About 2

I had my first craniosacral therapy session in 2008, and I came to it the way most people do — through discomfort, not curiosity.

I was dealing with recurring back pain and was looking for something that might help. Someone recommended craniosacral therapy. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t research it, and I had no particular expectations. I just went.

The session was quiet and, in a way, surprising. Nothing dramatic seemed to happen. There was no force, no manipulation, no visible intervention. At moments it almost felt as if nothing was happening at all. I remember thinking: is this it?

And yet something in the experience stayed with me.

It felt as if the body I thought I knew began to reveal another layer — quieter, slower, and more fundamental. The change was difficult to describe, but the depth of it was unmistakable. I left with a simple question that I couldn’t quite shake:

What was that?

The Question That Wouldn’t Settle

That question led me to read. And reading, in this field, quickly brings you to a problem.

Some of what I found was careful, grounded, and clinically precise — rooted in osteopathy, in the work of people like Still and Sutherland, in a real tradition of anatomical observation and clinical practice. Some of it was something else entirely: language about universal intelligence, cosmic rhythms, liquid light, healing energy. Written with great confidence about things that were, as far as I could tell, almost impossible to evaluate.

I didn’t know what to do with the gap between what I had felt in that first session — which was real and specific — and some of the language being used to describe it, which felt either vague or overclaimed. I was not looking for a belief system. I was looking for something I could actually understand.

What I eventually found was that the gap itself has a history. The tradition of cranial osteopathy was built by physicians and scientists — people making careful clinical observations under demanding conditions. Over time, as the work spread and evolved, some of that precision was maintained and deepened. Some of it was not. Learning to tell the difference became part of my own formation.

Training

In early 2012 I began my craniosacral training in Warsaw with Dr. Grażyna Walasek, a senior practitioner and teacher who brought both clinical rigour and genuine depth to everything she taught. Over two years, the training covered anatomy, physiology, and the fundamentals of the biodynamic approach — but what I remember most from that period is learning how to be still. How to arrive at a contact without an agenda. How to notice what is actually there before deciding what to do about it.

That is harder than it sounds. Most of us come to this kind of work with strong instincts to help, to intervene, to make something happen. Part of early training is learning to work against that instinct — not to become passive, but to become precise. The Warsaw years laid that foundation.

I then continued my studies at the Craniosacral Therapy Educational Trust in London, under Michael Kern — one of the most respected teachers in the biodynamic craniosacral field and author of Wisdom in the Body, a widely used text in craniosacral education.

Kern trained with practitioners who worked directly in the lineage of Sutherland’s later students, and what distinguishes his teaching is a combination of qualities that are not always easy to find together: genuine clinical depth, perceptual precision, and an honest acknowledgment of what this work can claim and what it cannot. He does not oversell the tradition. He also does not reduce it.

The CTET training included a full year of Living Anatomy — a way of studying the body not from diagrams and textbooks alone, but through direct palpatory exploration, session by session, developing a felt sense of how structures relate, how tissues respond, and how the system expresses itself under trained hands. This is not something you can learn quickly. It accumulates. Each session adds something to what the hands begin to recognize.

The training also included a Teaching Clinic, where I worked with real clients under supervision — people who came with actual conditions, actual histories, and actual uncertainty about whether any of this would help them. That is a different kind of learning from practicing on fellow students. It requires you to be present to someone who is genuinely looking for something, and to hold that responsibility carefully.

Assisting and Deepening

At the end of the training, I was invited to assist on the next two practitioner programmes at CTET — sitting with students at earlier stages of the same journey I had recently completed. I also assisted on cranial osteopathy workshops with Michael Kern in Poland.

Assisting is its own form of education. You see the same material differently when you are watching someone else encounter it for the first time. You notice where the genuine difficulties are — not the theoretical ones, but the ones that show up in the hands, in the quality of attention, in the moment when someone stops listening and starts trying to fix. You develop a clearer sense of what actually matters in this work and what is secondary.

Those years of training, assisting, and parallel clinical practice gave me something that no amount of reading can substitute: a feel for how this work unfolds across different people, different sessions, and different stages of a practitioner’s development. The variation is considerable — in what people carry, in how the system responds, in what a session needs to be. Learning to meet that variation, rather than apply a template to it, is what the cumulative experience of those years was really teaching..

What I Believe About This Work

I am not interested in making this therapy sound more remarkable than it is. I have sat with enough clients, and read enough of the literature, to know that the evidence base is still developing, that results vary considerably, and that honest uncertainty is more useful to the people who come to me than confident promises.

What I can say — carefully, from years of practice — is this: many people carry the effects of stress, old injury, chronic bracing, and accumulated strain in ways they are barely aware of. They have adapted. They have compensated. They manage. And somewhere in the process of managing, contact with something quieter and more fundamental in their own body has been lost.

A craniosacral session cannot solve everything. But it can sometimes offer something that is harder to find than it should be: the experience of being met without an agenda, attended to without demand, and given enough stillness to feel what your own system is actually doing.

That was what moved me in my first session, before I had any language for it.

It remains the reason I continue to practise this work today — and the standard I try to hold myself to each time someone lies down on the table.

I offer sessions for adults and children. If you are curious about whether this approach might be useful for you, please feel free to get in touch. I am happy to talk through questions before you book.