Taught By: Michael J. Shea, PhD. or Valerie Gora

This course for healthcare and bodywork professionals builds the skills necessary to begin to work with Primary Respiration, a therapeutic, tidal-like movement in the fluids of the body named by Dr. Sutherland, the founder of Cranial Osteopathy. Working with it requires stillness, thinking hands and delicate listening skills. Students will learn clinical practices to sense wholeness moving three-dimensionally in the soma and to palpate slow movements in the fluids of the body that support and restore health.

Also covered will be: appropriate therapist/client boundaries; Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy theory (the view of the body as a primarily a fluid structure of living water, and how it carries its stresses, patterns of resistance and past traumas in these same fluids); palpation of the Long Tide by contact with the shoulder, pelvis, feet, sacrum, and spine. The focus of this class will be on the embryonic development of the body carried forward through life and the clinical implications in the Biodynamic approach to Craniosacral Therapy.