Become a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist

Have you ever…

• listened to the roar of ocean waves and found your body swaying with them?
• wondered at the miracle of a pregnant woman's belly and the new baby
forming within?
• touched someone and wished you could understand more of the mystery
beneath your hand?

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is like a combination of these experiences - an opportunity to touch the mystery more directly, and to be touched by it. And it begins with the tides that are always moving through us and the peaceful stillness that rests beneath them.

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy - Practitioner Training

The Practitioner Training is a comprehensive 700-hour course for anyone who wants to become a professional Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist.

• This training deepens your ability to listen unconditionally to subtle expressions of essential life forces, generated by a deep, inherent organizing principle called "primary respiration," as well as conditional forces due to life experience.

• When you learn to percieve and resonate with health and wholeness, primary respiration shows you and your clients the way to natural and optimal healing. This training may also transform you on a deep personal level.

• When you graduate, you will be eligible for the credentials of RCST^® - Registered Craniosacral Therapist through the Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America (CSTA/NA). www.craniosacraltherapy.org

• This training is a good complement to other therapies you may already know, and you can easily incorporate the skills you will learn into any existing healing practice.

Introduction
Outline of Certification Training
The Teaching Team
Prerequisites to the Training
The Curriculum

Introduction

Perceiving WHOLENESS within yourself and other people is a rare skill in our modern world - different from focusing on what is wrong (or sick or out of alignment) so it can be fixed.

In your Practitioner Training you will learn how to...

• Focus on HEALTH instead of problems or pathologies
• Participate in a resonant field where health is predominant
• Perceive the WHOLE, rather than just parts
• Work with the innate healing INTELLIGENCE of the body
• Begin to acknowledge and support RESOLUTION OF TRAUMA held in the person's body and psyche
• Settle into a quiet state of BEING and establish a SAFE RELATIONAL FIELD, where all of this becomes possible
• More info about Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy

View a 2 minute introduction to the Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy Practitioner Training with Cherionna Menzam-Sills

Outline of Certification Training

As an embryo, you began as a WHOLE, a single life-filled cell. Ideally, you were held and nourished within a loving, welcoming field created by parents and community.

In the training we create a similar field, where you can rest and be nurtured in your learning.

The early part of the training establishes your ability to invite and resonate with health and wholeness. These foundational skills are deepened and reinforced as you progress to perceive and palpate more specific motions, structures, and functions within the whole.

In the first modules you will learn t0...

• Enhance your ability to settle deeply within yourself
• Establish relationship based on safe, contactful presence with and without touch
• Shift your focus to a wider view so you can perceive health and wholeness
• Sense and support fluid movement and stillness
• Appreciate the power of being rather than doing
• Practice perceiving subtle rhythms of primary respiration called mid-tide and long tide

The Teaching Team

Your teaching team - the instructor and the teaching assistants (TA's) - have all graduated from the Practitioner Training and are Registered Craniosacral Therapists with experience from their own professional practices. As an added bonus for our trainings, Franklyn Sills, founder of Craniosacral Biodynamics, will present once by Skype in each module.

Franklyn Sills (www.craniosacral-biodynamics.org) is a pioneer in developing Biodynamic understanding in craniosacral therapy and developer of this curriculum over 30 years. Franklyn has developed many of the terms used in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, as well as having taught many of its teachers around the world. He has authored the primary texts used in this training, Foundations in Craniosacral Biodynamics, Vols 1 and 2.

Cherionna Menzam-Sills is the primary instructor for this training. As well as incorporating 35 years as therapist and group leader, and 20 years as cranioscaral therapist, Cherionna has benefitted from her relationship with Franklyn. Frequently assisting and co-teaching with Franklyn in his foundation trainings and post-graduate seminars, as well as through endless discussions on the subtleties of Biodynamic practice, Cherionna's clarity in communicating and practicing the beautiful work has deepened exponentially.

In this training, you will learn under the guidance of one of the foremost pioneers in the field. You will have the rare opportunity to learn within a highly integrated, developmental model.

With its small class size and high teacher/student ratio, this training offers some of the benefits of an apprenticeship. Our intention is to embody the principles of this work as we are with you, so you can learn through resonance, and pass this on to your clients.

• We will guide you with experiential exercises in class and provide feedback and guidance for your practice sessions and assignments outside of class.
• You will also receive brief sessions from us in class and get feedback from us when you practice your skills with us on the table.
• During in-class practice sessions, we will sit close to you, sometimes with our hands over yours, to help you to develop your skills at the table.
• There will be at least one teacher/TA for every five students.

Prerequisites to the Training

• Receive at least 3 Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy sessions from an RCST^® or equivalent (i.e. a graduate of an BCTA/NA approved foundation training). If you have received craniosacral therapy sessions and are unsure about your practitioner's training, please find out about the practitioner's credentials and training and check with us if this is sufficient for the purpose of preparing for this training.
It is important for you to experience the work in your body so that you begin to understand what you are committing yourself to.
• Attend an Introductory Seminar. Or receive at least 1 of the 3 sessions from the instructor if possible.
• Attend an interview with the instructor and one with the administrator of Kutenai Institute of Integral Therapies (KIIT). This can be either in person or by Skype or telephone. It is important that we have a sense of each other before the training starts, to determine if this is the right training for you.
• A basic knowledge of Anatomy and Physiology, which can be obtained by taking a basic introductory, college level course.
• Having previous training and experience as a health care practitioner or therapist can be helpful but is not required. Note that in order to practice professionally after graduation, you are responsible for having a license to touch (e.g. massage license), if required in your locale. The degree of training required varies between regions.

The Curriculum

The curriculum for this training is based on that developed by Franklyn Sills over 30 years. Influenced by principles of psychotherapy, as well as Buddhist/Taoist meditative practices, it emphasizes the importance of the relational field between practitioner and client. A sense of safety is essential for a holistic shift to occur in the client's system. Settling of the relational field is therefore the first step in our treatment, which enables the client's system to settle under the numerous influences of life, to orient to deeper, Biodynamic forces, and to reveal its inherent treatment plan. You will learn to understand, perceive and support this process.

The curriculum includes (but is not limited to):

• Skills of Being: settle into a being state, a state of presence where the personal needs and issues of your small self become less important, and you practice being with what arises
• Relational skills: establish and maintain resonance, safety, and healthy boundaries, grounded in body-centered awareness and being
• Perceptual skills: orient to the whole and recognize specific aspects of the living system; perceive from head, heart, or belly; shift perception as needed; recognize and meet expressions of primary respiration as mid-tide or long tide, a sense of physical body suspended within fluid body suspended within a larger field of the tidal body
• Listening skills: learn to feel and support subtle rhythmic fluctuations, tides and stillness within the body, motion and relationships of specific anatomical structures; differentiate between settling, activation and discharge, contact and dissociation
• Trauma skills: recognize signs of trauma in the body-mind and support their resolution (influenced by the work of Peter Levine and the Karuna Institute's Core Process Psychotherapy)
• Verbal skills: talk with the client to establish and maintain safety and relationship before and during table work; useful comments and questions to ask, to help deepen or integrate a process, access a more resourced or settled state
• Anatomy: Landmarks, mobility, motility, relationships and embryological development of relevant structures:
- Bones (cranium, spine, pelvis, joints, face, TMJ, hyoid)
- Membranes and Fascia, (dural tube, reciprocal tension membrane, horizontal diaphragms, neck, hyoid and pelvis support, pericardium)
- Fluids (CSF, ventricles, circulatory system, venous sinuses)
- Neuro-Endocrine system (brain, autonomic nervous system, cranial nerves)
• Theory: Biodynamic Craniosacral concepts including Health, Wholeness, Resonance, Embryological Imperative, Inherent Treatment Plan, Breath of Life as ordering principle, Primary Respiration, Tides, Neutral, Holistic Shift, Resource, Potency, Matrix, Field, Stillness, Augmentation, Still Point Gateways, States of Balance, Mid-line, Natural and Inertial Fulcrums, 3-Stage Healing Process,Reciprocal Balanced Interchange, Ignition, Original Blueprint
• Specific applications and strategies: Augmentation skills, Lateral Fluctuation, potency in relation to specific joints, cranial sutures or other tissues, Still Point as Gateway to Dynamic Stillness (relating to CV4, EV4), working with TMJ and dental issues, Cranial Base, Spinal and Pelvic issues, Occipital Atlanteal Joint, Venous Sinuses, Nerve Facilitation and chronic pain, working with babies and prenatal and birth issues

The Practitioner Training is based on the teaching approach of Franklyn Sills

www.craniosacral-biodynamics.org

www.karuna-institute.co.uk/bios.html

A brief history of the development of this approach to cranial therapy, written by Franklyn Sills, is available at:
www.karuna-institute.co.uk/cranio/history.html.

The 700-hours includes:

• 350 in-class hours
• 150 hours of guided independent study or homework to be completed between modules (reading, drawing, etc.)
• Completion of a clinical research project (40 hours)
• 150 hours of clinical practice. (Practice sessions are performed outside of class with non-fee paying clients)
• Receiving at least 10 sessions from a Registered Craniosacral Therapist (RCST®) paid according to their fee - 10 hours. (It is recommended that students receive sessions from at least three different practitioners)

Class time occurs through ten 5-day modules scheduled 2 - 3 months apart. Students are expected to commit to the entire training. This supports you and your peers in the training to deepen within a consistent relational field. To help you understand what you are committing to, and to determine if this training is right for you, you are encouraged to attend an Introductory Seminar.

Upcoming Introductory Seminars

Dates	Location
None currently planned Stay tuned for upcoming introductory webinars	TBA	Details TBA Application

Current and Upcoming Trainings: Cherionna is currently not offering Biodynamic foundation trainings in North America, but is teaching in London, UK at CTET and offers post-graduate seminars in North America. She is also teaching with and assisting Franklyn Sills in Europe and North America.

Dates	Location
None currently planned
Completed March 24, 2012	Portland, OR	Portland Website
Completes June 9, 2012	Kutenai Institute of Integral Therapies (KIIT), Nelson, BC, Canada	Details KIIT Website