I’ve been listening to a fascinating podcast with Steven Kotler about optimizing human performance. In it, he makes the case that science and psychology straddle the divide between mechanism and metaphor. Kotler firmly embraces the mechanistic because he believes it leads to large scale human transformation. I believe that mechanism and metaphor are the yin and yang of healing--that biomedical mechanisms are utterly inseparable from the metaphoric expression of health.

The work of the Craniosacral Therapist is dual--to perceive the sensations of both the mechanistic and metaphoric to catapult the client’s system into a wild animal way of healing. There is a translation process that happens between the clients’ biology and their biography. The practitioner’s role is to hold both realities until the clients’ system attunes to and integrates these forces.

Mechanical understanding and perceptual understanding are directly proportional. Mutual metaphor between the two is enacted which helps clients integrate body/mind/spirit and invites all aspects of the system to self correct. From the outside the work looks still, but the felt sense of it is highly energized and invigorating. Here, clients can experience a profound return to the cellular flexibility of early life. As the body enters liminal states of awareness, emotions and memories that initiated and/or reinforced the mechanical breakdown often surface to be heard and released.

I have a strong belief that what you can feel you can heal. In this model, metaphor and mechanism are really the same because they are both energetic manifestations of the mystery that is life. We just need to be reminded that they equally co-create our experience.