Today’s post is a transcription of Episode 35 of The Craniosacral Podcast. Ken DiPersio began his craniosacral studies with John Upledger, taught for his institute for a bit, and eventually went on to study biodynamics with Michael Shea. In the interview he talks about some things he learned from Dr. John and Michael, and shares some insights into how he currently views and teaches the work. I received a good deal of positive feedback about this interview, so I thought it would be a good one to put into print for those of you who might like to have it in a readable form. Special thanks to Sarah Tivoli for doing this transcription.

RYAN: Today we will hear from Ken DiPersio. Ken has quite the resume as a craniosacral practitioner and teacher. As you’ll hear, Ken started with the Upledger Institute and taught there for a while. He shares some great stories about his interactions with Dr. John that I think you’ll really enjoy. Ken then went on to study biodynamics with Michael Shea and eventually develop his own curriculum, bringing together the best of what he learned in both worlds. Ken talks about some really cool stuff in this interview, getting into the details of how he sees the relationship between biodynamics and biomechanics, and elaborates quite a bit about a few biodynamic concepts. Not only is Ken very informative, I find his enthusiasm to be inspiring. You can tell he has really considered some important topics in our field and I think he is working through them nicely. I picked up some great perspectives from my visit with him. He mentions two books in the interview, one by Erich Blechschmidt and one by Dr. Ling, and as usual you will find Amazon links in the show notes to those books.

RYAN: So Ken, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to visit with us here on the podcast. I’ve had a handful of listeners email me requesting to contact you, because they had great experiences with you. And so now here we are, you are in the midst of, it’s not officially a hurricane, is it? It’s still a storm, or…?

KEN: No, I think its gonna make landfall as Hurricane Hermine up near Tallahassee. I’m a little south of that so I’m not feeling too many ill effects.

RYAN: So Ken, for our listeners who may not know you or haven’t heard your name (I recognize your name going back for almost 20 years now,) but for those who might not know you, why don’t you tell us about your journey through the work and what it has meant to you, key players, and I’ll just let you run with it.

KEN: Ok! Well, I am sorry to hear it was only a handful of people asking about me, or maybe a couple of handfuls, or maybe hands and feet! But we’ll go with that, that small handful too. And thank you for all those handfuls of people!

I want to start way back as I think it’s really important about what happened later. I lived in a really small rural setting when I grew up. And I was left to my own devices for most of the days. I remember being by myself in the woods or walking around the 60 square mile town, just on my own as early as six or seven years old. It was a safe environment; there were no worries about worldly things. Well, it turned out not so safe. That town was Sandy Hook, CT and there was a tragedy there not too long ago which all of us that lived there and grew up there and went to school there still remember. The reason I want to talk about that is because, as I look at what I do now, I’m kind of understanding having a foundation of stillness. It wasn’t that I was alone, just solitary at times, and in the natural order of things. I was outside not on electronic equipment, watching tv, or anything like that. I mean if I had a transistor radio I was lucky.

Spending a lot of my upbringing in quietness and stillness and then coming out into the world and moving to Florida was a big shock. I remember coming to St. Petersburg, Florida for the first time and thinking, “This is a huge, huge city!” And, well, it isn’t. I live here now in St. Petersburg, and it is not a huge city. As I went through my life I did a lot of different things and none of them were what I was supposed to be doing. I really believe that we all have a passion, we all have a path that if we travel on it we are in the flow of our natural order. None of that stuff worked out, and none of it was very still, and it was very stressful most of the time.

So I walk into a massage school on the advice of a friend of mine. She said, “You gotta be a massage therapist, you have good hands.” And when I walked in I felt like I just arrived home. It was a school that advocated yoga everyday, so before we did class we would do a yoga practice for half an hour. There was also an extra 200 hours worth of work offered in the curriculum above and beyond the norm you would take for licensure. It was called “present-centered awareness.” For me, it was like coming back to the way I used to be. It wasn’t something totally out there and new. I remembered this from when I was growing up, how to be still and how to be present for pretty much everything and everyone, but especially your client. I happened to take the last course they offered in that.

I got my license, I went to work at the student clinic for $5/hr in 1991, because I was sort of helping them and I was sort of overseeing the clinic. And my very first client was a nurse who said, “You should do Uplinger’s work.” And I was like, “Who’s Uplinger?” And she said, “He’s some doctor who invented a kind of therapy that gets to the causes of dysfunction, instead of treating symptoms around the body.” And I said, “Well that sounds good.” At the same time I was training with Judith Walker-Delaney, who was Judith Walker at the time, for neuromuscular certification. That’s a lot of doing, and that’s a lot of activity. I was getting some results with that, but my hands were getting tired. So I thought, “I’d like to get to the cause of the problem.” I’d like to think of myself as curious, so I went to the first ‘share care’ that Upledger offered in Sarasota in 1991. And they used me as a model in the class, so the teacher called me up to the front and said, “Okay, we are gonna work on you!” So I stood there and had this big, huge unwinding somato-emotional release. And as we went through that, she had to get some other people who were there to get me on the table. It was so amazing, and that hooked me. I went home and I learned how to do stillpoint inductions and I started doing them on everybody I treated, which was about three people a week at the time. And everybody loved it! So I was like, “I gotta learn that work.”

So I signed up for Upledger’s level 1 course and I didn’t have enough money. I paid for half of it and so they said, ”You can pay us the rest later.” I took level 1 and had amazing experiences learning that work and then plugging it right into practice. I am a therapist that’s going to tell new therapists that if you plug it in, it’s gonna work a lot of the time. Sometimes you might not get the result you are looking for, but if you plug it in you will get better at it, and it starts to work more and more often. When it came time to take CST 2, I didn’t have any money so I had to wait two years. I was all excited and I wanted to take it, but I didn’t have any money, it was like ‘93 at the time, so I had to wait. But when I look back at it now, having the two years to practice the fundamentals over and over again (I would just throw the book up on my clients’ chests and practice) was in hindsight, very good for me. I was slowing down and letting the work percolate. I could get really good at the basics and was understanding the foundations. So that, I think, is really important.

Level 2 went well, and when it came time to take SomatoEmotional Release 1 (SER 1), I had the money and I signed up. So I went to that course, and Upledger was teaching it. I had met him once before. One of my first people that I treated was being treated by him so I went over to the institute with her, one time, and met him. That was it, just met him. He was sort of not very accessible. And then, so, SER 1, Upledger stands up in front of 130 people and he looks into the audience and he starts talking. And within a few minutes he walks off the stage, and walks right up to me, and puts his hands on me and says, “Now this guy doesn’t want me to tell you guys anything about him!” And I was like, “Uh oh.” He picked me out of the crowd and I was like, “Wow, the big guru touched me.” It was a big thing to have that many people in a class, all excited. I mean it was a very supportive environment for the work, as you can imagine.

I went through SER 1, SER 2, and it came time to take Advanced level 1, and again I was short of funds, it was like $1500, and a week off from work, and you have to stay at a hotel, and he only teaches one a year, and there is a five year waiting list. Well, okay, so I went to put myself on the list, and they said I have to send a photograph, of myself, and a letter as to why I want to be in his class. And so, I’m like, “alright” and I sent off the only photograph I had laying around. It was of me standing in a full Turkish costume with a doumbek drum in my hands. I was standing next to a belly dancer because I drummed for belly dancers in a middle eastern band. So I sent that to them, and I got a call from his assistant about a week later asking if I could possibly attend the next class. It was in a week or two or something. I was like, “Seriously, what happened to the waiting list?” She responded, “I don’t know, he told me to call you.” I asked, “Why?” And she responds, “I don’t know, I just do as I’m told…You’re coming, right?.” So I ended up going to Advanced 1 because I sent him a silly picture. It was then that I realized he had a pretty good sense of humor about a lot of things. And we got connected during that experience and then at the next one. And I ended up being in, I guess at the Institute it is called the, ‘A Group,’ or used to be called the A Group. If you were in the A Group you could kinda call him at home and he would call you to do stuff with him. And so I started being supported in the work in a way, having that sort of mentorship.

I think that is really important as you are learning a new skill, as you are learning this skill which for me is more than just massage therapy it’s a life skill. It’s not just about how you are going to get somebody’s symptoms better, but how you are going to live your life differently. So that’s the long and the short of that.

After Upledger, I did end up teaching for Upledger 50 or 60 classes, CST 1, and then went out basically on my own. I loved that man, though. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have gotten to the place where I didn’t even know I intend to go. He did that, he took people and saw their potential and paid attention. You know, he didn’t have to see you every day to feel you were connected at some level. And when I called him and said can you help me with client so and so, most of the time he would say “yes.” If he said no, it was because he didn’t have any interest in it. So I admire him, I admire what he did. He brought the 10 Step Protocol into the hands of therapists, out of the hands of DOs who aren’t doing it much anymore. So throughout this interview I might throw out his name several times because he was one of my earliest influences in this work. I happened to get him, and when you happen to get him … well, you get some of what he was in your DNA, into the matrix. And I admire that, you can’t admire everything about everyone or everything he did, but the long and the short of it, is he helped me become the therapist that I am.

From there, to make a long story short, after teaching on my own for a while I needed more. I asked Dr. Upledger if he would teach what these other rhythms were that I was feeling in the body. And he said “No, I am not gonna teach you that.” So I ended up going back, after taking a visceral class with Michael Shea in like 93 or 94 or something, I ended up going back and finding him on the internet and seeing that he was teaching this biodynamic foundational course. And for me, I had 18 years experience of Upledger, and I was gonna go back and start from square one and go down this other track. I did the three years, 700 hours study with Michael and it changed the way I practiced again. So another big influence in my life would be Michael Shea, as he brought me into the realm of biodynamic craniosacral therapy. One thing I have a hard time with, is when you learn biodynamic work it’s really difficult to just not bring it into the hands of therapists. I “get” it, and then I want to teach it. I can’t just go back into biomechanical classrooms and say, “This is all I’m gonna teach you.” For me there is no dividing line between the two. You can practice biomechanically with biodynamic intention. And when it’s time we can get more into details about that, but this was my trajectory when I went through, now, about 27 years of practice.

Currently, I am working at a place called MindSpa, with George Rosel. He is a PhD of psychology doing neurofeedback and mind mapping, and we have been able to measure the effects of cst on the brain. While I’m working on the EEG, it’s immediate. When I say I am gonna do this, its readable on an EEG machine. His mouth nearly fell open when we did it the first time. He was like, “This is amazing, every time you said you have read something in the body and you are going to do something, it changes the brain waves and the way they are functioning.” So not only are we getting structural changes but we are getting functional changes in the way the brain is operating. I’m really excited about that.

RYAN: Alright, let me back up a little bit here. There are a couple things that lead to questions in my mind. First off is that for many people, beginning to teach for the Upledger Institute can end up being a life-long track. So I’m curious as to why you decided to step away at what might be considered kind of an early stage and do your own thing.

KEN: Well, I don’t know if it was my decision or a decision I was forced into. At the Institute people came and went all the time. There are some people at the Institute now, I just heard of one the other day, who was there when I was there, but people came and went. And Upledger, the way I saw him operate and the way I saw people come and go, my take on it is, that if he kept himself surrounded by the same people for 30 years or 40 years, then there would be no room for anyone else to come in. He said pretty often that, “The only thing constant around here is change.” So, I could say I wanted to hang on to this position, this lofty position as an Upledger instructor for my whole life. I could also say if I did that I would not have learned biodynamic work because that wasn’t allowed in the classroom. When I asked him about it he said “no.” I am that passionate, emotional person, I’d get up to teach and tell and great story about a great thing that happened in my treatment room and it would bring tears to my eyes and to the eyes of the people in my CST 1. And I sort of got in trouble for all that, I’d just let it all hang out. It was the first teaching I had ever done. I was so scared the first time I was dropping things all over the floor.

And since then, I look back now, given time to perfect my abilities at being a better instructor, I probably would have stayed on a little longer. But there are so many people coming down the track, that I wasn’t as good as I could have been, and I wasn’t as good as I am now at getting things across to people. In large part, I was an inexperienced novice teacher and I could see where there were people coming along who had better skills and more experience in doing it, and I am really happy they gave me to opportunity to do it for as long as they did. And I’m really happy they, in a sense, let me go. They let me go, and that helped me to move on to other things.

RYAN: Last time we talked, I thought you said you had worked some with Dr. John towards the end of his life. Is that correct?

KEN: Oh yes, yes! I was doing biodynamic training with Michael Shea in Jupiter, Fl. and John lived something like 15 minutes away, so I called the Institute to find out where he was and what he was doing. They had Lisa, his wife, call me back and I asked if I could come over and work with him. So I would go over and work with him maybe three or four times over the course of a year. And he had some difficulties, he had some health problems, but the last thing he ever said to me was another teaching moment:

I was sitting there in his midline, and the midline synchronized up to the brainstem and I told him. I turned to him and said, “Dr. John I think you just synchronized your midline up to the brainstem.” And he, up to that point, from the few times I had been there to see him, he really didn’t make any sense when he spoke, he had some sort of dementia or difficulties in that way. But his eyes brightened and he looked at me and said, “DiPersio, I think you are going to have to get whole lot higher than that.” Meaning, to me, that dementia isn’t gonna be found below the brainstem, you gotta get up into my head. I then got so excited because the master came alive and told me something to do, that I jumped up and went to the head of the table and put my hands on his head. Within a minute he jumped off the table and ran out of the room. So that was the last thing he ever said to me, that was the last time I ever saw him.

What it taught me is was … if you are in, stay in. There is no reason to get up and move and disturb the connection that I already had. I lost the connection by getting up and getting excited. We achieved the connection with the midline only after about a half hour sitting completely still. I took that with me, and use that now in the way I teach and the way I treat. When I am absolutely sure we are done, I wait five more minutes. And I ask, “is there anything else” before I’ll get up or move.

RYAN: Wow, what a story!

KEN: I’m excited that in 27 years I have some stories that I can use, to highlight the efficacy of the work.

RYAN: You used a phrase that I have used too, that is, to work from a biomechanical framework with a biodynamic intention. I wonder if you can talk a little about that, because one of my interests has been how we can blend these different approaches to the work in a more seamless understanding of the strengths of them both.

KEN: Yea, let’s talk about that because I think it is really important, especially for new therapist coming along. First of all, if we go back in history, Dr. Sutherland found the Breath of Life and started using it in practice and teaching it to students, in 1948 or so. It created a kind of schism in his cranio-osteopathy and cranial field work. There were those who wanted to explore this idea of synchronizing the body and the consciousness to this Breath of Life rhythm. And there were those who advocated continuing these biomechanical techniques. We don’t have to get into who was who, but it seems as though in the world today, we have these biomechanic practitioners who say you don’t need to learn or do, or that you want to keep away from the biodynamic aspect of things, that they are not compatible. And people, like Upledger Institute, they teach basically biomechanical work and don’t explore the world of biodynamics. There seems to be a focus that these are two separate models, to be clear. I would say biomechanical work emphasizes action, or doing, in a treatment. You study and treat components and you may be aware of the whole, but your attention is focused on the parts, the components, the fibers, the structures, the orientation in the near environment, etc.

But, how does what you’re doing on the liver affect every cell in the body? Upledger advocated this idea of walking into a treatment room and doing your treatment from a neutral place. That’s great, but neutrality, getting to neutral, implies that there is activity on either side of that neutral. There is still activity happening, and you are trying to come within a space in between activities so that you are as still as you can be. Stillness takes neutral to another depth. Stillness is deeper. Dynamic stillness is what everything arises out of, so there is no activity anywhere in the depth of dynamic stillness. It’s the void. You are not after neutral, you are after dynamic stillness to try to create change. In biodynamic work, we would want to emphasize stillness or ‘just being’, not doing. Every time you do something you are taking the focus into the doing and losing your state of just being. If you immerse yourself in the whole, in the dynamic ever shifting relationship between you and your client, you are able to perceive activities not just in structure … like the activities of cells and osmosis, the fluid bodies, the energy bodies and structures, and time as well. From conception throughout their life, to the moment they are laying on that table, it’s all right there, and it’s not really available unless you are still.

In biodynamic work the idea is to take neutral to a depth level of dynamic stillness and be still. So I think where we can have a biodynamic intent to support biomechanical work is by something that Michael Shea brought to my attention. It is in his book, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy 1, the first book, he used a term “touch and go.” It’s when we are able to be still and see something occur and then move away from it without taking it into a cascading series of events. For example, “I’m gonna hold this and follow that and hold it again and wait for that to release and hold it again and go, and figure it all out.” Just to make contact, that is doing. Once you make contact, GO! Then if you are asked by that body you are touching to open a window and become aware of, let’s say, a tight frontal bone at the coronal suture, and then they start to allow you to do a simple thing like a frontal decompression, a frontal lift. You can do that, but as soon as you arrive at a limit, go again, leave, move your attention out to the horizon and let things unfold in their own time. Being able to do one thing and not travel down a path in relationship to that thing is very difficult for most therapists, and was very difficult for me. It was like I was expecting something to happen, and then I was expecting to know what to do next, and then we go down that train of thought. In biodynamic work, we certainly understand that a thought can change everything, so we try to be thoughtless. In biomechanical work we tend to have a lot of thoughts about what we’re doing and where we are needing to get to.

I think that the techniques that are taught in Upledger work are fantastic. It’s great work. The techniques that they come up with, Becker’s Hold and other things, are very effective. And they could be even more effective if we can take a step back and have a biodynamic intent. It’s a whole, dynamic, ever-shifting body. When I tell people what we are going to do, I am not telling them we’re going to get them to a state of health. What I tell people we are going to try to do, is get them in a place where they can shift effortlessly out of stress and into health because that’s what the body is designed to do. The body is designed to dynamically shift and change, moment to moment, forever and ever, as long as you are alive. It’s when it gets restricted, when there’s trauma imprints or something in the system that won’t let you bring yourself back to balance, if we can help someone release those things, then they will automatically bring themselves back into health. As I understand it, this was Sutherland’s model, this is a biodynamic or osteopathic model. We’ll do some small changes to put things into balance and then the body will take care of itself.

I believe that you can combine these things, and you can combine it really effectively, but we need to know both. You can’t combine biomechanical work if you don’t know techniques. And you can’t really have biodynamic intent if you have never learned that. So I teach both in my curriculum. In my biomechanical track there are biodynamic aspects of the work that teach people how to do those techniques in a more effective way. So, what do you have to say about that, Ryan?

RYAN: You are giving well-spoken voice to my general belief about the relationship between biomechanical and biodynamic work. I really feel like my practice has been enhanced by an experiential and theoretical understanding of them both. And in my teaching, in my school, I teach both as well. And one of the growth points for me over the years, is trying to learn how to help students understand when it might be an appropriate time to lean more in one direction than the other. And so, in a typical treatment I do about 70-75% with more of a biodynamic mindset/attitude and depending on the client the rest of that time will be spent interacting more directly maybe with tissues, action, or focused intent … sometimes just to start a conversation if the body seems to be kind of stuck in a way that it could use a little bit of stimulation to give benefit. But I have limited that more and more over the years, and try to be very careful and precise when I do choose to put something into the body … any kind of intention.

KEN: Well, I’ll have to go back to Upledger for a moment with that, because I have a quote of his that says, “The shortest distance between two points in intention.” Intentions are extensions of a thought. We have a thought and then we intend to have something occur. And if the body has 80-100 trillion cells all of them busy doing what they do, then you can make a case that the autonomic system is doing trillions of things per second in the body. And my thoughts and my intentions are big, clunky things that go in there and may have an effect, and may not, depending on what the body wants to receive from me. So you’re right, and I agree with you, I also “do” less and less as time goes by. I would rather hear the body, listen carefully, and have the body tell me what its intention is. How is this body going to use me to support it in its health story, its unfolding? To achieve that, in biodynamic work, we can take a quote from Sigmund Freud, “Evenly hovering attention,” where we sit still and open or un-focus our attention, until the body calls us in and gives us an intention. It would go something like, “Oh man, I’m just finding myself lifting a frontal bone, I haven’t done that in a long time, I didn’t really intend to, but here we are…and I know how to do that.” Kind of like that.

And then I also wanted to go to Blechschmidt’s, The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy, in my view, if you understand how the body is built, you study the embryology, and we have the technology now to understand it a lot better than we did 30 or 40 years ago, then you are gonna understand how to fix it or how its inner workings occur. The recapitulation of embryological patterns is happening in an adult. So if we don’t know anything of how a body is built, because it is basically not taught in current curriculums, then how are we going to understand how it is going to repair itself, because it repairs itself the same way it built itself. So when we develop a really good working knowledge of embryology we get called into understanding the body in whole new ways. I recommend that book, Bleichschmidt’s, The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy, it will open minds and abilities if we are not clear on some of this embryological formational/foundational stuff. It will be amazing where it takes you in the body.

So, yes, I think if you talk to a lot of long term CST people they probably will say they do less and less over time. I remember going to Upledger’s house one day, he had a client coming and he wanted us to sit in. We were all sitting around in a circle and watched him work with a woman and she lay on the table and he put his head, his forehead, basically right down on her forehead or close enough. And he held on to her head for about 40 minutes, and then he popped up and he said, “Okay, here’s what’s going on.” He didn’t talk during it, he didn’t do anything, he didn’t move, and I was like, “Woah, that was different.” I had the sense that there is more to it than the 10 Step Protocol. And there is more to it than being able to act like a mechanic and work with just mechanical techniques. There is stuff going on in there I want to understand. So looking at Blechschmidt’s book and taking some biodynamic work will help us to understand the body at its foundational levels.

RYAN: Something that I heard Michael say and, he might have been quoting Dr. Jealous is that, “We are really more embryology that we are anatomy.” And when my awareness shifted into really seeing those formative forces that were not honoring the biological divisions that I was taught in massage school or acupuncture school, something really rich opened up for me. And I found the capacity to harness healing forces really grow for me. And you get the questions, “Why is there such an emphasis on embryology,” and you addressed that very well. I think there are several sides to it. One of them is when we start really getting deeply into the fluids of the body, start to really rest with this incredibly beautiful unfolding of fluid life going on in front of us, it can, I don’t want to say it is confusing, but it can challenge our ability to believe what we are feeling. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the anatomical structures we are told are there. But if we look at the embryo, it is giving us this dance of life and it follows certain patterns and makes certain formations and shapes, and we see that unfolding in the adult and can get a sense and say, “Okay, this is alright, this movement may feel a little foreign but it is very ancient for me and my body.” I can go with that, I can touch and go and recognize this is an embryological language that is speaking now.

KEN: Yea, I like that. The language of the embryo is put forth in that adult, if we are there to listen to it. We can understand it and it is not something that is emphasized, or taught at all in schooling. My eight year old son is home-schooled, so we have the opportunity to teach him whatever we want and the basics, of course, to satisfy the government. But he knows where his parts are, he knows how many vertebrae that he has, he knows where his liver is, he knows when he has a headache, or that a rash might be his large intestine. He’s sort of getting this knowledge because he is around it all the time. So unless you are in a household with people like this, you don’t really get it and then you don’t really know.

I like what you say about these fluids and the morphology of the developing embryo, the shapes and the location of things, determining what they will be. The metabolic fields are sub microscopic activity of the fluid body. The stem cell travels through this field in a way that it is affected by this energetic field in the fluids that it is travelling through and it changes the shape of the cell and creates different kinds of compressions and different orientations that allow that cell to specialize and move out of its generalities into a special cell. For instance Bleichschmidt says, “All fascia, all collagen in the body is formed in a field called the retention field.” So if we know this and we have a body, and I have seen this with Upledger with fresh cadaver dissection class, it there is a body that’s building extra fascial fibers to support, let’s say, a really heavy large intestine, the body, to build those fibers, has to ramp up and activate the retention field activity. As an embryo we are building things rapidly at 100%, as an adult we are in maintenance mode.

When forces like trauma forces come into the body, it triggers us to build stronger, heavier-duty connections and defenses. Years or months down the road people have problems and someone comes along and tries to stretch that fascia and that fascia doesn’t want to be stretched, it wants to protect. So we’re trying to use a biomechanical technique to change an embryonic catharsis of the fascia and create a safer body. So in a sense biomechanically we are getting in the body’s way of keeping itself safe. Understanding this from an embryological view is crucial to get the body back into balance and get it out of survival mode and get it back into joy, love, compassion, the human essential self.

One more thing before I forget, on fluids: I came up with an analogy and I want people to know this analogy. I talk like this with my clients every day. And when I thought of this, I talked to Michael Shea about it and he was like, “Yea, that’s okay to say.”

I was confused about these different fluid patterns in the body. The cs rhythm I was well versed with, but this whole thing about mid tide fluctuations and long tides and primary respiration, I needed to understand how it all fits together. So, one day, since I live out by the ocean, I went to the beach and these waves were coming in. The cs rhythm that Upledger teaches us to feel, that is difficult at first for some people to feel, is like ocean waves. If you go to the beach and you stand in the water and close your eyes, you are going to feel the waves moving your body and moving around your body, and if they are coming 3-5 seconds apart and then returning back into the ocean, it’s kind of like the cs rhythm. They are easy to feel, they are right and the surface and they are moving you. They are moving you individually and moving you as a therapist, so it’s right there on the surface, and if it’s not, there is something that is stopping it from getting to the surface.

And then I thought about the mid tide fluctuations. The tidal flows are different from the waves. High and low tide is still a movement of the ocean, but they’ve nothing really to do with the waves so much, as the moon’s gravitational pull on the planet. So I thought, “Well, if I went to the beach and stood in the water and closed my eyes, would I know if the tide was coming in or going out?” And the answer is, “No!” How would I know if the tide is going in or out? Well if I stood there for an hour and the water got deeper, maybe I would know that the tide was coming in. But it’s reliant on looking around and sensing everything around me. It’s not something I can stare right at. I can’t stare at the ocean and say the tide is going it or the tide is going out. I need references. So when we talk about mid tide in the body, which is where one can hold trauma patterning, physical and emotional trauma patterning, we are in tidal flows that resemble high or low tide. It’s a longer excursion, about 2-3 cycles/min.

And then I wondered where the long tide or Breath of Life, primary respiration, fit in? And where that fits in, is when you look up in the sky and you are standing in the ocean and you see the moon in the bright of day, you would really have no idea that the gravitational pull of the moon is what’s moving the whole ocean. And that’s something we can’t interfere with. We might be able to build walls to keep tides from crashing over our house. And we might be able to stop waves from coming on the beach by building breakers and barriers, but we can’t really do anything about the moon’s gravitational pull on the planet. That’s immutable. We can’t change that. And that moon’s gravitational pull on the planet in the delivery of life force into the fluid by primary respiration. The only thing that interferes with that is death. And that is life itself coming into the 100 trillion cells.

So when Sutherland found the rhythm in 1948, he started referencing it and he started using it therapeutically, in my view he was synchronizing attention to the life force itself as it supported every cell in the body and got every cell in the body back into synchrony with it. When that occurred, all the restrictions in the tides and the waves started to drop away. So the osteopaths said, “The health is in the body.” It’s just buried under, maybe, an avalanche of stress and strain and trauma events. But if we can clear that stuff out, that body will return itself to balance. And when it does that, it is finding its embryological imprints for health. In the embryological view, if you don’t follow the original patterning for health, as an embryo, you most likely won’t live. If you do live, you will be born with some serious issues. So if we can get an adult body to re-synchronize itself to its original embryological patterns for health, that are always there, just buried or not in synchrony, then we are going to have some great successes with people.

So I hope that helps listeners understand, or maybe come to some sort of understanding about these tidal flows that people keep talking about.

RYAN: Yea, that’s a great way of explaining it. You took it a step further than other explanations I’ve heard. You’ll hear it being explained that the cs rhythms will be the waves on the surface and then the mid tide would be the surge, or that kind of lateral movement of the water beneath the waves, and then primary respiration would be the night and day tide. But I liked the way that you explained it, I think that’s even more accurate to what is really happening. I’m gonna take that, Ken, and use it for myself!

KEN: Yea, take it! You know what? Everybody in Florida that I work on can relate. I live on the coast, people go out to the beach, they understand it. I was out on a yacht for work one day and I asked the captain if the tide was coming in or going out, can you tell by just looking at the water? And he goes, “Nah, I just look at that piling over there.” So it really hit me, that even someone who is on the water all the time, it isn’t easy to feel the tides. You’ve got to be really still and understand it from a whole other perceptual basis.

RYAN: It’s about your point of reference, you know. That brings me into something that I really love talking about and that’s the perceptual zones. On one of your videos on your website, you touch a little bit on some zone practice, I think you are talking about working with the heart during that video. I do a lot of zone work with my students, in almost all of the classes, spending some time evaluating what’s happening in these different zones. And I think the more comfortable we get shifting the width of our frame of reference and the depth, the better we get at identifying where we are at, and ultimately sinking into a place of deeper stillness. I’m wondering if you would want to speak any more about the zones.

KEN: Sure. I first got introduced to zone awareness by Michael Shea, I think it was 2007. I had already been a practitioner with Upledger since ‘91, but it was new to me and I did, I think it was, a four day class and we did zone awareness exercises in the morning and the afternoon. It was a class of around ten people and it would take us two hours afterwards to talk about what we were able to perceive; it was that big. I’ve come to find out that the process of talking about it afterwards has a name, ‘conversational analyses’. Gotta have a name for it!

Zone A: Zone A is everything inside your skin, the structures, fluids, fields, ideas, patterns, and organizational stuff. The “stuff of what you are” is in zone A. Your skin contains zone A, so you have this three-dimensionality that’s unique to you. We are all human but we each have our own uniqueness to us.

Zone B: Zone B is the field around you. It’s a projection of all the fields within your body. It’s also (this is amazing to me,) the zone B which holds everything in it that tried to get in but you wouldn’t let it. This can be held in zone B. These are activities and frequencies, and these are measurable. And also, if everything that comes into your inner awareness, into your body has to go through zone B, it gets changed on the way in if your body wants, your field does that. And then when you release something into the world it travels out of you through your zone B before it touches anybody else. So having zone B in pretty good shape is a good idea. It’s like a two foot wide cocoon all the way around your body, and it protects you.

Another interesting thing from embryology is that when you attach to your mother, she begins to do all internal functions for you, except for growth. So you are happy to just grow, and mom is going to do everything as the safe “other” that you attached to. She does the nine systems of the human body, the digestion and elimination and chemistry and all of that, until you can do it yourself. Then you slowly take that ability away from mom and you start practicing as an embryo and doing it yourself. Basically you project all function to the mother. So when you are overwhelmed and you cannot do all the tasks that you need to do as an embryo you project those functions to your mother and your mother does them for you. It’s no different as a child or an adult after you are born. If you are overwhelmed and you cannot do everything that needs to be done your body will try to project that task, that energy, out of itself and out to the mom. And, of course we are not connected to her anymore so those kind of things, those overwhelming forces and emotions and traumas that come into our body. We cannot process them, we cannot dissipate it, we can’t bury it so we project it out into the zone B. The field around you is where a fulcrum for the bodily physical problems are, it could be out in the field. So here we are as a practitioner, trying to peel away layers and get into the body and find the culprit in there that is causing all the trouble, and it’s not in the body at all, it’s out in zone B. If we don’t know how to get into the field around us, and we don’t know how to perceive it then we’ll miss that for people. They really need us to understand what is going on in the field and if we haven’t learned that, then we don’t know.

Zone C: Zone C is the next layer out, which is the near environment. So being able understand how the room you’re in, or the near environment, supports what you do or distracts from what you do. So most massage therapists understand that they want a quiet room and they want to have nice music or they want to have stillness, and they set their room up to support relaxation or something like that. Other practitioners, like PTs, they are at gyms and everyone is working hard and does that support what they do? Of course it does, somebody sees someone else working hard and they will want to do that, join the crowd, so that might support what they do. It’s important to have zone C, the environment that you are in supports what you do. So, does it or doesn’t it?

Zone D: Zone D is probably, to me, the most important one. Being able to be able to sit in zone D is really difficult for some people. Zone D is the horizon. It’s infinite space. It’s losing track of everything. It’s not having one thought or one idea, it’s letting go and surrendering to the “all it is” and allowing the body to unfold itself in its own time. And I believe that’s where Freud was when he sat listening to his patients drone on about their problems and he would turn and say, “Tell me more about that,” when something brought his attention from the horizon into an awareness that the person was even there.

So being able to easily transition between these zones means that you will be able to perceive what’s going on with the person in your hands, from any one of those zones or from all those zones at once. And that speaks, again, to combining biomechanical and biodynamic work. We need to be able to, if they need us to, lift and hold a frontal bone, and then look at it from the horizon, and not have to scrutinize what we are doing. So I teach the zones of awareness in every single class, even if it’s a one day class I teach the zones of attention. I think there is nothing more important for a therapist then to be mindful. And it’s a big buzzword these days to be mindful, well, how are you going to get mindful? Somebody told me the other night at my study group, “Well, I tried to meditate but I’m not very good at it.” I responded “What if you had an exercise to do that could take you through a series of things to focus and concentrate on to bring you into a mindful state?” She was like, “Yea, that sounds better than me just trying to be still. I can’t sit still.”

As I went through the trajectory of my work, I might have thought I was being mindful when I was working with Upledger, but I understand it from a whole different perspective now. I know he was doing it. So my mission, if I have one, is to put it in every single class I teach. And teach everybody, including my clients how to do mindful zone awareness. I made a cd that I could hand out fairly easily to clients and students. I made it fairly inexpensively so everybody who wants one can get one and listen to it on the way to work! I mean people say, well, “You aren’t going to zone out on the way to work.” I’m like, “When I’m in zone D I’m aware of everything, I don’t actually zone out, I zone into the interrelated wholeness of everything.” I might be driving over the Skyway Bridge on my way home and feel what’s going on, or understand what’s going on without looking in the rear view mirror. And then I’ll look and see what I was already aware of. That awareness is what’s going to bring us to new levels of support for people who need it. I highly recommend that people go through the zones of attention in specific ways, you said the one you listened to was about touching the heart or about the heart, but you can go through the zones and look at anything you want to look at from these different zones of awareness and see vast, complex, different things you’ve never seen before.

I’ll give you an example because I think it’s important. I taught for Cross-Country Education on the road, touring for seven or eight years, and I had one day classes, so I had six hours to really get people to get it. So we would do zone awareness in the morning. I would take people through basic zone awareness exercises, looking for the midline and the fluid body. And would do the body scan in the beginning and went through the zones and 90-100% of the time people would come up to me afterwards, on their break, and say, “My hip pain went away,” “My headache that I came in with is gone,” “My body feels like it’s floating, and I feel so much better, what was that?” When you go through the zones of attention it’s not just about being able to understand other people, the people you are treating, but you begin to understand yourself, how you are organized.

I’ll bring up just a short thing to help people understand this. Dr. Heisenberg, the quantum physicist, in his error-disturbance relationship, which is also called the uncertainty principle, said the act of observing something changes it. And people know this, they may not know it’s quantum physics, but we understand, as biodynamic therapists, that if I see it, it’s like taking it from the back-burner in my nervous system where it got put because there wasn’t enough energy in the system to manage it when it showed up. Bringing it up for observation, looking at it one more time and asking “Is there something that the nervous system can or wants to do about this right now?” And then it does, or it doesn’t, but often times it does. So why not go through the zones of attention? You will see stuff you never noticed before, because there wasn’t any awareness, you weren’t looking from the right point of view. And then the act of observing it can change it. I bring that quantum physics principle into my classes. We need to get more mindful of who we are and how we are organized and then bring that into the treatment room.

So I hope that helps with the zones, and I’m glad you are doing it, and let me ask you this Ryan, I got that from Michael Shea, and we did it in every class for three years, morning and night. I am wondering if there are any other instructors, folks out there, that are teaching that. Is that part of the normal biodynamic curriculum you’ve seen?

RYAN: Yea, I have seen that brought into the classroom with other people in the biodynamic sphere. Some emphasize it more than others. I know Michael used to emphasize it pretty strongly when I was spending more time in the classroom with him. I still emphasize it strongly. But one of my big influences is Dr. Jealous, and of course, like many of us, it’s been in an indirect manner through cds and I’ve also had a lot of access to workbooks from his classes. He really emphasizes zones, so I have spent many many hours listening to his cds and learning about some perspective of zones. But I think one of the key things to consider when we are working from these different perceptual frameworks is really learning to extend our sensory mechanism into that space, to feel into that space.

For many people learning to feel the air outside of the building they are in, that can be a little bit of a stretch at first, but when they really start to settle and get some support from the group, it’s absolutely fascinating the light bulbs that turn on, and the sense of real expansion that comes into people’s lives and experience when they can broaden out into the natural world and stabilize themselves, feeling spatial movement covering such a broad plane. We are given gifts of new awareness of how much bigger we can be and we also often learn that the larger our perceptual frame, the greater the potency of the forces we can interface with, and the broader out we go.

KEN: I like that! There’s more potential, right?

RYAN: Yes. And you can feel it in the room when you are taking the room through this practice. I go really slow and methodically. We will spend ten minutes in one zone, ten minutes in the next and gently broaden out. As I ‘open the gates’ to the next opening you can feel the vitality come into the room and shifting begin to occur within people’s systems and with clients as well, when you are at the table. So I really like to emphasize that feeling part of it when I work with the zones, you know, people get all kinds of information and so people will see things and get good intuitive hits when they broaden out to different perspectives too.

KEN: So that reminds me, and thank you for triggering this: embryologically and the morphology and the developing system. We always go through two phases, one is compression. Compression is like an ignition into expansion, and you mentioned the word expansion. I tell my students that in the body, all trauma has compression, so an aspect of trauma is compression. It doesn’t have to be an extreme, overwhelming event, it can be any kind of compression that inhibits our ability to expand and grow. So as we touch a body and we expand our attention, we’re expanding, as you said, the room. The room expands, and the body wants to expand out of its compression, its designed to do so, but it’s holding itself back, for whatever reason, perhaps safety reasons. I find that to be true many times, the fear, “If I let go of this, its going to hurt me worse than if I hold onto it.” And I love what you said, that when you expand it’s like you have more power to interface with more things.

At one point in time through the class meditation I ask people when they get out to zone B, I say, “Try to sense the zone B field next to you and all the zone B fields in the room and with your eyes closed. In you minds’ eye, are we a bunch of balloons touching each other and bouncing off each other? Or, can we make a conscious decision to open up those boundaries and let ourselves connect with each other in a way that will help us learn and grow and heal?” And it’s very rare that people stay a balloon and bounce around. People want connection … it’s embryological. When you come down the fallopian tube into the uterus, looking around for connection, if you don’t get it you will die. We strive for connection. We happen to be in a field where people are coming in and saying, “Touch me, connect to me.” And it’s something that’s basic to humanity. And if we do it while being still and not bringing an agenda or protocol into the room with us, then they will invite us in, as deep as they need us to go to get changes to occur in a way that they need them to occur.

In 1962, Dr. Ling came up with a fundamental shift in biology called the association-induction hypothesis. You can read about it in a book called, Life At the Cell and Below Cell Level. And what he found, briefly, is that when he popped a plant or animal cell into a saline solution, before any osmotic changes occurred, some known molecules went through the cell wall. The nucleus of the cell started to respond to the danger outside of the cell. Obviously, this book and also Seifriz’ protoplasm of a slime mold, these kinds of studies that were done with fluids, that show that fluids in the cells and protoplasm in the cells understand what’s going on outside of themselves before any osmotic changes occur. This occurs through frequency responses, so the energy of it. When you walk into the room as a therapist, the fluids of your client are reading who you are and what you bring to the room. So it’s essential for us as therapists to go through the zones of attention or find a way, if not that one, to get into a mindful state where we are no threat and no danger. There is nothing in me that is going to harm you as I walk into the room. We can be walking and talking and still be still in our nervous system. This was a fundamental shift in biology, 1962, it lead to the discovery and the development of the MRI. So without the association-induction hypothesis there wouldn’t be an MRI, but you haven’t heard of it, have ya?

RYAN: Hahaha, nope!

KEN: I know, when I read this book I opened my mouth and said, “Holy moly!” You just don’t hear about it. Often for new information to be accepted in science it is said, “All the old scientists have to die.” The old guard is saying, “No! It’s osmosis that makes these changes.” I have a physician uncle, who is an anesthesiologist, and I asked him how anesthesia works, one day, and he looked at me said, “I don’t know.” I said, “You’ve been an anesthesiologist for 50 years, I just want to know the nuts and bolts, what is the mechanism of anesthesia when you are putting somebody under?” And he said, “Nobody really knows how it works. That’s why we have to try things out and do, like, big huge studies to see how many different people respond, because everybody is different.” In his book, Ling talks about a day to come that we will go to the pharmacy and they with read your frequency responses in your fields and they are going to be able to make you a specific remedy that will help what’s going on with you, and it will be unique to you. Does that sound familiar?

RYAN: Well, aren’t there people already doing transdermal reading to find out where your frequencies need help? I’m not real familiar with that.

KEN: Well, what I am saying is that it’s more eastern medicine.

RYAN: Ohhhh, yea, it’s like reading pulses and getting your pattern.

KEN: Yea, and then make a homeopathic or an herbal concoction that they wouldn’t make for everybody, they make it at different strengths and will tweak it for an individual. Western medicine might actually get there, if they accept some of these fundamental changes that are going on. I sort of blend all this stuff. You know, Dr. Ling wrote that book, and the first chapter is called something like “How to Read This Book” and it is a very very difficult read for someone like me who didn’t do cell biology or chemistry in college, but there is enough in it to open our eyes and say, “It changed the way I walked into the treatment room.” I recommend books and videos like Seifritz’s Protoplasm of the Slime Mold because it changes the way I make first contact and it helps me to become more still. When I understand that I don’t necessarily have to do something, I can be there with somebody and it’s like taking the thought processes of the cerebrum and putting them, surrendering them, away or putting them on hold, and allowing my autonomic nervous system connect, integrate, with their autonomic nervous system. And together, two autonomic nervous systems might be able to do the processing job that one couldn’t do by itself. And I get to watch sometimes, this unfolding of this process where the two nervous systems cooperate with each other to get deep states of healing, ignition of healing processes to occur.

RYAN: Wow, I’m excited to get back in the clinic tomorrow!

KEN: Yea, okay, that’s another way of saying it. I bring up these books that I’ve read even just parts of because it makes me excited to walk into the clinic.

RYAN: So, you said one other thing that struck my mind when you were talking about the fluids responding to frequencies, is how in the clinic the fluids can get so still and settled that any little thought that comes from the mind can seem to put ripples through the fluid field of ourselves or the client. And that extreme state of sensitivity is such an incredibly beautiful place to be at, and to work from, but also takes a certain level of self-understanding. I hesitate to use the phrase “self-mastery” as that can be kind of a loaded term, but we do need to really understand what is emitting from us, from our nervous system, and just the simple thought patterns deeper in our mind – the deep mind resting in the heart. I think that’s one of the gifts of this work. We are basically required to grow ourselves if we want to continue to do this work and be effective with it. So for me too, Ken, it’s a path, a way of life. It’s not just a hat that I put on when I walk into my office. It’s something that infuses every part that I live.

KEN: I agree, and I marvel sometimes at therapists and therapists that are friends of mine that I know who want to have it as a tool in the tool box, when really it’s a fundamental underpinning of the way things work. And we’re getting such a better understanding of that, if we just turned our mind to it and let it in. I find that this becomes difficult for people. I taught the course for Cross Country for eight years. I brought mindfulness into my courses and received feedback that people don’t really want that. And I was asked to cut that out. I believe it is so important, though. Do you want to go in with the highest quality of course, where people will walk out and say, “I will go to more classes by this group because I learned amazing stuff” or just recapitulate the western view. So it can be a frustration. But the way I look at it, I had an autistic boy come into my practice, before I knew anything about autism, he walk in autistic and he walked out not autistic. And if that occurred in your practice, wouldn’t you want to understand how that could occur? And then want to have it happen again?

So I got very lucky, I think. Well, God was looking out for me and it is what I am supposed to do. I kept getting these opportunities, from, say, somebody like Upledger and also my clients. Upledger said, “Everybody who lays on my table teaches me something about how to work with the body.” And that was well along in his career. He was the kind of guy that if you gave him a book to read he would flip through it and hand it back to you and say, “Thank you.” It took him about five minutes and it was amazing because he would grasp what it was basically about. When I went to his garage office there were wall to wall books. The first thing I said when I first walked in was, “Have you read all these?” And he looked at me with this funny look on his face and said, “Why would I have a book if I didn’t read it?” There were thousands and thousands of them. So expanding the mind will, like you said, let you interface with all these ideas. There’s the way we can perceive things now, with technology, that I think is taking us back to a time, say, when we were more in tune with the natural order. For some reason we wanted to try to identify the natural order put it into categories, figure it all out, and get on top of all that, instead of just going with the flow. So we are at a place right now where it is finally coming around and we’re, at least a certain portion of people, are trying to understand it from a perception that, perhaps, used to be the main way that illness used to be treated.

I remember Michael saying that he went to treat this medicine man in the Dakotas. He was invited to go, along with all these other medicine men, to try and help this man. I don’t know how that occurred, but he thought he was just going to be there for a day or two and ended up living there for a week. Everyone lived together, ate together, and meditated together and went through zones and got the man back in the natural order of the zone of health. And it took a week! Who has time to spend like that on their own health? Our culture is really activated and we need some voices of stillness in the culture. So I would say that’s another mission of craniosacral work: to bring stillness into people, even if it’s an hour at a time. Helping people understand that they can be this way, that they can be still and they can make these changes. How many people come into the practice saying, “I’m not going to get better. My doctor told me I’m stuck with it.” Well you know, and your listeners know we can be that light bringing people back into the natural order. We don’t have a thought when we build a body from 1 cell to 80-100 trillion. And as an embryo we don’t think, to my knowledge. Before we have a brain, especially, there is no thinking going on, so how does all that stuff occur if we are not following the natural order of things? Let’s do that in our practice too.

One day I looked outside and I had a client under my hands, and it was a nice, sunny day and I suddenly became aware of molecules of sunlight in the atmosphere bouncing around. They were bouncing around near the trees, and the leaves on the trees were absorbing these photons into themselves, converting light into life. And I sat there for an hour watching this and forgot all about the client. Then she got up after that session and said, “That was the best session I ever had.” And I said, “What happened? I was watching the photons being absorbed by the trees.” So being able to let go of our need to watch everything, and understand everything in a linear fashion, and then having to write notes and keep track is part of the process of moving from purely biomechanical work, where you’re emphasizing action and doing stuff, to purely biodynamic work where you are letting the natural order of things resynchronize an entire system all at once.

RYAN: We have to educate some practitioners that that is, indeed, a responsible way to practice … that we don’t have to be hyper-linear to be practicing with a high level of integrity and responsibility. There is a tremendous therapeutic gift in letting go and going into those states of loose focus and there are signs that back this up from the effects of nature on our nervous system. I kind of see this barrier to entry with some people thinking, “Holy cow this guy just spent 40 minutes just making us feel space, this is not a responsible way to work.” And so we can educate people a little bit better, that actually, it really is. And in some cases you are doing a much better service with a higher level of integrity for the client to work that way, rather than trying to fit them into some kind of a system.

KEN: Right, I would tell my students, and I spent 160 days on the road some years, and I would tell them, I drive around this country a lot, and we are in a car with windows, and we are able to look out, but it’s a stressful situation being on the highway, surrounded by trucks and cars that could swerve and kill you at any moment. So when you see a sign for a scenic overlook and you pull off the highway at the rest stop, the scenic overlook, it isn’t a little box and they don’t make you sit in a small room. They want to give you vast vistas. And when you look out toward the horizon and open your awareness to the enormity of infinite space, it settles the nervous system. And we see it in daily life. If we close ourselves up and in, we get more anxious and more activated sympathetically than when we go to the beach or when we go to the mountaintop or just find some space for ourselves. People say it all the time, “I just need more space, I’ve got to have my personal space or my own space.” People say it all the time and our culture isn’t allowing us to do it as much as we need to as a species. So I hope we are on the right track in getting us back into the natural order of things.

RYAN: I think cranial work is doing an incredible service for different social groups all around the globe. I think it’s a very sacred position that we hold. I’m so honored to be a part of this link between culture and nature, to be a diplomat for nature and the ways of nature for people who may not be as closely tied to it as their bodies might like.

KEN: People talk about the universe conspiring to keep them healthy, or bring them this and that … when I look at that, I want to understand that from a deeper level. I believe that there is a creator, that we were created from the nothing, that everything was created out of the void. It’s not only in the Bible but other literatures, religious and otherwise spiritual literature, that we come out of the void and we return to the void. The void isn’t nothing. It’s nothing, but its everything. It’s the potentiality of everything. So identifying myself with this is important to me as a therapist – that I am not waiting for some chance thing to occur that’s going to make somebody healthy. There are certain natural order occurrences and patterns that have to occur for us to come into being. I want to know what those are and I want to look for them or have them show up in a session. I want to understand that grain of sand that dropped into somebody’s system that’s irritating them like a grain of sand in an oyster, and I want to be able to feel that in my own fluid body because I’m the stillness. So embryologically, the heart is parasympathetic. The heart is the stillness. I want to walk in with my heart open. I want to be the stillness in the room. I want to touch somebody, and if you watch the Seitfritz’ slime mold video you will see, that when two drops of slime mold connect one or the other has to give way to allow for connection. So I want to be the stillness and I want the activation of their system to be the one the gives way and brings people into stillness and into that creation, into that creativity. As you said, it’s great to be in that space, the expanded space, the all that is. If we get the thinking mind out of the way we can achieve that, and I want to reiterate that it takes practice, you can’t just say, “I’m going to leave my baggage at the door.” You know, it doesn’t work that way because our baggage is in the matrix, it’s in the fluids, it’s everywhere. You can’t just think about putting it out there. We, as therapists have to work at that.

That being said, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to people. And also because we talked about it a little bit and you watched some of those videos, I just want to tell people if you want to watch some just got to: KJDtherapy.com.

RYAN: Great! Well, this has been really fascinating. Thanks for sharing so much of your history with us, helping us to understand your interaction with Dr. Upledger, and how you’ve grown into biodynamics. I really relate, Ken, to a lot of what you said. My experience has been very similar, and my attempts to integrate these different approaches have paralleled yours and so I really enjoyed visiting with you. Thank you!

KEN: You’re welcome. I appreciate the opportunity, and if we can get together and talk again, that would be great.

Ryan Hallford is a craniosacral therapist and educator. He offers certification programs in basic and advanced cranial work through the Craniosacral Resource Center in Southlake, TX. www.cranioschool.com