I have wanted to write about this craniosacral therapy session for a very long time, but have never been able to find the time or the words. With the birth of this baby looming in the near future, I feel the time has come to finally get it down.
This happened near the beginning of my journey with CST, probably close to two years ago during one of my earliest sessions. I did not yet fully comprehend the power of CST, how it melded body and mind, that it was more than just a way to “work out” physical kinks. My body knew, though, and acted accordingly.
We had barely started the session when I found myself in an intensely uncomfortable position. I was lying on my back on the table, my head twisted to the left and at the same time bent so my ear was practically touching my shoulder. I wasn’t very happy about this, and sat there wondering why Kelly was shoving my head into such an unpleasant position. After a few moments, she asked me what feelings were coming up for me. “Trapped. Stuck. That’s how I feel.” She encouraged me to talk about other times in my life when I’d felt that way. So I sat there, my head jammed into my shoulder, and tried to think of when these feelings had arisen before. I hadn’t yet learned to listen to my heart, so I swirled around in my cognitive brain and talked about my childhood for a while; how I “must” have felt this way because of x or y. Kelly listened attentively, paused for a moment, then asked when was the first time I’d felt this way. It was then that my body decided to speak up. I chuckled. Then giggled. I couldn’t help it because it seemed so silly, but outlined in neon flashing lights in my head, it could not be denied. “BIRTH CANAL” is what my body was screaming at me, and even though I felt a little sheepish, I spoke up and told Kelly. “Now we’re there,” she replied, and we were off and running.
We spent the next hour dissecting my birth, probing my cellular memory, unlocking the secrets carried within my body. It would be wrong to say I remembered it in the way I remember my daughter’s birth or my wedding day or even what I ate for lunch yesterday. This was a different kind of memory … one of the body, sensations, impressions, visualizations. When asked who was in the room, I saw darkness with a circle of light in the middle and a doctor peering through the hole. Of course I couldn’t have “seen” that while in the birth canal, but I could have sensed it; that picture may simply be a visual method for my body to communicate what it knew was going on.
I knew from my mother that my birth started with my water breaking, a trip to the hospital and then pitocin. I didn’t know that I was also posterior and acynclitic – just like my daughter – although I confirmed these things later. The position I was sitting in, head crammed against shoulder, is the position I endured during labor and birth. My body remembered this and put me there, not Kelly as I had erroneously assumed. She just followed my body’s lead, kept her hands on my head, maintained a connection. “Trapped. Stuck.” Those were the feelings that came up for me, even before I was aware we were talking about my birth. How prescient. We talked about the pain and fear I felt. My need to stay in the womb for just a few days longer. The relentless pounding of the pitocin-induced contractions, and how it felt like there was no escape.
After we talked through my birth, Kelly encouraged me to “re-work” it, to make it what I wished it had been. I carefully considered the power she had placed in my hands and how I wanted to use it. Slowly, a vision came together – no water breaking, more time in the womb, no pitocin, optimal positioning, warm room, darkness, just my mother and father present. I stumbled over the words, going in fits and starts, but as I recreated my birth, made it into something new in bits and pieces, my head slowly righted itself and by the end of the session I was staring straight at the ceiling. I will never forget the drive home, when I did a shoulder check before merging onto the freeway. I was astonished by how far I could turn my head, and it dawned on me that I’d had a kink in my neck for 30-some-odd years and hadn’t even known it. I was even more astonished by the healing power of that hour with Kelly, how the gentle touch of her hands, her warm encouragement, and my ability to connect with and honor my body had finally exposed this long-held trauma to the light of day.
It is no accident that my daughter’s birth so closely mirrored my own. It was my body’s way of trying to resolve what had happened, and it ended up working in the end. My daughter’s birth led to her trauma which led us to CST which led me directly to this session and these discoveries about my own birth.
It is this experience more than any other that has taught me that babies are profoundly affected by their births; that they remember them – not in the way you and I remember things, but they remember them nonetheless. It is what finally helped me make sense of my daughter’s birth experience, and why she was so traumatized by what happened to her. I viscerally understood the pain and fear she endured for so many hours, her head tipped, body trapped, the two of us struggling together to continue on. I didn’t have to imagine what it had been like for her, because I went through it too. It made me realize that body memory, cellular memory is just as valid, if not more so, as cognitive memory.
This session taught me that birth is sacred, spiritual; that it is so much more than a bodily act. It started me on the journey that will culminate, in a sense, in a few short weeks. A journey that will bring this new baby into the world with the utmost respect and love. It started with a conviction to make my womb a sacred space, untouched by ultrasound or Doppler, unnecessary procedures or invasions. It will end, as much as a birth can be an ending, in a gentle birth that honors my baby’s journey, and does everything it can to protect it and make it safe. There will be no suctioning, no separation, no premature cord cutting, no probing or prodding. No bright lights or strange hands. It is what has driven my desire to bring my baby into this world by myself (with a trusted midwife in the wings), to catch it with my own hands and lift it to my chest, to gaze into its eyes and finally meet this person I have known forever for the first time.