intelligent spark that pervades everything. 

Enlightenment constitutes healing because all that we experience that causes us to suffer – our physical pain, our fear, doubt, anxiety, anger, resentment, desire – is recognized as simply thoughts that we have because we believe we’re separate beings. In enlightenment, even though we continue to operate as separate beings, doing our work and loving others, experiencing all this earth has to offer, the knowledge that we are simply Spirit helps us detach from the suffering life’s changes can cause, and set our sights on a greater truth. 

According to Jack Kornfield, there are four distinct experiences of enlightenment. In After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, he describes the various enlightenment experiences people have had, which in the Buddhist tradition are called the Four Gates of Awakening: 

My own experiences are most clearly the Gate of Oneness, which I call Connection. For me, that word best indicates the opposite of Separation, the illusion that we are separate from others. It has also been the closest way to describe the indescribable, what happens in the practice of craniosacral work. It can refer both to the client’s connection to their particular mind/body/spirit, or individual soul, and the Connection to all of Consciousness that constitutes enlightenment. 

Although there is a great deal of literature about the fortunate few who have achieved complete enlightenment, in reality most of us experience moments of enlightenment all the time, then return to an unenlightened state. Those on spiritual paths (like yoga, Sufism or Buddhism) take on practices such as chanting or meditation to find more of these moments, hoping to find that complete enlightenment. This paper uses examples from my own journey through the levels of Sacred Journey Institute, and examples from my client work, to describe how craniosacral work can also be a practice that helps one advance toward a more enlightened state. It is not meant to be a logical, scholarly treatment. The paper can be read on two levels: first, as it describes my own path through this training program; and second, as it describes how the work can be spiritual practice for both the client and practitioner. It is not meant to downplay the other aspects of healing that come about through this work, but simply to bring to light an effect of the work that doesn’t always receive adequate attention. 

Before Sacred Journey Institute (SJI)

 When I began my studies with SJI, I had already become a practitioner of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. This work uses a combination of yoga-as-bodywork and Carl Rogers-type dialogue to help the client integrate mind, body and spirit. In other words, to promote connection. This might be at the individual soul level, or Connection to Spirit. Both are healing, and perhaps there isn’t a definitive distinction between them. As David Frawley states in Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness: 

In connecting to the wisdom of their whole self, the client is able to make more purposeful choices and slough off what doesn’t work. She gradually begins to step more strongly onto her path, dropping ideas and emotions that interfere with her sense of wholeness, her ability to act as a whole, connected person. As a recent client told me, “You put me right back into myself. Once you’re in yourself, you can deal with anything.” 

As I performed the work, I noticed that after sessions, I was often in a state of Connection: not just with my own self, but with Spirit in general. I felt ‘at One with the Universe,’ which sounds like an overworked cliché, but which was entirely accurate. The work -- creating the ‘safe container’ for the client’s experience, being present to my own process so I could keep that container clear, being present to the client, and waiting without expectation – brought me into a state of being that I had never before noticed. 

Up until that time, I had practiced yoga and meditation mostly for the physical and emotional benefits they provided. I found these practices and continued to use them because they helped me be healthy and better cope with my life, not because I had a goal of finding enlightenment. 

Yet there I was, walking around with a deep ‘knowing’ that everything is all connected. Experiencing extreme contentment for significant periods of time. These were times of heightened awareness that all things in nature were the same as me. This applied not just to the stones, trees and water of my beloved lakeshore, but also to the ‘difficult’ people in my life. They were also times when I ‘knew’ that everything was fine, everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. Thoughts that normally caused suffering – fears, doubts, desires – seemed insignificant, arising then falling as effortlessly as breathing. I experienced levels of joy and peace I hadn’t imagined existed, and certainly never believed I could reach. 

In addition, even though I sometimes fell ‘out of Connection,’ I would somehow find my way back. Practice – meditation, yoga, my work, or simply being present and mindful – would re-establish my connection with my own body/mind/spirit, and my Connection with Spirit. More and more, my life became centered around understanding and seeking out more of what kept me in Connection. 

As I began to see more experiences of Connection in clients and in me, a loose personal philosophy began to emerge. I could see two aspects of Connection, which are not mutually exclusive: Connection with Self and Connection with Spirit. A person could find great healing through improved connection with their own body/mind/spirit, and even greater healing through a more mystical connection with Spirit. 

In addition, I believe both occur on a spectrum, and change is always occurring. Someone can experience the benefits of Connection at any given moment, and become lost in suffering shortly after. Thus, experiences of enlightenment are not uncommon, and although hope remains that one final, all-encompassing enlightenment can occur, mostly I believe we all constantly swing through the extremes of the spectrum. Our worst suffering occurs as we swing farthest from Connection, and our greatest contentment comes as we swing toward it. 

Spiritual work in its many forms is, exactly as it’s often called, ‘practice.’ The more one practices, the easier it is to stay closer to or in Connection, and the longer one experiences the accompanying benefits. Thus, with practice, one begins to spend more time closer to the ‘in Connection’ end of the spectrum.

Craniosacral Work: Practicing Connection 

My craniosacral education and training began with a series of sessions I took with a woman graduating from SJI. Although I knew little about the modality and what it was supposed to do, it was patently clear that this was another version of spiritual practice. While my inner observer stayed alert, I moved between varying levels of consciousness, I was hyper-aware of what was going on in my body and mind, and very present to all of it. At the same time, I was aware that the ‘journey’ of our sessions involved far more than I could perceive on the conscious level. It was the best of meditation, with none of the effort, monkey mind, resistance or body discomfort that usually accompany efforts to meditate for long periods of time. We also had one quiet yet spectacular session that connected me to my 7-year old self as we worked with a long-standing neck injury. It didn’t take long to decide to try the training program. 

SJI Level 1 and 2

There was a lot here that was new, and I suppose should have been daunting. Things others were experiencing, the skills of the other students, the unanswered questions, etc. Yet somehow, it wasn’t. I simply treated the work as the same spiritual practice I’d found in my previous work, with similar results. Creating the space, being present, opening my heart, practicing equanimity. There were minor struggles, but for the most part I felt comfortable leaving my questions about what I saw around me unanswered, and felt, most acutely, that I was ‘home.’ 

The work also brought an immediate shift in my own spiritual practice. My meditation practice, which was reasonably steady, became very steady. I ‘knew’ without a doubt that meditation and this new work went hand-in-hand, and it became much easier to make it to the cushion nearly every single day, sometimes twice a day. Even more important, I no longer had mixed feelings about this time; my resistance melted away, this time became like a ‘best friend,’ even though I didn’t quite understand why. 

I began to practice the work on friends, clients and other students in the program. Mostly I stuck with the techniques we’d practiced in class, finding the technique on a new and different body, feeling flexion, extension and unwinding. Making note of the reactions: people being present to the subtle movements of their own bones and energies, people sinking into different states of consciousness, people experiencing the deep relaxation and peace that made it so hard to get off the table. This was ‘time-out-of-time,’ every bit as good and satisfying as the best meditation experiences I’d heard or read about. 

In addition to finding this space, some clients had more specific ‘connection events’: 

While working with one man, I thought for sure he was asleep, as he snored throughout the entire session! However, he later said no, he was awake the whole time, aware that he was in a hypnogogic state. He found the experience very intriguing, and it awakened great hope in him. He used to be a smoker, and with the drug had found a certain internal space that made it easy to write. Since quitting the habit, he hadn’t been able to find that space – until this session. Even without the chemical changes smoking caused, he connected to a level of consciousness that was familiar and very welcome, one that had been very helpful to him in the past. It gave him an understanding that there were other ways to find that space. With some coaching, he began a meditation practice, which he told me was very helpful. 

Two sessions with an artist client brought her in connection with the consciousness of her second chakra, the origin of her creativity. During the first session, she received a clear visual of the bones of her spine, and during the second, a sense of her sacrum buried in moss that was both visual and visceral. These connections to her own soul – the grounded, creative part buried in her second chakra – were made possible in the deep meditative space of cranial sacral work. 

Still another client, in profound grief over the death of an ex-lover, traveled through many other lifetimes in which he had abandoned her. She came out of these experiences crying, ‘He’s left me, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime!’ Though the session was difficult, it clarified why she was in such deep agony over this latest ‘betrayal’, and she was immediately able to release some of the energy of that relationship. A few days later she spontaneously experienced another wave of energy release. She felt she released things that dated back almost 60 years to her childhood, and shortly thereafter deepened her relationship with a new love. 

Although these experiences were very different from each other, they were all experiences of Connection outside the realm of everyday life. Though each of these clients was intellectually aware that they had a soul or spirit, the sessions brought them in palpable contact with that spirit. Through the simple touch of craniosacral work, clients found Connection: to a mental space one man feared he had lost forever; to a deep knowing about one’s artist soul centered in the body/mind; and to awareness of other lifetimes that helped create a major healing release in the present. 

Doing this work, I began to experience a shift of my own. During one session, I suddenly ‘saw’ the client clothed exactly as she was clothed, except that her shoulder was jagged. I began to bring healing to that part of her, and later learned that it was the only part of her body that had sustained an injury, and that it was also an emotional injury, as she acquired it lifting her mother over and over during her final illness. 

Many on the spiritual path describe that at some point, the practitioner begins to acquire paranormal abilities. For example, in yoga, these are called the siddhis, and include such phenomena as clairvoyance or being able to exist without food. Through my years of yoga, meditation and yoga therapy, and now through the spiritual practice of craniosacral work, I was beginning to come in touch with these abilities. As I had had huge concerns that I wouldn’t be ‘intuitive enough’ to do this work, this ‘seeing’ was a great relief indeed. 

I also began to realize that I was experiencing clients’ movements in a different way. For example, I might see or feel a very tiny unwinding in the physical, yet on another level I was ‘feeling’ huge movements. This was what the teacher meant when he talked about feeling things energetically! 

SJI Level 3 

After the ease I found in the first two training levels, Level 3 proved very difficult. Not because of the material, but because I lost my own sense of Connection. After being in a teaching space for Levels 1 and 2 that was clearly like the one I was taught to create during a healing session – open, spacious, safe – suddenly the space felt unsafe, limiting. I experienced pressure to conform, pressure to limit my responses to what someone else wanted. These were dynamics that existed in my own childhood, and they instilled a deep fear of being controlled. This caused me to contract into my ‘small self,’ the self that feels separate. In SJI parlance, my fear of being controlled is probably a miasm of great proportions. 

However, this particular miasm did not come up for release as such. Instead, I spent a month being what I call ‘confused’. This is when I don’t feel Connection, when I feel separated from Spirit, anxious, doubting, angry, and fearful. 

But, it was a craniosacral session that brought me back to Spirit. When I expressed my feelings to my practitioner, instead of trying to release negative energy, she practiced a series of techniques called ‘Windows to the Sky.’ These techniques are meant to help the client connect with Spirit, and that was exactly what happened. My confusion disappeared. One hour of craniosacral work accomplished what several weeks of yoga and meditation hadn’t! 

During this time, in my client sessions, more experiences of ‘seeing’ beyond the obvious were happening. For one client with chronic mandible problems, I saw the joint as old pieces of metal, loosely hinged together with an old bolt. For another who had fused vertebrae, a dural tube unwind led to a vision of the fused area as a washer, with the tube constricted below that area. In both cases I began to direct my healing to the vision rather than the physical body, even though my hands were still on the body. 

As my ‘paranormal’ experiences began to add up, this is what I began to believe was happening: in the spiritual practice of facilitating sessions, I was connecting to Spirit and receiving these images, these ‘knowings,’ as a result. Although this may sound simple, it profoundly changed my whole worldview about psychic abilities. Before, I had thought that people with intuitive/psychic skills had gifts that others didn’t have. Now, I understood that these abilities are really open to everyone – including me! Think of it this way: performing various forms of spiritual practice was like mailing out cards, hoping for change, trusting that it made a difference; suddenly, I was receiving mail back! This opened up a whole new level of wonder and gratitude about my life, my path, and the work I was doing. 

(Obviously, the more common way to understand what was happening is that I was gaining access to the astral, where all things CAN be seen/known. Still, I like the mail analogy, as it conveys the years spent meditating, hoping for change, and the spotty, once-in-a-while manner of my first experiences with the astral.) 

SJI Level 4 

Throughout my training, I’d seen people drop out because of fears about the ‘big’ processing. I don’t think I ever experienced this fear, but I had only processed quietly, sweetly, going into a deep euphoria or a journey through levels of consciousness. Thus, that kind of processing seemed foreign, and I was never quite sure how to best respond to it. I opened my heart and stayed present to the client, but felt somewhat at a loss about what else to do. 

Level 4 changed all that with the Mandible Ritual. I finally processed ‘big’: twisting my body in various shapes, growling, coughing, and screaming to release energies. Funny thing was, despite the external physical drama of the session, internally it all felt like a yoga practice. Just as I might go into a twist in my yoga practice to relieve physical tension in the body, now it made sense to growl or scream or rock to rid my body of the energy. It wasn’t particularly scary, just different than my previous processing. Since then, quiet or noisy processing, it’s mostly all been the same to me, just settling in and doing the work. 

In addition, my first ‘power chakra’ reading was an enormous Christmas present from Spirit, a vision so clear and strong and high vibration that tears spurted out of my eyes. A vision of a heart chakra as an arena where angels and other spirit beings come to play, all gold and white light. I call this a Christmas present because I received much more than information as a result of doing the practice. I believe I received a jolt of high-vibrational energy, which probably recalibrated the energy in my own body. This I take as a sort of snowball effect: doing the practice puts me in Connection, being in Connection brings more and more gifts that make staying in Connection easier and easier. 

By the same token, a reading of my own chakras provided me insight into my developing gifts. My practitioner read my seventh chakra as my power chakra, seeing silver streams coming out of my crown and going right across the room and through the wall. Knowing this helped me put more pieces of the puzzle together. Although I have heard and read of psychic abilities being a function of the Sixth chakra, the Third Eye, I began to understand that I was receiving my ‘knowings’ through my Seventh chakra, my Connection to Spirit. This helped me understand a number of things: why I intuitively ramped up my meditation practice when I started this work, why I mourned for Connection to Spirit whenever I lost it, why so many intuitive readings included references to my spirituality. My path has been very much about coming ‘home,’ about working, practicing, living in Seventh chakra power. 

It was soon after this training that I took in a stray cat, who turned out to be pregnant. Although I had never envisioned such a thing happening in my life, and it created some interesting chaos, the entire kitten experience was a riot! At the same time, several people commented that I seemed to be more relaxed, and attributed this to the kittens. However, I was aware that it was much more profound than that. After Level 4, I knew without a doubt that all things can be healed. I was walking around with such a high level of trust that I relaxed more completely. To me, the kittens were a gift I received because of that trust. 

SJI Level 6 

Now that I was more comfortable with the ‘big’ processing, I felt like I was on a roll, and signed up for the next session, which was Level 6. A good time for more practice at the new skills I picked up in Level 4. In addition, there was practice talking to miasms, which was a stitch – a great way to really kill off any fears about these types of energy. 

Beth gave a description of miasm that made me understand that, except for the semantics, it’s exactly what I understand about karma – accumulated action/pattern that can be released, or burned up, as we’re more likely to say in the yoga community. This gave me further insight into why my yoga and meditation were so aligned with craniosacral work, whether receiving or doing the work. In all of these practices, we’re releasing our attachment to energies or thoughts (which are sometimes the same thing) that cause suffering and keep us feeling separate. Whether you call it burning karma or releasing miasms, it’s the same work: the low vibration energy in our body/minds has been released, either in tiny bits or in one fell swoop, leaving us lighter, clearer, with less suffering. More time is spent in peace and joy, in the present moment, closer to enlightenment. 

In addition, I understood that any energetic residue taken on while giving a session could potentially be released in yoga and meditation. 

My client sessions after these Levels 4 and 6 deepened according to the work I’d learned. There were chakra readings, whole visions that popped up, peaceful meadows, sharp knives, scared mice, a Sixth chakra yogic seer who thanked me when I connected him to the client’s heart. After working with the long wave in class, I held a client and her baby in the long wave while they nursed, bringing nearly instant calm to the baby after she had overstimulated herself. Another client, who normally processed ‘quiet,’ released a miasm by toning it out. And, there was a lot more ‘knowing’: ‘hearing’ a heart call for connection, sensing anger and agitation in an injured knee, understanding a heart that asked its owner to have more compassion for self; experiencing in chakra colors the energy a client’s body was drawing from my hands. 

SJI Level 7 

Level 7 was an amazing Connection adventure, connecting with the awareness of memory and other lives as a form of healing, connecting with possible futures. In the meditative state of a craniosacral session, any of these can be used as part of the client’s healing process. 

Connection to other lives, called Sacred Journey, called for major processing on my part to integrate the experiences. Bits and pieces from other practices – Phoenix Rising sessions, meditation sessions that included visions – were sometimes included in the lives I saw. These lives were visual, downright sensual: purple mountains and barely breathable air, light filtering into a destroyed temple, a green pool in a cave, the pure wonder of staring at the black fringe of my boy’s hair, the deep need to take a huge breath of country air and taste real food, the clouds under the ‘Big Sky.’ It made me wonder if the books and movies I’ve devoured were to re-taste these locales, or if these visions were nothing but a by-product of these books and movies. My first reaction was to downplay the visions and think that they were just visions, not actual lives. It was especially hard to digest the lives where I was acting in a spiritual capacity of some sort; somehow, I couldn’t/wouldn’t allow myself to BE the spiritual leader. I went home and watched a movie just to shift out of thinking mode. 

The next morning I experienced an epiphany, which was that my doubts about whether these were actually my lives was more of my own reluctance to step into my power. After all, if I don’t acknowledge that I’ve been a spiritual leader in lifetime after lifetime, I could continue to avoid claiming my power in this lifetime. 

Epiphany or not, I’m still trying to integrate all that I learned while ‘traveling.’ Nearly every lifetime brought some understanding regarding my way of being in this life. The major shift, though, was in regards to my work: instead of wondering how I had the chutzpah to do spirit work in this lifetime, I began to wonder what took me so long to find my work this time around. 

The last insight was especially important for me. Always I felt slightly like the outsider looking in, the one without quite the same skill set as the others. Travel to other lives made me understand that I’ve always done this work, that this work was simply an extension of all of my work, that I could step into my authority, into my power, with no qualms. 

In fact, in a second travel during the Level 7 Practicum, I visited two powerful lives, one a repeat of that first travel. Even as I was describing them to my facilitator, my conscious self also connected to two understandings: that all of this work was given to me for the benefit of my students and clients, and that I don’t always allow myself the power of my ‘knowing’ in this life. At the end of this session, I experienced my second recalibration: a wave of energy centered around the heart as my body integrated all of this knowing. 

The power of Level 7 affects me even now as I recollect and write about these things. For all that we do in this world, there is the process of learning something, and there is the separate process of coming into our power to practice what we have learned. In my own life, it is the second that I struggle with most, and it is also the second that I try to focus on in my teaching. It isn’t especially difficult to teach yoga poses or meditation techniques, the larger and more difficult part is helping students use these to come more fully into themselves and their own powers. 

The Level 7 Practicum also catapulted me into an aspect of the work that became truly ‘mine.’ Two practitioners described doing distance work, and I found that the thought of this drew me, without knowing why. I did feel I had tried it in a rudimentary fashion: when I first took home my cat, she was very traumatized, and I often found myself at my workplace, bringing her to mind and wrapping my heart around her. I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed appropriate. 

After the practicum I called a friend who has a history of chronic, severe asthma, and asked if she’d like to try this work with me. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, or what would happen, but we spoke on the phone and created an intention for the session. 

I sat down and closed my eyes, and it was as if a movie unwound right behind my eyelids! I ‘saw’ her body, and began to touch her, and immediately sensed the wonder of not being limited to the physical. I could, and did, hold her lungs directly in my hands, and ask that they be returned to a state of newness. Suddenly she was there as a baby! I thought, maybe not when her lungs are new, maybe when they were the strongest, and suddenly she was there as a young teen, running and galloping all over her parents’ farm, carefree and tremendously happy to experience her own movement. Later, she told me how she had loved to run, that she was the fastest of all her family.

At one point I heard muttering off to the left, and realized I had encountered a miasm. Incredibly, I was familiar with this miasm: it was an aspect of her that used to surface when she became frustrated in her work, she would go into a very similar muttering. It was also an aspect of her that I hadn’t heard in years. Obviously, it was ready to release, and somehow I knew how to do that. 

We did a number of sessions in distance, each of them different. 

One session was very quiet: the few visuals I had were of individual cells and fluids in her body, apparently I was working at that level to heal these parts and processes. Other sessions were raucous: working on an infection in her sinus cavity, out popped a tiny wildcat, furiously moving as though it was trying to get out of a cage. I ‘banished it’ out onto the lake. In yet another, at a time when her arms and legs were filled with excess fluid, I very physically squeegeed them out, watching the gunk flow from her hands and feet. 

What followed were months and months of distance work with other SJI students. The work seemed to break down into four main aspects: craniosacral-like work that allowed the body to release and unwind, work that moved higher-vibration energy into the body to heal an area or release energies, holding space for the client’s process, and work that involved taking a journey for the client. 

When the client first showed up in energy, I placed my hands under her occiput. Her whole body began to furiously unwind, flailing, swinging, moving as much as possible as my hands kept her anchored. 

Another time: 

I stood at her head, but placed my hands under her whole back, reaching down so that my index fingers were on her sitting bones. Her whole body began to dance, unwinding, balanced on that finger-and-bone contact. 

I might place my hands right onto the place that needed healing, such as making contact with organ, bone, muscle or skin. In one case, I miniaturized myself and went directly into the client’s intestines, patting the walls with my hands and applying a sort of healing potion. 

Other times, I would use my own heart chakra, placing it directly into the part of the body that needed healing. Sometimes this meant bisecting the client’s body with my own – theirs horizontal, mine vertical – so my heart chakra could work directly on theirs to bring healing, and/or release energy. 

Holding space often meant watching the client dance: dances of joy, frustration, anger or sadness. After watching these, I often suggest friends dance more! Or, the client might experience an unwinding process, letting a limb or the entire body move to release energy. Or, I might simply see the client spending time in a healing place such as a forest, meadow, or pool. 

The fourth aspect was the most amazing, as it touched on the limitlessness of consciousness, shamanism, archetypes and mythology. 

The client began to walk away from me, but kept looking back over my shoulder to make sure I was following her. She took me to a cave, where she picked up a bowl of colorful crystals. She took out a dark gold diamond and placed it on her Third Eye. Immediately she became cloaked in a robe of the same color, becoming a Goddess. In this transformation I saw her own power to transcend the ‘ordinary’ concerns she was having about her body’s changes, to transform into whomever she needed or wanted to be. 

In another session, with a client who has chronic problems in her left shoulder blade, I removed the shoulder blade and arm down to the elbow, and cloaked it within my own body. I found myself walking up a hill with the same winged white horse that had come into one of my first sessions with this client – obviously a guide of some sort. We came to a campfire and sat down around it. I understood that this shoulder blade of hers was actually a gift, that it had been entrusted (key word) to her and was part of her power, and that she was meant to safeguard it (another key word). 

Subsequent sessions with the same client revealed even more about this shoulder blade. By this time I had opened to channel my own guide, and had done several distance sessions while my guide was in me, and this was one of them. When I channel my guide I am still ‘present,’ thus these sessions are a form of co-creation, and I have an additional source to answer questions. 

The client began to furiously process in that shoulder blade, and once that was completed a number of angels came and surrounded the bone, bringing it light. They began to sing, and the deep sense of reverence and awe they showed toward my client and this particular part of her brought tears to my eyes. I asked my guide what it was about, and she said in a very matter-of-fact, solemn manner, ‘Those are The Sorrows, my child.’ My own ‘knowing’ about what went on is that, for this client, this is where her share of sorrows is held, the apportionment of suffering that is part of her current life’s journey. And that the reverence the angels showed is none other than what they have for each of us, that our souls have chosen to take on an earthly incarnation and experience The Sorrows. 

In yet another session where the client expressed low self-esteem, I thought to ask a white bear along. The bear took us to the depths of the ocean, where we sat and experienced the lives of beings at that depth. Then, we went into the cosmos, universes away from our own planet. Finally we channeled a speck of dust, and I understood it was the same speck of dust that had been around 14 billion years since the creation of this planet, and had been breathed into the lungs of Buddha and Christ, and was now here with us. And that we could ‘be’ that speck of dust. The journey was clearly meant to show us that we have no limits, that our consciousness can penetrate all of space and time, nothing is beyond our capability. 

These and similar experiences felt like another aspect of Connection, that of connection to a sort of universal mythology. Although I haven’t read much of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, there is in these journeys a sense that I was tapping into cosmic consciousness that revealed itself through visionary, sacred story. Though aspects matched a particular client, in essence they were timeless, and could apply to Everyman, to every Hero of his own life journey.

Reciting these examples, of course, does little to convey the impact doing this work had on me and my belief system. To consider that I could sit down, connect with someone’s energy, know what needed to be done, do it and impact their well-being??? The word ‘mind-boggling’ doesn’t even apply: there I was, day after day, doing this as easily and matter-of-factly as washing the dishes. 

And, although there were doubts about whether I was actually ‘doing’ anything, there was always feedback: about how ‘on target’ I was in what I saw, and about the shifts the work was creating in the client’s life. Once again, the work showed itself to be spiritual practice: clients began to lose their attachment to lower vibration emotions and live more fully in the higher vibrations of peace and joy. On a spectrum, moving closer and closer to enlightenment. 

I began to understand that, as nebulous as it may seem, distance work was actually the deepest work I’d ever done, with the greatest effect. I also gained more and more respect for the power of my Seventh chakra, because although there were times when I was specifically seeing through my Sixth chakra, this was clearly Seventh chakra work for me. 

Distance work brought home to me the depth and immediacy of my own Connection with Spirit. This combination of seeing/knowing/doing was time I spent in Connection, time spent in the flow of the Consciousness that pervades everything. No wonder doing it often made me giddy! 

SJI Level 5 

Level 5 was, in some ways, anti-climactic. It had been nearly a year since Level 7, a year in which I did many distance sessions. I was beginning to use ‘distance mode’ for other situations: bringing help to a traumatized man I had seen on TV during Hurricane Katrina; contacting friend’s energies to find out what was wrong with them, working on friends’ loved ones, from photos; and working with animals. 

Still, the final session, in which we invited the spirit guides to do the work, was a blessing. I couldn’t help going into distance mode for a while, traveling into the cosmos with the client, releasing some energies. But then a huge angel popped up over the client, and I could sense entities bringing out tiny unwindings throughout her body. It was a lovely collaboration, one that has since allowed me to take my sessions to yet another level. 

The Saga Continues 

There isn’t really a typical conclusion here, as the process just keeps unfolding. The work deepens, the ability to ‘see’ what needs to be done grows, and the clients take baby steps and/or leaps and bounds toward greater peace and joy. Perhaps this ‘take’ on craniosacral work, that it is spiritual practice that furthers our path toward Connection, toward Enlightenment, is specific to me. But, as I continue my work, that is the vision I hold for each of them: to let go of suffering and be in perfect Connection with Spirit. 

Maria was tortured and raped in Guatemala more than 10 years ago, and continues to have frequent flashbacks. She needs to maintain control during our sessions: they are conducted with her seated and eyes open, me located only in front of her and beside her, asking permission before I place my hands on any part of her body. Her psychotherapist must also be in the room. Whether she would even allow me to touch her was in question, as she had once worked with their best massage therapist for a full year, yet never allowed the therapist to touch her. But, she allowed me to work, and her soul showed itself to me early on, dancing flirtatiously in a red flamenco dress. Now I work mostly in distance even while my hands are on her, bringing safety and peace and releasing trauma while Maria remains thankfully oblivious, feeling only warmth and relaxation from my hands. 

One day, as I set my intention to work on Maria, my guide comes into me, setting off my limbic system so that my eyes flutter and spurt tears the whole session. I do my work as usual, but within the higher vibration energy of my guide’s presence. At one point I bring together our three heart chakras – mine, Maria’s, and her therapist’s – to be bathed in pure white light. As always when in Connection with Spirit, the healing is far deeper and broader than my ‘small self’ could possibly imagine.  

Footnotes

¹ Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), 65. 

² Ibid, 75. 

³ Ibid, 93. 

⁴ Ibid, 95. 

⁵ David Frawley, Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness (Wisconsin: Lotus Press, 1996), 135.

Bibliography

Frawley, David. Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness. Twin Lakes, Wisconsin: Lotus Press, 1996. 

Kornfield, Jack. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path. New York: Bantam Books, 2000.

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