Andrew Cook Craniosacral Therapy

When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.

This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his books, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (US) / Divine Beauty (Europe)
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

County Kerry, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

https://www.craniosacral.co.uk/blog/measuring-the-effectiveness-of-cst/

Measuring the Effectiveness of CST – The Craniosacral Therapy Association Measuring the Effectiveness of CST Posted on May 10, 2024May 13, 2024Author CSTA EditorCategories Research BY Dr Nicola Brough The Fulcrum, Issue 92 May 2024 I first used complementary and integrative medicine over 20 years ago to support my own ill health. It was reflexology that awoke me to my inn...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.23.23288976v1
This is a rather blunt instrument of a test, and in an environment (a Military hospital) where PTSD has a bigger meaning than for most people outside the military.

Nevertheless, about 10% of the new mothers screened showed measurable PTSD immediately post-birth. My experience working with new mothers and babies in Norwich is that :

(a) thank goodness someone has bothered to look at this issue.

(b) this figure is probably a little too low (because shock is a spectrum, not an on/off switch),

(c) there are inadequate resources in the NHS to pick up and give adequate attention to all but the most severe cases (that's what happens - there is a triage system to allocate limited funds and resources),

(d) most new mothers really don't recognise what is going on because they have a single focus - to cope with whatever and look after the baby.

I've been treating new mothers and babies for well over 20 years now, and in many cases all this is so easy to help. And when it is helped there is a vast improvement in the quality of relationship between mother and baby - to their lifelong benefit.

Screening for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder following Childbirth using the Peritraumatic Distress Inventory Background Maternal psychiatric morbidities include a range of psychopathologies; one condition is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that develops following a traumatic childbirth experience and may undermine maternal and infant health. Although assessment for maternal mental health problems is....

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Subscribe to The Nested Pathway How did humanity land on the current self-and-other destructive pathway? No other animal spoils its nest like humanity is doing to Earth. What can each of us do on a daily basis to turn things around? Take up our ancestral wellness-promoting pathway. Click to read The Nested Pathway, by Darcia Narva...

Attention To Sensory Perception


Live Talk with Andrew Cook and Natalie Lang

Tuesday, 9 April 2024 at 18h UK time*

Everyone from your cat to Mark Zuckerberg knows that attention is the most valuable commodity. Lots of people want your attention. Our whole society is geared around making money and consolidating power by grabbing your attention. All of this is secondary to (and dependent on) the way that attention drives your whole being, and orients the physiology and nervous system of every living organism.

In this live Talk Andrew Cook, long time Craniosacral therapist and teacher, will discuss with Nat the way that attention works. Exploring how it can be simply and practically applied to regulate the nervous system. Andrew began applying this over 15 years ago as Neuroception, but along the way the ideas have been modified by biosemiotics, Francisco Varela, and many other influences.

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_q0FBkOnGQZaKzYPRqUvpuw?__s=izk39nl8hr2ic5i5d62d #/registration

CST involves many different strands of attention, one of which is observing and working with slow formative rhythms that move up the body to the head and then down towards the legs and feet. An interesting very powerful upwards rhythm can be seen in this video of a moose shedding its antlers...

Moose shedding antlers caught on drone video A drone captured the moment a moose shook its body and dropped both antlers from its head into the snow. Full story: https://abc7chicago.com/moose-sheds-antl...

This has been a focus of my CST practice for almost two decades...

neurosciencenews-com.cdn.ampproject.org

https://evolvednest.org/

The Evolved Nest NESTED CHILDREN, FLOURISHING WORLD

Having been building a low energy home for about 15 years I realise I'm challenged by this almost every day. Once we went from wood fires to electricity it all got bigger and better and more complex. Going to a low energy solution without even more tech and complexity is almost impossible. The tech solutions in the end rely on a chip being made in a megafactory in China or California.

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,

coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,

there is a small
opening
into the new day
that closes
the moment
you begin your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To become human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,

what urgency
calls you to your
one love?

What shape waits
in the seed of you
to grow and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?

In the open,
lovely and inviting
white page
on the waiting desk?

…

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING
in
David Whyte: Essentials
Many Rivers Press © David Whyte

…

Rose Coloured Dawn
Photo © David Whyte
Saint Saturnin-Les -Apts. Provence.
September 16th 2018

If youre in the UK or have a BBC subscription - there is a great series - an abridged audio version of "Ritual" by Dimitris Xygalatas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wq50 ... Episode 3 - "Looking at a Spanish firewalking ritual, and how it creates a transcendent experience for the community"

During the fire walking there is heart synchronisation within the villagers and particularly between people in the same family, to the extent that you can see how related people are by the degree of synchronisation. Ousiders observing did not show significant synch, even though they were apparently participating in the same ritual. Food for thought wrt how far the spectrum of socuialisation goes. During this their heart rates were measured at over 200bpm, indicating that it is vagal activity that is important (i.e. communication between CNS and viscera) rather than the "vagal brake" of "relaxation"

BBC Radio 4 - Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas, Episode 1 1/5 By Dimitris Xygalatas. Fascinating journey exploring why we are the ritual species.

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/andrew-cook.../t-zzjqlla

A practical look at the way fundamental cellular biology influences even humans, and how to use that to "regulate the nervous system". I put that in quote marks, because we are not only a nervous system - that would be like saying a Tesla car is the wires and computer, ignoring the driver, the software, the battery, the wheels, etc...

We have a choice to be driven by the biological body or to ride it. But our biological horse is not a car - its a living organism with its own biological intelligence.

It's only possible to ride the biological horse according to the rules it was set up with by a couple of billion years of evolution. Its unfortunate that Western society and culture have to a great extent decided that they know better than to listen to the horse. This Colonial attitude to the body (the internal ecosystem) is also expressed in a Colonial attitude to the external ecosystem. If there is no understanding, compassion, or capacity to BE with the ecosystem we have as a body, there is unlikely to be a proper appreciative relationship with the "external" (as it is thought of) ecosystem.

This is so true.

Embodied Touch as Transformative Practice NCBTMB approved for 12.5 CEsGet 20% off all streaming courses through December 14! Discount is automatically applied at checkout.Embodiment Experience happe...

All members are formed according to eternal laws, and the rarest
shape secretly preserves the archetype
So The shape determines the way of life of the animal, and the way of living has a powerful effect on all shapes.
So The orderly formation clearly shows itself, which tends to change through externally acting beings.

Alle Glieder bilden sich aus nach ew’gen Gesetzen, Und die seltenste Form bewahrt im Geheimen das Urbild
Also bestimmt die Gestalt die Lebensweise des Thieres, Und die Weise zu leben, sie wirkt auf alle Gestalten Machtig zuriick.
So zeiget sich fest die geordnete Bildung, Welche zum Wechsel sich neigt durch ausserlich wirkende Wesen.

Goethe

quoted in
TIMOTHY LENOIR : THE ETERNAL LAWS OF FORM: MORPHOTYPES AND THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE IN GOETHE’S BIOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Today we note the birth date of Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875 – December 29, 1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist who wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose.

His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety.

Rilke published the three complete cycles of poems that constitute The Book of Hours in April 1905. These poems explore the Christian search for God and the nature of Prayer, using symbolism from Saint Francis and Rilke's observation of Orthodox Christianity during his travels in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century.

Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade because of a long-lasting creativity crisis.

On June 11, 1919, Rilke travelled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the Duino Elegies once again. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies in several weeks in February 1922.

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering. The poems employ a rich symbolism of angels and salvation but not in keeping with typical Christian interpretations.

Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philosophical despair, asking: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels? and later declares that "every angel is terrifying”. While labeling of these poems as "elegies" would typically imply melancholy and lamentation, many passages are marked by their positive energy and "unrestrained enthusiasm".

Before and after, Rilke rapidly wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets.

In 1929, writer, Franz Xaver Kappus, published a collection of ten letters that Rilke had written to him when he was a 19-year-old officer cadet.

The young Kappus wrote to Rilke, who had also attended the academy, between 1902 and 1908 when he was uncertain about his future career as a military officer or as a poet. Initially, he sought Rilke's advice as to the quality of his poetry, and whether he ought to pursue writing as a career.

While he declined to comment on Kappus's writings, Rilke advised Kappus on how a poet should feel, love, and seek truth in trying to understand and experience the world around him and engage the world of art.

Shortly before his death, Rilke was diagnosed with leukemia. Open-eyed, he died in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. He was buried on January 2, 1927, in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.
______________________________________________

Quotes and Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?

Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
______________________

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
_______________________

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
________________________

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

--Rainer Maria Rilke
[translated by Stephen Mitchell]
______________________

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

--Rainer Maria Rilke
[Translated by Robert Bly]
_________________________

Love Song

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

--Rainer Maria Rilke
______________________

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

--Rainer Maria Rilke
[translated by Stephen Mitchell]
_______________________

Sense of Something Coming

I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live
it through.
while the things of the world still do not move:
the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are fullof silence,
the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.
I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.

--Rainer Maria Rilke [Translated by Robert Bly]
______________________

Water Lily

My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal-
in the rythm of my daily soul
I do not desire-I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors...

--Rainer Maria Rilke

[Translated by A. Poulin]
_____________________

The First Elegy [Excerpt]

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not Angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, lingered, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,
desired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasks
for the single heart. It is easier on lovers?
Ah, they only use each other to mask their fates.
You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your arms
out into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

-- "The First Elegy" from The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated and edited by Edward Snow.
_____________________

All content of this post is for educational purposes only.
______________________

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https://www.cureus.com/articles/207654-clinical-approach-to-post-acute-sequelae-after-covid-19-infection-and-vaccination

FYI

Note this paper describes a clinical protocol run by a doctor in the USA.

It's somewhat ironic that a recent *hypothesis*published in Nature journal suggests quercitin (one of the useful supplements mentioned) is responsible for headaches.... Of course according to the Nature article only people who drink expensive wine suffer from hangovers...

If you're not used to using herbs and nutrition supplements medicinally in a serious way, better to contact a herbalist/nutritionist if you need to apply something like this.

Clinical Approach to Post-acute Sequelae After COVID-19 Infection and Vaccination The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 has been found to exhibit pathogenic characteristics and be a possible cause of post-acute sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 vaccination. COVID-19 vaccines utilize a modified, stabilized prefusion spike protein that may share similar toxic effects with i...

Today is the 70th anniversary of the death of Dylan Thomas
There's no other poet whose music I love as much.
This is just an excerpt from Fern Hill, which is such a joy to read that understanding is quite secondary to the sensation of letting the language roll through the poem.

Interesting infographic of where we came from. All of this is still encoded in our nervous system

Evolución del ser humano a través de mas de 4 mil millones de años.

Un esquema muy interesante para ver a nuestros antecesores de un mismo linaje desde el inicio de la vida en el planeta tierra.

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-genes-memory-million-years.html
650 million years ago.... That was when marine algae were becoming the dominant life form.

Genes for learning and memory are 650 million years old, study shows A team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Leicester have discovered that the genes required for learning, memory, aggression and other complex behaviors originated around 650 million years ago.

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his books, Benedictus (Europe) and
To Bless the Space Between Us (US)
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

The Burren
County Clare, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS - a major cause of obesity and illness

Yet again evidence is compiled that they are dangerous, and yet again the power of the food industry lobby means that it's just business as usual and recommended intake continues unchanged. I'm not even going to link here to the story because that will headline it - see instead first comment (below).

There are chemical receptors all through your gut exactly like the taste buds in your mouth. These continue to monitor chemical reactions and nutritional content of fomod as it passes through your body. A big discrepancy between perceived calorific content in your mouth (sweetness) and actual released calories in the gut tells the body that food quality is poor, and therefore it's a good survival strategy to put on fat. This is just one of the many ways that artificial sweeteners mess with our metabolism and are extremely UN-healthy.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/

I've been following through on this idea from well before the paper was published in 2018. The principles tie easily and elegantly into the cybernetics research by Bateson & Meade and Varela's "Not One, Not Two" model of organic life - and into Gordon Pask's communication theory. But also affirm personal experience and are in accord with so-called shamanic views of consciousness. /s12304-023-09523-0 -information)

When given practical application in treatments, the idea of loosely coupled multiplicity as a basis for biological organisation leading to fragmented multiplicity in unresolved overwhelm (and fragmentation being the reversible foundation of pretty well every physical and mental pathology) is extraordinarily productive.

The idea of Fragmentation is also supportive of self-compassionate and more vitalist (rather than landrover maintenance) models of treatment.

Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything? A new paper argues the condition now known as “dissociative identity disorder” might help us understand the fundamental nature of reality