Articles by Mark Levine

Beyond occlusion craniosacral therapy and functional orthodontics

Mon, 24 May 2010 18:59:45 -0400

“If he grinds his teeth the disease will last a long time.”
-Found on Sumerian Clay Tablets, 3500-3000 BC

A ‘consumer / survivor’ is one who self-describes experiencing disempowerment and iatrogenic sequelae from previous psychiatric services. As a loosely defined movement, the moniker suggests that patients themselves have elaborated a more comprehensive model of mental health than is currently practiced among mental health professionals.

Analogously, there exists an as-yet unnamed population of orthodontic ‘consumer / survivors’. Cumulative anecdotal evidence suggests that in many cases a pattern of somatic, cognitive and emotional dysfunction arises precisely at the onset of orthodontic treatment.

All too frequently, the periodicity of visits to the orthodontist marks a tempo not only of temporary stomatognathic discomfort, but of diverse, significant, and sometimes lasting, sequelae to treatment.

The acute discomfort typical of wire tightening that arises within minutes of the procedure often is resolved by a progression towards chronic whole body and cognitive and behavioral adaptive changes after several weeks.

My own experience of braces is a case in point. My orthodontist, Dr. Y., (the best in the city I was assured), was a professor at the university and taught many orthodontists currently in practice. This was the mid 1970’s, and I was subjected to the standard extraction of 4 premolar teeth - a significant trauma in itself - banding, heavy wires tensioned across the maxillary suture and a rapid series of tightenings.

I clearly remember, around age 12 or 13, the first evenings after my appointments with Dr. Y., holding my head and drooling in pain over my bathroom sink with a headache, acute maxillary discomfort, sinus congestion, cervical hypertonicity, a sensation of heaviness, fatigue, mental confusion, and the cognitive dissonance of knowing rationally that, while I was told this treatment was necessary, I wondered how my parents could let me suffer so much.

Several days following my appointment, the acute orofacial pain would usually subside, yet I would feel that the left side of my face was increasingly ‘locked’; a unilaterally and persistently blocked sinus, a dull ear ache, TMJ crepitus, and an occasional ‘fireball’ of pain from the left side of my neck when I rotated too far.

The heaviness, fatigue, mental confusion and cognitive dissonance would all slowly diminish over the weeks, only to return full force again following the next appointment along with another round of acute orofacial discomfort. I developed a marked craniofacial asymmetry as evidenced through family photos during those years.

Perhaps it was a property of adolescence and the complexities of family life in modern times, but I still associate an enduringly, oppressively claustrophobic sense of trauma around those years of braces. And I suspect that my adolescent behavior and academic performance would have been better had I not experienced that persistent sense of being so bound.

I can remember the sense of freedom, vitality and cognitive clarity surging through me as soon as the maxillary wire was removed at each appointment, and I relished the few minutes of this novel sensation before the next, likely thicker wire was twisted into place. I was overjoyed when Dr. Y. announced that we were finished treatment, and I resented having to wear a retainer that felt similarly binding, so I lost or broke 3 of them before my parents and Dr. Y. agreed not to make a 4th. I have a wide gap between my front teeth today as a result.

As a practitioner of craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy for the last 20 years, I now know that my unilateral symptoms and the development of my craniofacial asymmetry had its origins in a congenital anterior fascial restriction - I was born with a mild club foot for which I wore an external rotation brace fixated to my legs at night as a baby. I also had a high maxillary arch, forward head carriage, pectus excavatum, a left sided torticollis and positional plagiocephaly, a mild scoliosis, and was a mouth breather. I also was poorly co-ordinated and I sucked my thumb until I was 7 years old.

This history was not asked about on Dr. Y’s intake forms, nor did my parents convey it to him. I suspect it was not of interest to him because, like most orthodontists even today, he was interested in my smile.

Though groundbreaking discoveries such as Richard Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity model of physical structures (synergetic balance among discontinuous compression elements bound by continuous tension) had already been introduced and was influential in engineering, physics, chemistry and bodywork circles by that time, it clearly was not reflected in Dr. Y’s paradigm of orthodontic treatment.

Dr. Y.’s strictly occlusal approach to orthodontics made life worse for me. I strongly believe that the more sophisticated tensional integrity models of functional orthodontics, had he been aware of them at the time, would have instead ameliorated my pre-existing fascial imbalances and facilitated high level wellness.

Many young clients I work with today are the beneficiaries of a gradually developing consensus among pioneering leading edge orthodontists who, by chance or inclination, have discovered the clinically significant relationship between the alignment of teeth and a more comprehensive model of somatic, cognitive and emotional healthcare.

Today I work closely with orthodontists knowledgeable about functional approaches to design individualized programs of craniosacral balancing prior to orthodontic treatment, sessions timed between orthodontic appointments to ameliorate acute tensions, followed by a series of sessions after orthodontic treatment to rebalance the whole system.

The positive health outcomes of such a multidisciplinary approach transcend a simple reduction of the discomforts of orthodontic treatment; many pre-existing functional conditions, such I experienced in my own case, can be resolved via appropriate orthodontic appliances and manual therapy techniques; and conversely, a spacious and fully functional craniosacral system facilitates the project of occlusal alignment. I have learned much from the dentists and orthodontists who have referred to me over the years, and I know of several who have themselves gone on to take courses in craniosacral, osteopathic and manual therapies.

In teaching craniosacral therapy, we often have physicians, chiropractors, physiotherapists, massage therapists, dentists, orthodontists and psychologists all sharing a class. Such a diverse group with a nuanced understanding of anatomy and physiology tends to generate a unique synergy, excitement and high degree of specificity in practice. This is only possible amongst professionals from multiple disciplines who can check their turf-kicking boots at the door and meet with open minds and the intention to cross fertilize paradigms. Such is the stuff of scientific revolutions.

I would argue that for more patients to have better outcomes, entry-to-practice dental training programs ought to include at least a rudimentary introduction to the concepts and techniques of cranial bone movement, autonomic reflexes, and dural and whole body fascial effects of the sustained mechanical tensions characteristic of dental procedures and orthodontic treatment.

Introducing this model into the curriculum at the beginning, when students are least ideologically conditioned, would have the eventual effect of moving functional approaches out of the small and as yet politically insignificant fringe of practitioners into the mainstream. Then, perhaps, more orthodontic patients would experience high level wellness along with a nice smile.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

This article is about to be published in the inaugural issue of the IFUNA Journal: The Journal of The International Functional Association (www.ifuna.info

Craniosacral Therapy and Autism Shelter From The Storm

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 11:57:56 -0400

The first time I saw Bob Dylan perform live several years ago, I wondered why he never looked at the audience, why he never said anything to us or even to Joni Mitchell, with whom he was double billed. He’s famous for ignoring his audience, for seeming to be in his own world.

I went to see Dylan again last week for the second time, while I was writing this article. This time he stood sideways to the audience while his band faced us, again never said hello, never introduced anyone in the band, rocked a little in the corner when he wasn’t singing, never said goodbye, and when the band exited stage right, he exited stage left. It suddenly dawned on me that he’s probably slightly autistic.

Some measure of autism seems to be more the rule than the exception in the realm of those acknowledged to be masters of their craft: Glenn Gould, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, David Byrne, Andy Warhol and Bill Gates have all demonstrated the traits of mild autism.

Socrates, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven, Newton, Thomases Jefferson and Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Curie, Henry Ford, Neitzsche and Jung, Einstein and Wittgenstein, Jane Austen, J.R.R.Tolkein and James Joyce were all, according to their biographers, fascinated by the focus of their interest, often to the point of obsession, and probably would have been diagnosed with autism if the category existed at the time.

Even fictional characters - Lisa Simpson and Spock come to mind - have been endowed with the autist’s intellectual intensity and integrity. In 1975, when The Who created the rock opera Tommy, Elton John’s portrayal of an autistic Pinball Wizard was as an exotic neurological curiosity. In 1988, When Dustin Hoffman portrayed the autistic Raymond Babbitt in ‘Rain Man’, there were very few people in the world who knew anything about autism.    By 2002, when Sean Penn played Sam Dawson in ‘I Am Sam’, most people had heard about it. In a few short years, autism has emerged from relative obscurity into one of the defining phenomena of the 21st century. Everyone now knows someone with autism.   This fact alone speaks for itself.

The assessment, diagnosis, epidemiology, best practices for intervention - and even if intervention is appropriate at all - concerning autism are the closest thing we in the cloistered world of health care have to a post-modern philosophical debate.   Even its classification and nomenclature have changed markedly over the last few decades. It was only very recently that the Ontario government reclassified autism as a neurophysiological disorder, rather than a psychological disorder - and therefore insurable under OHIP for services related to its treatment.

What is Autism?
ASD, or Autistic Spectrum Disorder, is the currently accepted umbrella term for what has historically been variously described as PDD (Pervasive Development Disorder), Asperger’s Syndrome, Minimal Brain Dysfunction, non-verbal learning disability, ‘idiot-savants’, high functioning autism, ‘gifted’, ‘heavy’ autism, Kanner Autism, non-verbal autism, and so on.

ASD is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder which is characterized most generally as a difficulty in recognizing or engaging in a socially understood mode of communication concerning ‘I-Thou’ relationships.

ASD implies awareness of the world without the benefit of a ‘normal’ heuristic, without a comfortable reliance on unexamined high-level assumptions about the nature of reality and the interpretability of communication, assumptions which allow us ‘neurotypicals’ a wide-screen view of implied meaning in our interactions with others. An autistic mind meets the world fundamentally mentally, thinglike, unassociated a priori. Where an autist has made sense of the world, it is because he or she or someone has a bolted it together logically.

It has been postulated that ASD is an extreme version of the typical male brain pattern.   Interestingly, four times as many males are diagnosed with it than females - though females diagnosed with it are usually more deeply involved cases. Those ‘in the spectrum’ have difficulty with verbal communication, unwritten social rules, complex or subtle emotions, reciprocity; the so-called ‘right-brain’ ‘touchy-feely’ ‘yin’ sorts of empathic cognition typically associated with female consciousness. Like many men, autists lack a theory of other persons’ minds.

There is also often a remarkable facility with, and obsessional interest in, the typically male ‘left-brain’ functions such as memory recall, (often either photographic or eidetic), logical analysis, precision, and consistent axiomatic systems such as mathematics, engineering and computer science.

So while there is a kind of blindness to the intuitive apprehension of other minds, there seems to be a correspondingly greater affinity for and comfort with the monologue of ‘I-It’ relationships with things, technology, concrete thinking, literal linguistics and formal logic. There is also a remarkable phenomenological honesty in the ASD community. Someone lacking a theory of mind has no need of learning deviousness, manners or social graces. This is often the root of many awkward social situations, and marginalization.

Behaviors that count as autism admit of a remarkably broad range. As a spectrum disorder, ASD shows up as everything from pedantry to genius, from celebrity to the institutionalized, from hyperlexia to silence.   It shows up as full on freight train symptomatic to being barely distinguishable from one who gets lost in his work.   Perhaps we’re all a little autistic.

“Autism is an engima.” said my friend Paul in response to my reflections about Bob Dylan’s autism, just as the poet was about to walk on stage. Paul’s 19 year old daughter is profoundly autistic. “It is such an enigma. And what people don’t realize is that the spectrum of what is autistic is even broader than what is normal.”

Any of the following, in any degree or nuance, can count: social retreat, abnormal responses to sensory stimulation, failure to make eye contact, be interested in or attach emotionally to parents and peers, abnormal verbal skills typified by repetitive sounds and echolalia, or pedantic idiosyncratic use of language (poetry?), obsessive interest in specific objects or subjects, perseverance of activity, an insistence on rigid routine and predictability, emotional lability in the face of novel or unplanned experiences, clumsiness, tactile defensiveness, and stereotypical body movements, or ‘stimming’, such as rocking, flapping, bolting, jumping, hitting or flicking one’s self, chewing, bruxing, and facial tics.

A Short History

The term ‘autism’ was coined in 1912 by a Swiss psychiatrist named Eugene Bleuler to describe the quality of self absorption amongst children diagnosed with what was then thought to be schizophrenia. In the mid 1940’s Dr. Leo Kanner, an American psychiatrist, was the first to describe a cluster of child patients who had similarly odd behavioral patterns.   About the same time the Austrian psychiatrist, Dr. Hans Asperger, described a group of people who shared many of the same characteristics of autism, but who were able to communicate well verbally.

Since 1997, when Dr. Asperger’s writings were translated, this description has become widely known as Asperger’s syndrome. Like ‘autism lite’, these individuals are often hyperlexic and display extraordinary mental capacity within narrowly defined areas of interest.

Some have argued that the population historically pegged as ‘geeky’ or ‘nerdy’ are actually experiencing varying degrees of Asperger’s syndrome. Dr. Asperger described his patients as ‘little professors’, as they could go on and on about their special area of interest - most often math, computers, engineered devices, linguistics, or any rule governed system - without the slightest nod to the response of their audience, or unwritten social rules of engagement. Silicon valley, for example, is chock full of ‘Aspies’.

Epidemiology

Interestingly, someone diagnosed with ASD is 7 times more likely to have one or more parent occupationally involved in mathematics, computer science or engineering than the neurotypical population. One or both of the parents of a child diagnosed with ASD often exhibit similar, but milder, ASD-related behavior, and anecdotal evidence often points to a lineage of oddness and narrowly focused brilliance in the extended family.

Exactly how big is autism? The American Center for Disease Control released statistics in 2004 that the incidence of ASD has risen a whopping 600% over the last 10 years; that 1 in 166 children are now diagnosed with it, and that 1 in 6 are diagnosed with a related neurodevelopmental disorder.

Estimates now stand at some 600,000 people worldwide as having been diagnosed with ASD, half of whom are of school age. This is approximately the entire population of Mississauga, Ontario’s 3d largest city.   While many in the spectrum are high functioning, many will require varying degrees of help into adulthood, even for basic activities of daily life.

When one considers the human and financial cost of this situation to caregivers, family, friends and the educational system, these are staggering statistics. In October of 2006, Jon Stewart hosted an A-list fundraiser for autism education called "Night of Too Many Stars", sponsored by Chevrolet and Intel. This kind of hollywood hoopla is usually reserved for structurally entrenched global problems such as poverty and AIDS.

Who is Normal?

Autism is now so pervasive it has spawned its own political economy. While most people with autism are frustrated by living solipsistically, disconnected in an apparently fragmented world, many feel quite comfortable with their way of being and do not regard their cognitive style as a problem at all. And while a majority of the autism support community - families primarily - are stressed, impoverished by the high cost of special education, and polarized by the need for fundraising and advocacy into seeing autism as catastrophic, more serene voices can also be heard that question basic presuppositions about normalcy, brain function, psychology and the very purpose of education.

There is a large and growing community which seeks to de-pathologize, dignify, celebrate and redefine autism as simply a different way of legitimately apprehending reality.   According to the argument, the only real therapy for autism is applicable to the neurotypical population, ‘the larger phenotype’, facilitating a greater tolerance for neural and behavioral diversity.   See, for example, neurodiversity.com, , aspiesforfreedom.com, taaproject.com.

Also I often hear, especially from those with an explicitly spiritual world view, reference to ‘Indigo children’, an anti-label understanding of ASD behavior which relates spiritual, psychic, psychological and physiological concepts into the proposition that children otherwise labeled as autistic or ADD/HD actually represent an evolutionary quantum leap. Moreover, the argument is that the dramatic increase in highly individuated children who ignore social norms in favor of following the dictates of their own precocious intellect may represent an adaptive mutation, conferring survivability for an increasingly chaotic planet, teetering as we are on the edge of profound ecospheric and social change.

Research

An enormous literature, much of it speculative, some of it scientific, has grown up around ASD. A good deal of progress has been made on differentiating it from disorders which often accompany autism but which are not necessarily pathognomic, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, fragile x syndrome, Rett’s syndrome, seizures, anxiety disorders, attention deficit disorder, oppositional-defiant disorder, dyspraxia, aphasia, dyslexia, digestive and autoimmune disorders, sensory integration issues, depression, and so on.

Interestingly, synaesthesia - the neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled, and perfect pitch - the ability to produce or identify a note by name without the benefit of a reference note - often also accompanies ASD.

Recent research has shown that the the average brain size of someone with ASD is significantly larger than the neurotypical population. While of normal size at birth, there is a rapid growth in the frontal lobes by the age of 2, and the average brain size of a 4 year old diagnosed with ASD is comparable to that of a neurotypical 13 year old. This brain size difference disappears by adolescence. Chronic brain inflammation is common. Further, there are significant differences in the wiring of the ASD brain; while there is more white matter generally, there are more short neurons within disparate parts of the brain, and the longer neurons that interconnect these various parts are far fewer than in the neurotypical population. Not surprisingly, functional MRI studies show a lack of synchrony amongst disparate brain functions.   There is much debate as to whether these are symptoms of an as yet undiscovered underlying pathology, or whether these findings are the pathology itself.

What Causes Autism?

As far as what actually causes autism, we are no better off than the proverbial blind men of India inaccurately describing an elephant according to what part of the elephant they were touching. At one point Bruno Bettleheim claimed that bad mothering - the ‘refrigerator mom’ was the cause. A study recently released from Cornell University positively correlates television watching with ASD. Some research points to hypoxia at birth resulting from early cord clamping protocols, and febrile events, especially those following from adverse reactions to vaccinations, have also been implicated as etiologic factors. Cambridge University professor of psychiatry Simon Baron-Cohen (Borat’s real-life cousin!) postulates that an increase in social mobility and the entrance of women into engineering and mathematics - historically exclusively male preserves- have allowed individuals with similar inclinations towards systematizing to find each other in what he describes as ‘assortative mating’ and thereby having children with amplified genetic tendencies to autism.

Much remains to be seen. Current theories are numerous, with the leading contenders involving a complex interplay between genetic predisposition and mutations, gastrointestinal and autoimmune disorders, cumulative heavy metal toxicity, and sociological factors.

This particular aspect of the debate is, not surprisingly, also the most contentious; exactly who ought to carry financial responsibility for ASD is punted about as a political football as the epidemiological curve of autism has approached an asymptotic vertical.

The pharmaceutical industry in particular has been on the defensive over strong anecdotal evidence and underfunded but persistent research which points a causative finger at thimerosal, a mercury based preservative in multi-dose vaccines. Thimerosal was banned more than 20 years ago by most of the developed world. The Canadian government is quietly phasing it out gradually; stores of thimerosal containing vaccines were allowed to be used up, and many of the vaccines for influenza and hepatitis-B still contain it. The American FDA categorically rejects the proposition that thimerosal causes autism, but many states have already imposed their own bans.

Working with Autism

So what is done with autism? The lion’s share of funding, both public and private, currently goes towards paying for long term special education services, especially for an intensive one-on-one form of behavior modification called Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA. Occupational and speech therapy, sensory integration therapy, dietary restrictions and supplementation, homeopathic remedies, botanicals and pharmaceuticals are also common. While it is outside the scope of this article to describe the details, suffice it to say that, like all aspects of this issue, there exists a wide variety of approaches and models, and much debate as to usefulness.

One of the hallmark sensory integration issues of ASD is exquisitely sensitive reactions and aversion to touch. Most find normal tactile contact uncomfortable if not intolerable, preferring instead the repetitive shocks of stimming, or the self-controllable deep pressure of lodging one’s self into tight spaces. Many have found craniosacral therapy to play an important role in integrating proprioceptive and tactile sensory overload, reducing anxiety, increasing body awareness and facilitating learning. As a practitioner specializing in pediatric craniosacral therapy, a large portion of my practice is dedicated to working with those diagnosed with ASD.

Families attending to the practical realities of someone with ASD are almost universally overtaxed, filled with the tensions of watching out for even the basic safety of an unpredictable mind. For this reason I usually end up working with family members as well on the reduction of stress related tensions.

It is in this sense that I see the value of my work as multi-layered. Wholly apart from any hands on help, many of the families say that just being able to talk to a health care practitioner who knows something of the terrain of ASD, who can bear witness to the paradoxical mash up of suffering and joy that is ASD, and can hold a conversation about a very complex set of concerns, is therapeutic in itself. Bodywork helps too.

I often find myself in the role of explaining to parents that there is a real 3D person inside that collection of disturbing habits, and that the habits are really disturbing only to the parents. I also find myself explaining to parents that many of the disturbing behaviors are actually age appropriate normal behaviors, and would be there with or without autism. This is especially true with teenagers and the terrible twos.

What happens during a session is as wide ranging as the individuals I work with and their moods; While the primary focus of craniosacral therapy is a stretching of the dural membranes via mobilization of the cranial bones to which they are internally attached, the reality is that one modality melds into another intuitively; sometimes I’m doing very gentle energy work and the person is hovering between sleep and wakefulness, sometimes I’m doing a long lever mobilization as the child giggles hysterically, now an acupressure point, visceral work, myofascial and positional release.

A trained and sensitive therapist can usually detect a rhythmical increase and decrease in the volume, warmth and pressure of the cranium in anyone. The cranial bones of someone with ASD feel remarkably restricted in movement, as though pressure from the inside prevents alternation of cranial size. This palpatory finding, which has been widely noted for the last 40 years, makes sense in light of the recent MRI findings about brain size differences in ASD. A good session ends with a more pliable and less viscous feeling in the cranium. Behavioral differences are immediate, with a decrease of stimming, greater receptivity to communication, generally a slower and more coherent presence.

One young man with Asperger’s syndrome with whom I worked had an ability to describe his sensory experience with remarkable precision. He said that after a session he was able to take note of his environment - the colour of the walls, the artwork, the quality of silence in the room, and that this was a function of his being much less distracted by the muscular tension - especially jaw tension - that he usually experienced interacting with what is to him a confusing world.

Typically I cannot work directly with the ASD individual for much time in the first few visits; usually there is too much novelty in terms of schedule and stimulation to allow for lengthy time on the table. I usually work with the parents first. This helps the parents to trust what I do, to know that it’s not painful, that it really feels like something (since it doesn’t look like much from the outside), and it provides them with a felt experience of some of the basic techniques I subsequently teach them to do daily with their children. It also provides the child with an example of the routine to be followed, promising that it will be his or her turn at a certain time in the session. Usually by the second or third session, the child scampers up onto the table and is willing to stay still for the duration, much to the parents’ surprise.

Touch is just one tool among many. I use precise concrete language, avoiding metaphors, slang (though some Aspies I know are the keenest punsters and get the worst of my jokes. Some are sublime artists.) I sometimes write out the plan of the session with the times I expect the child to lay still on the table. I am careful to turn off the background music I usually have on in the clinic, and turn off extraneous lights.

Unlike most of the rest of my practice, which tends to be time limited, I tend to work with ASD families over the long term, with frequency of visits dependent on the family’s resources. Typically this works out to a cluster of 3 to 12 weekly sessions until a pattern of trust and recognition is established, then biweekly or monthly sessions indefinitely, with clusters of greater frequency during stressful periods, growth periods (during which stimming usually increases), and after fevers or traumas.

I believe that what is most important about working with autists is affirming and searching out the whole person so labeled.   Working with the stigma and other peoples’ negative reaction is usually reported by autists as the worst part of being autistic.   I assume that everyone is of high intelligence, capable of the transcendental, and my real job is to figure out how to facilitate communication. My task is to offer shelter from the storm of the neurotypical world, to learn how to be sensitive, not so thick and gross and presuppositional, to slow down enough to feel out what someone else is feeling; to behold along with someone, for example, how light can be laid bare, tinkly, silent and full of obvious holographic import. And sometimes, if I’m very steady, I swear I can sense the dawning reciprocity of a theory of mind.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

This article was published in Massage Therapy Today, a publication of the Ontario Massage Therapist Association, May 2008

Lifestyle and Health

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 11:46:20 -0400

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
- Mary Oliver

As we pick up speed in the 21st century, we’ve learned this much about health; that it doesn’t emerge from the barrel of a pharmaceutical manufacturer or glint off the edge of a scalpel any more than peace emerges from guns, though some decisive battles can be won or lost over them.

The bell curves of statistical analysis ring out the truth that stress, smoking, channel surfing and McDonalds will make you sadder, sicker and more quickly dead than yoga, getting a full night’s sleep and juicing.

The inner lazy hedonist might predictably protest that ironman vegans can be depressed and die young from cancer, and Winston Churchill, for example, lived a long and hale life despite a steady diet of Cuban cigars, Scotch and war. But these are the exceptions to the larger truths of statistics. Possible, but not probable.

For better or for worse, it is a statistical truth, and often to a heroically large extent, that what we think and feel and do can transcend our genetics and petition our fates. Our lifestyle and and our health do generally stand or fall in tandem.

On the other hand, it is also an individual truth that, despite doing all the right things, sometimes we get sick, and get better or die as the fates would have it.

We moderns have a lot of words for money and sex, but precious few for invoking nuanced pictures of ways of living. Like the Inuit having so many words for snow, and the complex terminology for different kinds of love in Hindi, we disclose what is most important to us through subtly related meanings about the same general thing.

What we mean by lifestyle is most often a function of personal choice about consumer products. The smorgasbord of potential lifestyles offer up the material stuff of a path for an individual, regardless of its intrinsic morality or sustainability; private jets, paparazzi and bottled glacier water have seemed in the past to be as blameless a lifestyle as granola, birkenstocks and meditation. This is changing.

The prevailing model of health, especially as found in complementary health care circles, revolves around ‘personal’ choices about food, exercise, rest, medicines, and the psychologies of interiority. God knows there’s precious little that can’t be helped by way more sleep, pure water, exercise, and fresh organic food locally grown and lovingly prepared by someone who truly cares for you, but these practices become little more than nostrums in the face of an increasingly populated, polluted and disturbing world.

As headlines begin to look more like tractates on Exodus, as we are overwhelmed by the sheer scope of planetary chaos, as millions of real life ecological refugees struggle with real life plagues, we are pushed deeper down the rabbit hole to ask serious questions about our collective moral responsibility for our individual lifestyle.

More and more about our ‘lifestyle’ is conditioned by the outsized disjuncts of global realities. Note how impossible it is, really, to live a village life, the kind we humans are hard wired for and have lived for thousands of years before we became addicted to oil and technology.

Our most pressing questions did not always revolve around iTunes, and greenwash brochures touting breezily unreassuring suggestions for reducing our carbon footprint did not always fall out of every piece of junk mail.

Once, and not so long ago, we were not Wii, we were farmers, true neighbors, unintentional members of a fully functioning community. With a track record of 10,000 generations and a fecund earth to underwrite our plantings and harvest, we muddled through our winters, our poxes and our deaths but with a human cadence and a reassuring sense of our place in the Great Chain of Being. Once, and not so long ago, the raspy breaths of a dying planet were not the elephant in the living room of a frazzlingly unsustainable lifestyle.

In my practice I often hear clients describing the double bind of feeling powerless to change our basic patterns of consumption; aware or not, we still drive internal combustion engines that have no more efficiency than in the days of Henry Ford himself, eat the bread of shame, petro-pharmaceutico-agribuisness products trucked flown and shipped absurd distances, and heat our homes by burning still more of the few drips and belches left of dinosaur juice. Short of heading for the hills stocked up on survivalist absolutisms, we find ourselves mostly helpless to not leave the alternatives and the cleanup to generations unborn.

I also sense, both in others and myself, a kind of intermittently necessary denial and taboo, an anxious fantasy that perhaps if one can pursue business as usual move faster consume more stuff make more money move to the top of the heap, this ominous rumbling about the end of the world will stop. The rules are just don’t talk about it, refute the science on reflex, suppress one’s inner Chicken Little, as we will surely be saved by technology, a wise and beneficent government, and the invisible hand of the market.

Increasingly I hear from the table and sense on the streets that the most sensitive, prescient, earnest and engaged among us are more predictably falling prey to despair, regardless of lifestyle. A tipping point seems to be in the air. People are asking very deep questions about our purpose, about what is moral, and whether we have a responsibility to life as such.

A few days ago an 11 year old boy with remarkably clear eyes asked me during a session if I believed in global warming, and with the rigorously phenomenological curiosity of an emerging consciousness asked me what I thought was going to happen. I sensed in his question the anxiety he’s picked up from the adults around him, a request for a reassurance that his world, his lifestyle, his way of being in the world, would not be affected. I couldn’t lie and tell him that it wouldn’t. We talked a lot about what people are actually doing to make the world a much better place, and he relaxed, and was enthused.

Carl Jung had over the stone arch of his home and inscribed on his tomb a quotation from Erasmus: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. “Invoked or not, God is present”. Sustainable or not, conscious or not, willed or not, our collective lifestyle is changing by necessity, and the drums say there’s a lot more in store. How to stay healthy in this context is the real question to be asking.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved
2008

This article was originally published in Human Spirit Magazine Spring 2008 .

How I Discovered Craniosacral Therapy

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 10:57:49 -0400

I first came upon Craniosacral therapy 17 years ago by accident; I had just graduated from massage therapy college and was working in a clinic with an experienced, curious physiotherapist named Iris Weverman. Iris had heard about Craniosacral therapy and was about to take the first Upledger course. She brought the textbook and videos to the clinic to study at lunch. I watched the videos and was non-plussed; it looked to me like the laying on of hands.

I have no problem with the laying on of hands, but the textbook described all sorts of detailed bio-mechanical concepts of proprioception, motion and cranial bone movement. I was skeptical because all I could see from the video was John Upledger putting his hands on someone and not moving them for a long time, then saying something reassuring like “There, that’s it” “There’s a good release”. Hardly spectacular or forceful or meaty or obvious enough for a freshly trained Registered Massage Therapist. I thought it was hooey.

Then, the first day back after taking the course, Iris offered me a session at the end of clinic hours. It was the most amazing hour of bodywork I had ever experienced.

After the first few minutes, during which Iris put her hands on the back of my head, and my critical mind nattering in the background “what hooey...” I began to experience a state of deep relaxation, in which I felt the extraordinary sensation of my body correcting itself from the inside out.

I felt my body deeply relaxed, and my mind very awake; the intersection of a lucid dreamlike state in my imagination with my proprioceptive and nociceptive senses fully facilitated by an induced state of extreme parasympathetic dominance was like no other form of bodywork I had ever tried, and I had tried many.

In this extraordinary state of deep relaxation, I felt a series of strong soft tissue discomforts and releases – alternations of aching, nauseating, lancinating pains, warming, fasciculations, pulsations, becoming less viscous - connected to just about every trauma I had ever experienced.

As Iris moved her hands onto different areas of my body and left them there for minutes at a time, warming, slightly motion testing with 5 grams of pressure in rhythmical ways, I became aware of an intricate interweaving of sensations, images, memories, and realizations, all of which carried the gravity of something objective, something remarkably truthful, as though I was being shown all this content for an Important Reason by an Authoritative Source.

The soft tissue releases seemed to occur precisely as I turned my attention to the sensation, image, memory or realization. I recapitulated memories about which I had not thought for a long time. I felt like crying, and did.

In particular, I recapitulated a cycling accident I had three years previous, in which I sustained a head injury – I had lost consciousness for 40 minutes – and multiple fractures. In the span of what must have been only a few seconds (but felt like minutes), I recalled and felt the experience of impact into the telephone pole in great detail.

Since the time of the accident, I had struggled with retrograde amnesia about the events around the time of the accident. And now, in the blink of an eye, with Iris’s gentle hand supporting me and moving the very tissues in which the kinetic forces of the accident had been absorbed in me, the memory of exactly what happened became conscious. I even remembered what happened during the time I was unconscious, including things I heard which I verified later. This memory recall was most unexpected.

And at the end of that extraordinary hour, I felt completely different than at the beginning of it. I felt like Gumby in a heat wave, as though someone had just pointed out the fact that, until now, I had been tightly wrapped in Saran Wrap, and then gave my body permission to unwrap.

I was euphoric: flexible, coordinated, awake, more acutely sensitive to all of my sensations, emotionally open, optimistic, calm, blissful. And I felt like stretching a lot. I felt as though I knew myself much better than an hour previous.

On my drive home, the car seemed to weave back and forth (even though it wasn’t actually); steering seemed difficult. I even thought that something was wrong with the front end of the car. When I got home I fell into a very deep sleep, and I slept for a long time.

The next day I felt as though I had been hit by a truck, or at least that I had just smacked my head into a telephone post at high speed on my bicycle. All the same disturbing neurological deficits that I had experienced chronically for several months following the accident were back – acutely.

I lost cognitive ability, experiencing a distressing ‘brain fog’ including photophobia and phonophobia, memory loss, paresthesiae and a lack of co-ordination and strength in my whole left side (it was a right sided head injury). Suspecting that this was the ‘healing crisis’ I had been warned about, I drank a lot of water and went back to bed.

By evening I began to feel better, although I still felt achy and flu-like. The next day was better and on the afternoon of the third day I experienced an all-at-once profound sense of psycho physiological integration as I rode my (same) bicycle past the same point where I had the accident.

As I rode past the pole, I felt a strong feeling of suddenly re-inhabiting the left side of my body after having vacated it three years earlier. A sustainable version of that free body sense and euphoric feeling was back, I felt better than I had in years. These gains have stayed with me, and subsequent sessions have only deepened the experience.

I of course wanted to study this remarkable therapy, and dove right in to the primary texts by John Upledger, and soon took the first course with Robert Harris. The precision and simplicity of the approach, the demonstrability of the effects, and the degree to which the techniques respect and leverage the exquisite sensitivity of our autonomic nervous system impressed me.

I began to practice more and more of it, offering it as an adjunct to my then normal massage therapy practice. I took more courses and began reading the early 20th century texts of the original cranial osteopaths; Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, Dr. William Garner Sutherland, Dr. Harold Magoun, Dr. Robert Fulford, and so on. The more I read, the more this approach made eminent sense to me, and I began to use it a lot more, joining several study groups at the same time, and taking more courses. For about 5 years I became a Craniosacral therapy education junkie. I then began as a teaching assistant with the Upledger Institute and co-taught the first four Craniosacral courses numerous times.

And then I discovered working with babies, also by accident. A friend with a colicky baby had been close to insanity with sleep deprivation and asked if Craniosacral therapy could help. The literature cautions that a practitioner ought to develop a sufficiently educated touch by working with adults first because a baby’s Craniosacral system is so very sensitive. I felt experienced enough to try, and my friend’s desperation was obvious.

I spent about 45 minutes gradually stretching and expanding the baby’s Craniosacral system with great gentleness. The baby was in a full blown scream at first, but much to her parents’ (and my) surprise, she settled down after a few minutes.

The effects were nothing short of miraculous. This baby had been strung out for 3 months with colic, screaming for 4 hours a day, and the parents at their wits end. Within a day after the session, nothing. Not a peep. And it lasted. We did 3 more sessions over the next month to make sure everything was ok, and the baby is now 12 years old, much happier.

This gratifying experience launched a new direction in my practice, and I began studying the works of Dr. Viola Frymann, I took the (now offered) Pediatrics course from Upledger, (and have since also co-taught it.) My practice quickly morphed into doing Craniosacral therapy exclusively, primarily with babies.

Working with babies and children and their mothers and fathers is a wonderful practice. There is a saying: ‘As the twig is bent, so grows the tree’. It is an extraordinary privilege to work with families to help unwind bent twigs. Each situation is new and varied and offers me a learning opportunity. I usually work with the parents of young children first, so that they can have a felt experience of what first looked like hooey to me, so that they can trust that a) I’m actually doing something more than the laying on of hands (which is great in itself), and b) that it doesn’t hurt, and c)so that they can learn some basic exercises they can do with their children.

Currently, about 70% of my practice is focused on treating pediatric concerns (neo-natal to teens), and about 30% is adult (over 18).

The 10 most common reasons for visits to my clinic by infants and younger children are:
Traumatic Birth (forceps, suction, Cesarian, Premature)
Neonatal Trauma (Accidents, Infections, Surgery, Separation)
Nursing Difficulties (Poor Latch, Tense Jaws, Mother’s Pain),
Torticollis (Turning mostly to one side)
Positional Plagiocephaly (Oddly Shaped & Partially Flattened Head)
Sleeping Difficulties
Colic, Tense Baby & Failure-to-Thrive Syndrome
Mother / Child Relationship Challenges & Post Partum Depression
Seizures & Motor Problems
Chronic Ear Infections

The 10 most common reasons for visits to my clinic by older children, teenagers and adults are:
-Head Injuries & Concussion
-Headaches & Migraine
-ADD / ADHD / Aspergers / Autism
-TMJ (Jaw Joint) Pain / Vertigo / Tinnitus / adjunctive to braces and appliances
-Whiplash, Back & Neck Pain
-Orthopedic & Sports Injuries
-Post Surgical Recovery
-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome & Fibromyalgia
-Addiction Issues
-Stress, Emotional & Existential Crises

And the 11th most common reason for visits to this clinic concerns Wellness, Personal Development & Curiosity. High level wellness implies personal development and curiosity about novel body / mind experiences, and Craniosacral therapy certainly offers a novel mind/body experience.

After 17 years in practice, 16 years since first encountering Craniosacral therapy, and 7 years subspecializing in pediatrics, I now have a busy home-based practice focusing primarily on perinatal and pediatric concerns of an international clientele. I have informal associate arrangements with an osteopath and a foreign trained pediatrician, both of whom sometimes work out of my office.

So what exactly is Craniosacral Therapy? It is an extremely gentle hands-on body-mind technique for evaluating and treating a variety of soft tissue, neurological and psychosomatic problems.

Whereas the focus of traditional massage therapy is on stretching and increasing the range of motion of muscles through a variety of manipulations that increase circulation of blood, the focus of Craniosacral therapy is on increasing flow of the cerebrospinal fluid of the central nervous system through a light touch - of about 5 grams - on mobile cranial bones, spinal and pelvic joints.

Clinically, Craniosacral therapy is predicated on at least 3 surprising and medically contested assertions; 1) that cranial bones move, even into adulthood, and 2) that there exists a palpable, rhythmical alternation of cerebrospinal fluid pressures, the patterns of which are biologically significant, and that 3) it is possible to intervene therapeutically in both 1) and 2) with less than 5 grams of manual force.

Craniosacral therapy occupies a middle ground between the physically manipulative approaches to bodywork such as Chiropractic, Physiotherapy and Massage Therapy on the one hand, and Energy work such as Therapeutic Touch, Reiki, and Chi Gong on the other.

Craniosacral therapy is much lighter in touch than most physically manipulative approaches, and yet is also a manipulative science that uses direct hands-on mobilizations of connective tissue and joints (albeit very light) in specific directions, which is not characteristic of the various practices described as Energy work.

Craniosacral therapy shares many of the theoretical constructs of manual practices of Osteopathy, which traces its history back to the early 1900’s, and myofascial release and the strain / counterstrain techniques of positional release.

Craniosacral therapy really describes an approach to bodywork which is gentle and non invasive, and the term commonly includes related modalites such as visceral manipulation, fascial release, gentle joint mobilizations and acupressure.

It has been variously called osteopathy, osteopathic manual practice, cranial osteopathy, osteopathy in the cranial field, sacro-cranial therapy, sacro-occipital technique (S.O.T.), bio-cranial therapy, craniostructural integration, cranial-sacral therapy, and so on.

While there are subtle theoretical differences among these various names, I would argue that these apparently differing names are really proprietary or ‘brand’ names given to the same body of work by different teaching institutes. While there are differences in the depth, quality and duration of training among these various schools, ranging from a single weekend course to a 5 year doctoral program, it has been frequently noted that the most experienced practitioners from these different schools practice in essentially the same way.

The common link among the various modalities of the Craniosacral approach is a light touch involving only a few grams of pressure, sustained over a long period of time. This method of proprioceptive (in contradistinction to tactile) palpation can be taught to anyone willing to be still enough to attend, to listen, to the subtle but definite motions involved.

Specifically, Craniosacral therapy addresses the meninges or dural tube. These structures, together with cerebrospinal fluid and the bones of the cranium and face, the spinal column and sacrum, have been described as the Craniosacral system.

Because the dural tube is continuous from the sacrum to the brain, and because connective tissue is continuous throughout the body, stress anywhere in the body can restrict normal motion of the dural tube, resulting in inefficient movement, a deficit of coordination, mental and emotional disorders, and pain, sometimes quite distant from its source.

The great value of this approach is that it is entirely safe and free from the potential dangers of more invasive forms of bodywork. Also, one can deeply relax into a slow stretch or joint mobilization without fear, which allows for significant, painless gains in movement.

It also allows for a truly holistic approach to the interaction of mind and body, since deep relaxation encourages one to be internally objective in the self-assessment of emotional contributors to pain and loss of function. These reasons are as true for infants as for adults.

The only contraindication to craniosacral therapy is recent cranial surgery, or cerebral bleeding such as an aneurysm.

A full case history is taken on the first session, including postural assessment, range of motion testing, orthopedic and neurological testing, and subtle fascial palpatory testing. This work is done through the clothes and does not require that a person disrobe. The session involves having various body parts gently stretched, held and mobilized extremely slowly, almost imperceptibly.

People often enter a dream-like state of profound psychophysiological relaxation in which sensations, images, memories, thoughts and feelings become amplified. Non-ordinary states of consciousness, including the dissolution of physical boundaries, seeing of colors, and extremely pleasurable wave-like feelings of energy, lightness and wholeness are often reported. Some people become very quiet, and others talk, while others again experience or express strong emotions such as grief, fear, and excitement.

Like with yoga and other transformational arts, emotions frequently well up during sessions, and part of the process is simply acknowledging what is happening by making it safe to encounter the emotions, and by offering verbal support and validation in its expression. Upledger has termed this phenomenon SomatoEmotional Release, emphasizing that emotions often accompany somatic releases, and are in fact the often ‘missed factor’ in the perpetuation of somatic pain and dysfunction.

Usually there is a profound change felt after the first session; people usually feel much more relaxed and simultaneously aware of both subtle body sensations and energy in their environment. Sometimes people feel perceptually altered, as though one area of the body is larger or more sensitive, or balance is off. One usually feels like stretching after a session. Often people are profoundly fatigued, or alternatively, highly energized. Babies usually will sleep for longer than usual. Occasionally, symptoms are exacerbated for a few hours to a few days in what is often termed a 'healing crisis', after which symptoms usually improve.

The theories proposed to explain the Craniosacral rhythm and its relationship to self healing have received a great deal of attention in the last few years, and have ranged from traditional mechanistic understandings focused on a pressurestat model of cerebrospinal fluid balance and its relationship to normal neuromuscular function, to those associated with transpersonal psychology and theories radically unconnected to the mainstream of scientific understanding.

What mechanisms or principles truly inform such phenomena is fertile ground for further research.

Craniosacral therapy is taught as a postgraduate course to Doctors, Chiropractors, Massage Therapists, Physiotherapists, Dentists, and Psychotherapists by the Upledger Institute, an educational and treatment centre founded by the American Osteopathic physician John Upledger. A doctoral level program is also available in Ontario through the Canadian College of Osteopathy and now, a number of independent colleges and teachers. It is a method rapidly gaining currency and attention.

References: A Selected Bibliography

Barral, Jean-Pierre
Visceral Manipulation, Eastland Press, 1988

Frymann, Viola M.
The Collected Papers of Viola M. Frymann, DO : Legacy of Osteopathy to Children American Academy of Osteopathy, 1998

Fulford, Robert C.
Dr. Fulford’s Touch of Life, Pocket Books, 1996

Gehin, Alain
Atlas of Manipulative Techniques for the Cranium & Face, Eastland Press, 1985

Magoun, Harold I.
Osteopathy in the Cranial Field, Third Edition, Journal Printing Company, 1976

Sutherland, William G.
The Cranial Bowl, Free Press Company, 1939
With Thinking Fingers The Cranial Academy, 1962

Upledger, John E.
CranioSacral Therapy, UI Publishing, 1983
CranioSacral Therapy II, Beyond the Dura, UI Publishing, 1987
SomatoEmotional Release And Beyond, UI Publishing Inc., 1995
A Brain Is Born, North Atlantic Books, 1996

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy

310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468

info@marklevine.ca

www.marklevine.ca

Craniosacral Therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 10:39:17 -0400

They say it feels like a heart of darkness.

The events of the last few years, perhaps beginning with 9/11 and culminating most recently with tsunami and hurricanes of biblical proportions, rumors of global viral pandemics and ongoing intensification of 21st century violence, have served to spur renewed interest in the long term nature and healing of trauma.

For example, some 30 years after the Viet Nam war, many of its veterans remain dazed, drug addled and depressed, anxious and unable to sleep, still lost in the violent nightmare so clearly depicted in the film Apocalypse Now Redux.

Their suffering is symptomatic of an increasingly recognized psychosomatic syndrome called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Survivors, and we as witnesses of the worst of our brave new world, both near and vicarious, also suffer PTSD.

The news routinely carries reports of trauma: Car accidents, disasters, random and premeditated violence claim and maim many lives. Most of us numb to such reports, but those who survive such misfortune suffer most from a dreadful sense of constant alarm.

Imagine being anxious 24 / 7. The body will simply not allow the mind to relax, and vice versa, in case ‘it’ happens again, and traditional therapeutic approaches are usually of little help.

Part of the problem involves our old notions of a body-mind split: In our currently crumbling health care system, if you are physically injured there is excellent emergency medical aid and physical therapy available. If you are mentally or emotionally dysfunctional as a result of trauma, anti-anxiety or anti-depressant drugs are usually prescribed, and referrals are sometimes made for talk therapy with a psychologist or psychotherapist.

Unfortunately this divided approach leaves most PTSD victims feeling alienated, unable to digest their experience. They often become convinced that healing is not possible because neither approach addresses the soul angst which trauma leaves in the centre of ones consciousness. Neither physical nor mental approaches alone allow a trauma survivor to both recognize and communicate to someone else the depth of such an existential crisis.

Body centred approaches to the treatment of trauma have arisen out of a more realistic model of human experience which recognizes that body and mind are not split, and that the body stores and involuntarily recycles reflex reactions to trauma. Approaches based on this model have had tremendous success in helping PTSD victims regain their equilibrium.

A large-scale treatment program in Florida for Viet Nam Vets suffering from PTSD is one such example, which has yielded remarkable results using a technique called Craniosacral Therapy. Men and women who were convinced that they were doomed to a life of suffering claim dramatic recovery after only a few weeks of therapy.

Craniosacral Therapy offers an holistic alternative to the artificially separated worlds of traditional physical therapy and psychotherapy by combining the gentle techniques of Osteopathy, (a form of manual therapy practiced by European therapists and American Osteopathic Physicians since the early 20th century), with sensitivities of energy work, such as Therapeutic Touch, and the non-directive facilitation of emotional release from Gestalt and Depth psychologies.

The hands on part of Craniosacral therapy is extremely gentle and slow, differentiating it from traditional Physiotherapy, which focuses on pain management strategies and exercise, and Massage Therapy which can be quite deep and forceful, and Chiropractic, which produces the characteristic ‘pop’ of a spinal adjustment in a fraction of a second. A Craniosacral session usually lasts an hour or more, taking many minutes to gently unwind a restricted area or a single stuck joint.

Interestingly, because this approach is so remarkably gentle, it has been highly successful at resolving many of the PTSD - like symptoms in both mothers and infants who have been traumatized in childbirth.

The great value to sufferers of PTSD of such a slow and gentle physical approach is a re-patterning of the central nervous system. During the session, the hands-on work is combined with questions from the therapist around sensations and feelings and images, giving an individual time to notice that unconscious anxiety is in fact stored as muscle tension. One can consciously choose to re-run the images of the trauma in the caring safety offered by the warmth and stillness of the therapist’s hands. This process gives new information to the body that the danger really is past, and that it’s now OK to relax.

Craniosacral therapy is one name given to a family of related bodywork techniques, such as Cranial therapy or Cranial work, SacroCranial therapy, Cranial Osteopathy, Sacro-Occipital Technique, Biocranial therapy, or CranioStructural Integration. The differences among these techniques are mostly theoretical and usually for proprietary teaching purposes.

However, not all practitioners of this family of techniques are prepared to deal with PTSD. Some practitioners approach these methods primarily as a physical manual therapy, akin to a slow version of the traditional chiropractic adjustment. Others de-emphasize the manual aspects, using no force at all and focus on psychotherapy or more esoteric elements of energy work and psycho spiritual counseling.

Even similarly trained practitioners apply the same techniques in very different ways. The experience, interests, educational depth and personal development of the practitioner, rather than his or her particular techniques, makes the biggest difference, so it’s best to interview prospective practitioners about their work.

Craniosacral therapy is most widely practiced in Ontario as a postgraduate specialization of massage therapists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, naturopaths, dentists, psychologists and medical doctors.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved
1. Revised 2005

Craniosacral Therapy for Colic

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 10:28:39 -0400

Colic. Your beautiful baby screams incessantly, fists clenched, rigid body, obviously in pain. You try rocking, singing, gripe water, perhaps changing your diet or the baby’s.

You are an otherwise capable parent reduced by sleep deprivation and tension to feelings of failure, panic and tears. Additionally, post partum depression may be triggered or worsened by the stress of a high needs baby. A mother experiencing a post partum mood disorder may feel unable to cope. Parents are often at the breaking point before they seek help.

Much of the literature and advice from doctors, family and friends often is vague. Cause is usually ascribed to an immature digestive tract, and parents are advised that the baby will eventually grow out of it.

Research from various state-of-the-art manual therapies has shown that colic can often be a functional problem, the result of compression of a cranial nerve.

Because of the pressure exerted on the skull as it passes through the birth canal, a particular cranial nerve, called the vagus, is often compressed where it passes through the base of the skull to the neck. When it is working properly, this one nerve serves to relax almost all of our body’s organs, and encourages proper function of the organs. When it is compressed it stops working properly.

Human digestion, regardless of maturity, happens only when we are relaxed. When the vagus nerve is compressed, it keeps a person stuck in the fight-or-flight stress reaction. Even adults will develop gas, discomfort and poor assimilation if eating while stressed. So colic can happen when babies can’t relax because of a nerve compression.

What really happens by letting the baby ‘grow out of it’ is that the baby’s nervous system eventually learns that the cumulative stress of being continuously in the fight-or-flight reaction is ‘normal’. Research has also shown that, left untreated, colicky babies are therefore at higher risk of stress related and sleep disorders, immune dysfunctions such as chronic ear and respiratory tract infections, injuries and school age diagnoses of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

Perhaps more importantly, letting the baby cry and waiting for the baby to outgrow the colic undermines development of the parent-child bond during the critical first few months. How a parent interacts with his or her baby is now believed to influence how the baby’s brain develops. A responsive parenting style is one of the keys to a baby’s healthy emotional development. Most parents agree that responding quickly to the baby’s cues is their most important job in the early months.

Advising ‘waiting it out’ does nothing to empower parents to help their own children when they are so clearly attempting to communicate that something is wrong. For the baby, this can create a preverbal pattern of parental distrust. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”.

Fortunately, specific treatment is available in the form of a gentle hands-on therapy which has proven to be remarkably safe and effective with colic and other pediatric concerns such as nursing and sleeping difficulties, vomiting, seizures, eye problems, chronic infections, torticollis (wry neck), and oddly shaped heads. This approach is called Craniosacral therapy.

Cranio what? Craniosacral therapy is a light touch manual therapy which addresses restrictions in the bones and connective tissue wrappings around the brain and spinal cord which impede fluid movement and neurological function. It is practiced by specially trained massage therapists, physiotherapists, chiropractors, medical doctors, and dentists.

Craniosacral therapy involves slow and extremely gentle mobilizations focused primarily on bones of the skull, face and mouth (the cranium), and the tailbone (the sacrum), as these are the bones to which our central nervous system is anchored. It is a remarkably effective holistic approach for working with a wide variety of physical, neurological and emotional issues in both children and adults.

Mothers and fathers often arrive at the clinic suffering from the anxiety of not knowing how to calm their babies. After an hour’s treatment session, during which they learn simple manual techniques to help both themselves and their babies, parents usually leave with the babies relaxed and quiet, or asleep.

The success rate for colic is high. Results are usually evident with the first session, and more lasting effects are cumulative from subsequent sessions. A treatment program typically involves 3 to 12 weekly or biweekly sessions.

For older children and adults, Craniosacral therapy is also helpful with concussions, migraines, learning disabilities, motor co-ordination problems, dizziness, and TMJ (jaw joint) pain.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved
2004

This article was originally published as handout for mother and infant workshops by Mark.

Childrens Health and the Tyranny of Expert Advice

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 10:19:13 -0400

“Children today are rude, lazy, lack respect for their parents and spend too much time lounging and drinking”. Ah yes, the lament of parents of teenagers, worried that they did something wrong from the beginning. Think this is a uniquely modern problem? Think again. This is a translation of some hieroglyphic grafitti found in a 6,000 year old Egyptian tomb.

Perhaps it has always been thus. Raising children has never been easy. Even throughout the animal kingdom, the intensity of physical, emotional and spiritual care for offspring has always represented the lion’s share of a parent’s energetic investment portfolio.

In our overdriven 21st century schizoid world, the task, I would argue, is made several orders of magnitude more difficult because we moderns lack a coherent, integrated model of what childhood, development and maturity ought to look like. Many different and countervailing models of what is right for our children seem to co-exist and compete for our allegiance.

As our world becomes more multicultural our models of everything become more fragmented, individuated and syncretic. On the one hand we don’t have the luxury of doing it ‘the way it has always been done’, and on the other hand we have a plethora of expert opinions about the ‘right’ way to do it, most of which conflict with each other.

Browse the literature of parenting and children’s health in a bookstore or on line for long enough and you may realize that for every proposition made by an expert, you can usually find at least 2 other expert opinions on the same subject with very different advice.

Corporal punishment, for example, was for millennia the gold standard of discipline. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” as it was said. Now, the practice is, of course, so frowned upon that it is illegal. A child has the right to call child protection authorities should a parent or guardian lay a hand upon him or her. What has happened? How has opinion changed so thoroughly? Albeit, small groups of parents and religious factions still claim the right to hit children, but the tide has turned and expert opinion is virtually unanimous on the subject.

I am using this as an example of how an entire generation of parents had to do a great deal of soul searching and exercise of will in the face of their children’s disobedience and transcend their own early childhood biographies by restraining the impulse to impose the kind of punishment to which they themselves were subject.

How did this happen? Perhaps it is the ‘Hundredth Monkey’ phenomenon (Google that if you don’t know what it is) over the relative values of fear or love in child rearing, but it certainly represents one of the great social dialogues of recent history. Over and above the thousands of pages of research, and the weight of media and punditry, an entrenched model had to be deconstructed individual family by individual family, and a new one elaborated. Millions of individual parents had to experience long dark nights of doubt, self-reflection and ambivalence over this issue before it became obvious, in a mysteriously social way, that we shouldn’t hit our children.

My point is this: the only way we are to figure out what is best for our own children is to listen to the complex stirrings of our own guts, hearts and consciences in relation to each individual child.

In my practice I am routinely asked for my ‘expert’ opinion about everything from pregnancy concerns, natural childbirth and interventions, attachment parenting, breastfeeding, nursing on demand or scheduling, co-sleeping, immunizaton, the propriety of media exposure, diet, exercise, extracurricular programming, and so on.

In response, while I do give my own advice, I am aware that my real job is to empower the parents simply to trust that they have the ability to make their own choices.

I’d like to think that I am sufficiently aware of my biases and tell my querying patients what I believe and, at the same time to beware the tyranny of expert opinion. In the same way that we ought to be conscious of the limitations of opinion coming from mass culture, fads, and the apparent objectivity of ‘best practices’, we as parents need to take into account the individuality of the family and the child; what is right for one family may not work for another, and what is right for one child may not work for another, even for a sibling.

Doing due diligence of self-education is not enough: Capricious change is ever in the air. Like the arc of temporary popularity to rejection of the Atkins diet, many approaches to children’s health seem to go through waves of fashion, even fad. Truly evolutionary change is the cumulative result of individual contemplation, observation and confidence borne of experience, one child at a time.

It has been my experience that children benefit from the kind of rock steady solidity that comes from parental self confidence. How do we get that in a world of such conflicting information? It was only a few generations ago that we could rely on the received wisdom of our cultural heritage. It’s up to individual parents now to become experts on each of their own children and allow for the possibility that you may raise your children differently from your neighbor, from your parents, even from your own siblings and closest friends.

This is obvious among adults; we accept and celebrate individuation and diversity in lifestyles amongst adults. Why are we so timid about treating our children according to our own perception of our individual children’s needs?

My father, an architect, often jokes that having children is the only activity that can still be done by unskilled labour and without a building permit. The tyranny of the expert and opinions emerging from mass culture may also take away this last bastion of parental discretion. Individuals have been re-inventing approaches to children for thousands of years in a Quixotic attempt to reverse engineer our strange teenagers. Why stop now?

In matters of what is right or wrong for your individual children, trust your guts above all and your children will benefit. That is my expert opinion.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

This article was originally published in Human Spirit Magazine Fall 2005 .

What is Craniosacral Therapy?

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 09:33:09 -0400

Craniosacral Therapy is an extremely gentle hands-on body-mind technique for evaluating and treating a variety of soft tissue, neurological and psychosomatic problems.

Craniosacral therapy is particularly helpful in situations of trauma, such as car accidents, head injuries, and surgery, and difficult births. Conditions unrelieved by more conventional methods are often relieved through Craniosacral therapy. It is used either on its own or in combination with other forms of bodywork, such as visceral manipulation, myofascial release, joint mobilization, accupressure, massage, and psychotherapeutic bodywork, where appropriate.

The focus of therapy is on the nervous system rather than the muscles or joints. Specifically, Craniosacral therapy addresses the connective tissue wrapping that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, forming the immediate environment of the central nervous system known as the meninges or dural tube. These structures, together with cerebrospinal fluid and the bones of the cranium and face, the spinal column and sacrum, have been described as the Craniosacral system. These structures form the core of your being. Because the dural tube is continuous from the sacrum to the brain, and because connective tissue is continuous throughout the body, stress anywhere in the body can restrict normal motion of the dural tube, resulting in inefficient movement , a deficit of coordination, mental and emotional disorder, and pain, sometimes quite distant from its source

This method of kinesthetic (in contradistinction to tactile) palpation can be taught to anyone who can be still enough to attend to the subtle but definite motions involved.

Treatment is also done through this same method of light kinesthetic palpation, applied with less than 5 grams of pressure, approximately the weight of a nickel. Such light touch is remarkably effective at moving tissues given enough time. The therapy works in part by inducing a state of relaxation deeply enough to allow the client's own self-corrective neuromuscular processes occur.

In this sense Craniosacral Therapy can be viewed as a form of biofeedback. The therapist, connected through touch to the client, responds to faint kinesthetic motion signals, and amplifies them to make the client more aware of the movements which allow self healing to occur.

Facilitation of self healing through this mechanism is, to greater or lesser degrees, afforded through many systems of bodywork, including Chiropractic Physiotherapy, Shiatsu, and Swedish Massage. Craniosacral Therapy is among the most gentle of these systems, related most to Myofascial Release, Strain / Counterstrain (positional release), Therapeutic Touch and the techniques of Cranial Osteopathy.

The theories proposed to explain the Craniosacral rhythm and its relationship to self healing have received a great deal of attention in the last few years, and have ranged from traditional mechanistic understandings focussed on a pressurestat model of cerebrospinal fluid balance and its relationship to normal neuromuscular function, to those associated with transpersonal psychology and theories radically unconnected to the mainstream of scientific understanding.

What is certain is that Craniosacral Therapy works for many acute and plateaued cases in which more invasive therapies have failed, and that many who have experienced this therapy describe profound kinesthetic, emotional, cognitive and spiritual transformations occurring during sessions What mechanisms or principles truly inform such phenomena is fertile ground for further research.

Craniosacral therapy is taught as a postgraduate course to Doctors, Chiropractors, Massage Therapists, Physiotherapists, Dentists, and Psychotherapists by the Upledger Institute, an educational and treatment centre founded by the American Osteopathic physician John Upledger. It is a method rapidly gaining currency and attention.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

Neanderthals In The Heart of the Global Village Stone Age family values in the mass age

Wed, 1 Nov 2006 21:50:15 -0500

No other fragmenting institution - religion, law, education, commerce, politics - has the power to elicit such polarized emotions as family. Depending on whether yours is unconditionally loving or horrifically abusive, lucky or unlucky, rich or poor, compassionate or dismissive, large or small, functional or dysfunctional, local or scattered across the globe, everyone’s strongest feelings revolve around family.
As things go slide in all directions, one of every two families find themselves fractured, estranged, re-formed, and angsting over custody. The remaining 50%, according to recent studies, are stressed, brittle, unhappily hanging on in quiet desperation.
The purpose and very definition of what constitutes a family is now up for grabs, punted about as a political football in the highest courts and insurance towers of the land. The innumerable column inches of press devoted to family issues are shorthand for our collective bewilderment as we accelerate into the passing lanes of the information superhighway.
We can be sure that structural changes are already a done deal by the time the politicians and lawyers begin debating. In my circle of friends, family and patients, the Leave It to Beaver version of 2.5 biologically related children wisely shepherded by two ethnically homogenous parents is increasingly rare. Far more common are single parent families, blended families, adoptive families, gay and lesbian families, multigenerational and multiethnic families, ‘failure to launch’ families, families of two, quirkyalones, and ‘families’ comprised of any number of people unrelated by blood or legally binding contracts who just want to live together and work it out. This is the reality on the street. Clearly the nuclear family is morphing into something else.
Perhaps the we are witnessing the renaissance of a more ancient and fully functional family model. The anthropologist Margaret Mead noted that throughout history and cross culturally, humans have mostly lived in clusters of 12 to 15 people; a nuclear family orbited by parents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, servants, hangers on and guests. In the middle of the last century, she wrote “Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.” She noted that the only exceptions to this extended family structure were during times of war, when the need for mobility - and soldiers - trumped the need for bucolic love, and the family went down to 5 members or less. I wonder what kind of war the nuclear family is reflecting today, when Lavalife, an on-line yenta business, sells for a cool $250 million U.S.
So this model of a small nuclear family in the suburbs is a recent invention, and clearly a bad one at that. And there is something else; our tribe size is habitually limited by our mind. It seems that, on brain power alone, we humans can only form authentic relationships with a maximum of about 150 people. In 1993 The anthropologist R. Dunbar published a paper concerning the social grooming habits of primates. It concluded that “.. there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”
This upper limit to an integrated loving group size, known as ‘Dunbar’s number’, was popularized in the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Apparently, every species has it’s own limit which varies directly with the thickness of the newest, shiniest, most recently evolved parts of our brain. It seems that the precariously thin layer of neocortex surrounding our Neanderthal brain is typically maxed out by caring about what happens to no more than 150 people.
It has always been thus. Push comes to shove, we have always protected our own tribes and families; and tribes have always been about 150 people, and families have always been about 12 to 15 people. What is new is a convergence of technology and and an explosion in population.
Throughout all of prehistory there were never more than about 300 million people on the planet, so structure and function of tribes and families were stable and predictable. By the time I was born there were 4 billion other souls here already. We now have 6.5 billion, and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, on Oct. 18, 2012 at 4:36 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, we will be 7 billion strong ...the good lord a’willin’ and the creek don’t rise.
Compound this doubling of the world’s already swelling numbers in two generations with an accelerating technology, shake in at least two world wars, bake on an alarmingly warming globe, and we have a recipe for, among other things, family stress.
On our watch, in this generation, we are bearing witness to a seismic redefinition of our quaint notions of family as blood and tribe in a kind of Brownian motion towards a citizenship of elective affinities at the click of a mouse. Our children more frequently introduce themselves by their first name alone, or via an MSN alias, than by their last name.
"The family circle has widened” said McLuhan 40 years ago. “The whirlpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar [the world’s first communications satellite], flight--far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage."
We baby boomers, the first progeny of the global village, have ourselves raised up a crop of adults weaned on these facts, and every fracture line in our sentimental notions of family are part of this brave new world. And nothing could be more stressful.
In my practice as a therapist I would say that the most soul squashing stress boils down to family matters; children, parents, abuses, infidelities, exes. Cruelties only imaginable within the crucible of safety we imagine families represent.
The word ‘family’ comes from the Latin familia, meaning “household”, and was applicable to relatives and servants alike. The term implied service, helping, getting things done for each other. No wonder the I-me-mine generation has been unable to maintain the family; it’s really about caring for others.
Who are our servants today? The Chinese factory worker who made my shirt, the migrant fruit picker in California, the tech guy in Bombay helping me with the Byzantine mysteries of my computer. They serve me. Some days I am more connected with this sort of faceless global villager than I am with my own blood relatives. Are they my family, my tribe?
One of the most interesting discoveries of genetic mapping is that all life forms are remarkably related; 40% of our DNA sequencing is identical to that found in worms, and 97% is the same as that found in chimpanzees. 99.something% of our DNA is identical human to human. What makes us and our blood relatives unique and different from each other is not abundantly accounted for by genetics. In an age of blood transfusions and organ transplants, we are more family with each other than our minds and cultures have yet been able to embrace.
In response to the the recent intensification of Middle Eastern violence, Marianne Williamson wrote “if I'm sure of anything I am sure of this: the mortal mind, as it is currently and commonly configured within human consciousness, is inadequate to the demands of the times in which we live.“ A big part of this inadequacy is our mental image of familiarity defining the limits of compassion and care. Fueled by fear, we still reflexly rely on tribal logic in defining who can marry whom, who is responsible for the mortgage, who we give to, who is our enemy.
Mcluhan also said "Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence." Indeed, it does seem that the more we interpenetrate each other, the more families and tribes are intermingling in the global village, the more strained is our mind, less secure is our source of familiar identity, and the more reactionary violence we are seeing.
It seems to me that each of us is being asked to find new modes of feeling secure that are at least as gratifying as our idealized image of what family ought to be. Perhaps we each need to deconstruct the very notion of identity, comforting illusion by comforting illusion. I have found that meditation helps, bodywork helps, walks in the woods.
This is not an easy task. For ten thousand generations, family has been foundational, the source and label of our primary identity, the basic building block of civilization. We are being asked by the times in which we live to expand our spheres of care, to evolve quickly, to fully utilize our thin layer of cerebral cortex by annealing it with the strong electromagnetic forces and limitless power of an informed heart. We are being asked for nothing less than a quantum leap of consciousness in learning how to control our primitive reflexes connected to protecting our own at the expense of others.
I am hopeful, necessarily so, that this atomization of the nuclear family, combined with the best of what globalization and technology have to offer, can bring us to the actual application of loving each other without rank, to live in the Buddhist ideal of seeing your own mother in everyone. As (Tuesdays With) Morrie Schwartz quipped, “We must love one another or die.” We have our work cut out for us.
I was struck recently by a documentary clip from Gaza of a Palestinian man, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, probably made in China like the clothes I wear, standing with a hose and washing away a pool of blood from a street in which a suicide bomber had blown himself up. The bomber did what he did presumably in the service of what he perceived his family, his tribe, had wanted him to do against those the consensus has decreed to be not tribe, not family. The man in the golf shirt stood quietly, sadly diluting what was left of a human being with water.
While it may be true that blood is thicker than water, we’re still mostly water. And water wears the rock.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

This article was originally published in Human Spirit Magazine Fall 2006

Mens Health

Sat, 1 Jul 2006 22:38:15 -0400

In my last article I wrote about the Goddess easily, glibly, in large measure because I’m not a woman; keep a little distance from the subject, let my man’s observations work their way to the surface, edit, et voila.

Truth be known, I’m intimidated writing about men’s health. Like trying to explain water to a fish, any semblance of objectivity to men is limited precisely because I am one. But I’ll try.

In the literature and in my clinical work, the most consistent axiom of stress revolves around having a prehistorically evolved nervous system plunked into the weirdness, choice and speed of the postmodern world.

A corollary is that a prehistoric nervous system soaked in testosterone will react more acutely to this situation than a prehistoric nervous system soaked in estrogen. This is why men suffer more stress related illness than women.

Our fight-or-flight responses are hard-wired, allowing us to fight or run away if we should, for example, see a bear in the woods; our heart rate, blood pressure and sugar elevate in response to adrenalin. Our pupils dilate, we go up on our toes, our breathing becomes shallow, our digestion stops. Our shoulders and legs get tense, as do the muscles on the floor of the pelvis and the jaw. These are the very same reflexes we share with the scary bear, and other mammals. In the natural world, such high energy has to be discharged; we either fight or run away, and then have a nap to recover.

These are useful reflexes for surviving physical threats. The problem is, of course, that for human beings in the post-modern world, only a very small percentage of perceived threats that trigger the flight or flight reflex are actually the kind of threats for which a fight-or-flight reflex is useful.

Our fight-or-flight reflexes are triggered when stuck in traffic, when the stock market goes down, when we see bad news on TV, or when watching an action film. So we have a reflex that evolved to be triggered occasionally, deeply, being triggered constantly, shallowly, with no opportunity for discharging the energy, and precious few opportunities for naps. And so we men tend to burn out our adrenal system.

In the past, it was we men who were counted upon to protect women and children from threats; beasts sometimes, military incursions mostly. Now that we live in the largest, richest, least militarily involved country in the world (other than the Afghanistan mistake), we Canadian men, at least, are left twiddling our thumbs, with no well defined protective role upon which we can hang our beret. All that testosterone with no place to go. What’s a postmodern guy to do?

Nowadays, the concerns that actually threaten our survival are not the kind that our feeble brains can even imagine; global warming, species extinction, biospheric collapse. These are serious and terrifyingly real concerns which seem to be implacable, inexorable and increasingly in our face. What stick or rock or grunt would suffice to fix them? How is a man to respond to a change in the weather?

Things, yes, are also very exciting, miracles and wonders, interesting times we live in. But lots has already fallen very seriously apart, and in the first quarter of the 21st century, the prospects for seven generations hence are, apparently, undeniably, dimming. We are beginning to pay the price. I need not remind you.

We are being drowned in descriptions of global demise, problems being spoken of out loud, accumulating in the ‘not fixable’ inbox of the male psyche. We men don’t do very well with these sorts of problems.

So what are we men supposed to be doing on a planet increasingly imperiled?

Every day we hear more news proving that we may not survive projecting our shadow like this on Mother Nature, drowning in self-pollution. No sane being would dare mess up the environment as unconsciously as we do.

All this waste is a cumulative byproduct of a modern interpretation of Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. There are so many impersonators of happiness; a better job, a new car, bigger house, and no guiding stories to share with each other; we’re increasingly at the mercy of integral globalization and a short memory.

And we do this in the deepest pools of choice – everything is a choice - from diet to spirituality to family life, whether to bank our children’s cord blood to immunizations to school, friends, activities, rhythm. With no sure ways to guide…we do our best.

Of course all this choice can make your head spin. Without dad or grampa or your brother or a religion telling you how to be in this world, you have to make decisions yourself, or (horrors!) in partnership with others. Such a wide array of one decision after another is not easy to sustain.

It’s a strange thing to have freedom in realms previously bound by tradition and duty. We’ve only had a few generations of such freedom, preceded by 10,000 generations of tradition and duty. We’re only getting started in this brave new world of choice, and already it’s confuddling.

One of the wonderful things about the postmodern world is that we really have no boundaries; it’s all up for grabs. How we comport our lives, models we choose for ourselves, the kind of fathers or husbands or sons or brothers or cousins or friends we are to be has become a choice. No longer are we bound by old world values that determine acceptable roles. We actually don’t have to respond with stick or rock or grunt. We may not even have to fix ‘it’.

Perhaps this is the problem with us men. We want to fix stuff. It’s an inclination imprinted into our DNA.

As a therapist I am privy to the most intimate details of a huge array of biographies and psyches, and after 17 years in practice I have found some patterns. One of the most enduring and oft repeated patterns is a woman, speaking of her partner / boyfriend / husband, that he doesn’t really listen, or want to talk. When she begins to describe a conflict or difficulty, he jumps in, post haste, to try to fix it. He then gets frustrated and gives up caring when he realizes that it’s not the kind of situation amenable to being fixed.

What she really wanted was simple validation, just to be heard, to speak of the issue as though trying it on for size, to hear herself say it out loud. Women talk to each other about these kinds of things all the time and are not phased one bit by the fact that there are no fixes available. In the absence of fixes, though, with such highly sophisticated forms of communication among them, and such diligence, there are usually workarounds that emerge from all-female communication fests.

We men don’t communicate nearly so willingly; we talk about stuff that can be or has been fixed, changed through the application of some force; technology, politics, wars.

Perhaps this is why, for example, that The Men’s Movement isn’t nearly so well organized as The Women’s Movement. The Women’s Movement has lots of media presence, academics, conventions, retreats; it’s a fait accomplit, a done deal.

We really do inhabit a different world as a result of the women’s movement. The concept of equality of the sexes is a radical departure from the last several thousand years at least of the world’s cultural norms, and we have built a radically transformed world because of it. Our whole social structure is premised on equality, that women can do anything men can do, and that civil rights, human rights, all rights, are conferred equally on both.

All you have to do is go to another country outside of North America, Europe, and the technologically overdeveloped world, and the prevailing opinions about the relationship of the sexes tend to the right; in extremis, fascism, sexism, racism, etc. In fact, I don’t know any men anymore who hold traditionally ‘guy’ stances with respect to women, and am shocked when I hear about it.

So where is The Men’s Movement? There are a few scattered Bly Guys, a few word-of-mouth drumming circles in the forest by invitation only, a few gatherings in living rooms. Even the term ‘Men’s Movement’ sounds ridiculous, rarely uttered.

And yet, our prehistoric male nervous system, so alarmingly prone to the fight or flight reflex, is calmed with words, mythology and logos. It helps put worldchange into context if we can tell a story about it, just talk about it, even if we can’t fix it.

We men are kind of stuck between an old world and a world as yet unseen. The old world gave us codes of conduct, definite roles, models for how to be. As dysfunctional as such old world dictates were, they were at least comfortingly definitive of what it meant to be a man.

And this new world, as yet unseen, doesn’t have a manifesto, a decree, a call to something other than arms. Just a lot of individual postmodern guys waiting for the Big One, or transcendence, for someone or something to show us how to fix it. We would do well to start talking.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

This article was originally published in Human Spirit Magazine July 2006

An Inconvenient Response

Thu, 1 Jun 2006 23:08:39 -0400

Last night I went to see Al Gore’s new film “An Inconvenient Truth” with my wife and a group of friends. I am shell shocked, moved into another orbit of meditation on what to do with my life.
I had the same reaction to reading Jonathan Schell’s book The Fate of the Earth some 25 years ago. The image of a dark, windy desert world inhabited by nothing more cumbersome to mother earth than insects was traumatizing, mesmerizing, and galvanizing.
That book, combined with attending lectures and personal meetings with well known environmental and political activists - Noam Chomsky, Dr. George Wald, Dr. Joanne Santa Barbara from Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others, impelled me to become active in anti-nuclear and social justice issues of the time. I fashioned much of my academic research to focus on these issues, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on the psychological fallout of the threat of nuclear war.
Over the last 20 or so years of having children and figuring out how to balance life, work and finances, I left social activism in favor of exploring more deeply into being a resourceful therapist, especially for babies, since they are going to be inheriting our mess, and they need to be resourceful, adaptable and increasingly capable of surfing on chaos.
I feel that I am now at another nodal point in my life. As a closet philosopher and concerned but passive observer of these seismic world changes we are witnessing, I am feeling much like I did in my university days, that something has to be done.
The threat of nuclear war was timely when our governments were pursuing policies of an arms race. Now, even though the threat still exists, it is a possibility contingent on political will, human sociopathy. We can always hope that humans can find it in themselves to choose not to perpetrate a crime.
On the other hand, the effects of global climate change are already upon us. Katrina, avian flu, polar ice caps melting, ocean levels rising are already facts, and the tipping point at which Gaia’s death rattle become self sustaining is arguably a matter of months to several years.
Apocalyptic chatter abounds. In my line of work many have shared with me private existential angst over the clamor to make sense of it all from books of prophecy, seers, avatars, Mayans, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce and others predicting that the proverbial shit will hit the proverbial fan sometime between now and 2012 in the form of a cluster of wars intersecting with natural disasters from climate change and the apparently unrelated natural phenomena of the reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles, which is also well under way. The more optimistic among them speak of transcendence and a new consciousness. I hope they’re right.
I’m not much of a metaphysican. I go on what I can sense and understand, and I tend to be skeptical of the mystical. That being said I am finding these days that such distinctions are irrelevant as the chaos mounts.
Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

Immunity: A Global Perspective

Tue, 1 Nov 2005 13:19:45 -0500

When Linda Gilbert, the editor of this wonderful magazine, wrote to me that the theme for this issue was going to be “Fortifying the Self – Building a Strong Immune System”, my first response was a radical dialectic notion that these two imperatives – fortifying the self, and building a strong immune system, may in fact be at odds with each other.

Down through the ages, sages have said that a strong immune system devolves from deconstructing the Self – that aggrandizing ego in each one of us that seeks to fortify itself at every opportunity, often at the expense of balance within our own being, of others and of the world.

Of course this is a linguistic sleight of hand to make a point; a kinder, gentler interpretation of ‘fortifying the self’ means simply upbuilding, making stronger. From this perspective, fortification is a good thing.

All the obvious things we do for ourselves to help strengthen ourselves – enough deep sleep, organic foods lovingly grown, prepared and slowly eaten with family and friends, stabilization of relationships, exercise, meditation, spiritual practice, and so on, all serve to build a strong immune system. This much is self evident, and most of the focus of what is now called integrative medicine rests on these basics. God knows we all have enough difficulty just handling the basics.

And it is not for lack of information that we do it so poorly most of the time. From time immemorial it has been for lack of love, will, wisdom and social integrity that we fail so often at this sense of fortifying our immune system, and get sick.

What is new is that we now we have world sickness to deal with; it is now the world that is making us sick, and this suggests to me the need for a more critical examination of the relationship between fortification and health.

The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti once quipped that “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. This is one of my favorite quotations because it draws attention to the fact that, at this point in history, it is our environment, the very things of the world, the world itself, that is now sick. Very sick. And there is a rising tide of opinion that it is on death’s doorstep.

People like Dr. David Suzuki have been warning us for years that our collectively profligate ways of living, our compulsively selfish individual fortifications, have brought us to this threshold experience of witnessing the melting of the polar ice caps, the rise in ocean levels, the creation of super storms, the destruction of the ozone, the warming of the globe and the disappearance of species at a rate faster than that of the time the dinosaurs died out. Clearly global immunity is under siege.

Tsunamis. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. AIDS. Bird Flu. Locusts. The list is beginning to sound, even to someone as this-worldly as me, remarkably like the biblical ten plagues. That list, as told in the story of Exodus, speaks of the increasingly consequential crises sent by God to convince the Egyptian government to abolish slavery.

Perhaps we, who have been wooed by the likes of Exxon and Wal Mart, have become unwittingly ensnared in pharaonic miasmas, complicit in a totalistic globalization of slavery. And, like the bad guys in the Exodus story, we’re beginning to pay the price of having fortified our selves at the cost of the balance of the world.

Day by day we watch as the global economy is forcibly milked in broad daylight for all it’s worth by the most cynical and proudly ignorant leadership the world has ever seen. No pharaoh, no imperialist, no despot, no marauding hordes in history have ever held the raw power now so cynically wielded by global capital and their spin doctor governments, all with full knowledge of the human and environmental costs.

My adult patients have been reporting that they are experiencing a kind of surrealistic psychic numbing as of late. As world events become increasingly dire, dramatic and soul – sized, we as a culture begin to experience an increasingly schizoid collective case of post traumatic stress disorder.

This much was evident and much was made of it after 9/11. Many people reported an increase in stress-related illness after being vicariously traumatized by witnessing those planes crashing into those buildings, those people jumping to their deaths, and the icons of global trade crashing to rubble.

Since then the ‘cultural chaos meter’ seems to have jumped an order of magnitude, and now if we don’t see or hear of something even wilder, even more destructive, even direr in the news, we think of it as an uneventful day.

So what does this have to do with our immunity? Biological systems require a relatively steady state in order to flourish. While we do have some capacity to temporarily adapt to an unstable environment, it takes its toll. Adaptation uses up our stores of natural steroid hormones from the adrenal glands during periods of heightened anxiety and environmental flux. We can do this for a period of time, but sooner or later we need to crash; we need to detoxify, rest and recuperate if we are not to head into immune dysfunction and major organic illness.

This attention to the limits of physiology, to respecting that our immunity is only as strong as we are physically, mentally, spiritually, financially and socially balanced is the hallmark of all integrative health care practices. That is to say, the cultivation of strong immunity from the worldview of complementary health care implies the need to simply give space and time for the innate capacity for biological systems to heal themselves.

Building a strong immune system is therefore more a matter of retiring, of rest, of yin, or living within our limits. Fortification, on the other hand, implies that we call our battalions to the fortress wall and defend ourselves against an inexorable enemy, like the heroes in Lord of the Rings, like the West facing the South.

Let’s take the case of the bird flu that’s supposed to be halting the everlasting trade expansion sometime this winter. There is a fundamental difference of opinion amongst educated people about how to handle it, a difference that mirrors this polarity between fortification and balance.

If we are to believe, on the one hand, the mass media, the U.S. Government and Roche Laboratories Inc., there is one way, and one way only, of dealing with it; $100 doses of Tamiflu for everyone. What Tamiflu actually does is slow down the progress of the infection by making cell walls less permeable to the reproduced virus from exiting to infect other cells. It doesn’t actually prevent the virus from infecting a person in the first place.

And it is expensive because it Roche is, understandably, opposed to generic manufacture of the drug. After all, they paid $50,000,000 U.S. for the exclusive rights to manufacture, market and sell it in 1997 from a small pharmaceutical company called Gilead, whose chairman at the time and a major shareholder was…get this…Donald Rumsfeld, the same guy who convinced many credulous people that the previously CIA installed government of Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and must therefore be invaded.

And Roche now has orders from the U.S. government for $2,000,000,000 (that’s two billion dollars) worth of this drug. I’m not sure that I or any one of us wouldn’t be tempted to protect a 4000% return on investment were we in that position. Never mind that it has been linked to pediatric seizures and deaths, and that the U.S. government just passed the Pandemic Flu Countermeasure Liability Protection Act of 2005, a federal law which shields producers of vaccines from liability arising from adverse reactions. So here is an enviously sweet deal for our American neighbors’ ostensibly democratically elected government officials, who are fortifying their financial selves at the taxpayers expense and marketing it back to us it as the very salvation of our immunity.

What about washing our hands? What about botanical and homeopathic remedies? What about getting enough sleep, meditating our stressors into philosophy, taking our vitamins, turning off the TV, eating more organic kale and less sugar, healing our relationships, exercising in the cold and making warm love? What about a political analysis that allows us to see through the fear mongering? What about repairing the world from the effects of our own Selves’ fortifications? What about developing, as the French homeopaths say, le terrain of a strong immunity?

What about that?

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved

This article was originally published in Human Spirit Magazine November 2005.

Attention Deficit Disorder

Mon, 1 Jan 2001 23:16:43 -0500

ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, is widely recognized to be diagnosed and medicated far too frequently. Based on my experience, understanding and observation, I would add my voice to the increasingly common consensus that there are actually 3 distinct categories of phenomena associated with what is usually diagnosed as ADD. only one of these three categories is actually Bona Fide ADD and therefore potentially amenable to treatment with Ritalin or other pharmaceuticals. The other categories of cause are not actually ADD, and therefore imply other interventions.

Bona Fide ADD / ADHD is within the Autistic spectrum; a complex neurological disorder related to Asperger’s Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Tourette’s Syndrome. These disorders have genetic roots and perhaps some connections to diet, allergies, immunization reactions and other immunological factors. This class of causes responds well to a mix of behavioral interventions, dietary changes, supplements, Craniosacral therapy, and there may be a role for antidepressants or amphetamines such as Ritalin.

Some childrens’ distractibility and oppositional behaviors do not have the same neurological basis as #1. These children may be reacting to dysfunctional family dynamics or unimaginative and overly intellectual educational systems, failures by parents and teachers to provide appropriate physical and emotional warmth, boundaries, rhythm, movement, models to imitate, and a sense of wonder. It has been said that ‘it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’, and perhaps many children inappropriately diagnosed with ADD and prescribed Ritalin are actually reflecting the anxieties of our time through their naturally more sensitive natures. If this is true, it implies that we as adults must radically change the way we make a living, consume and parent; that our children benefit when we actually take charge of their development, and spend more outdoor play time with them, in the natural world, with less stimulation from driving, the shopping mall, jolly jumpers, exersaucers, walkers, television, video and computer games, and more still time with them, near them, letting them simply be.

Trauma, particularly traumatic births (interventions such as forceps, suction and emergency Cesarian sections) and childhood concussions, can lead to the development of many of the behaviors commonly associated with ADD. A program of Craniosacral and Osteopathic Manual therapy, administered by a highly experienced physical therapist, as soon as possible after the trauma, has proven to be of tremendous value in treating this category of ADD-like symptoms.

Mark Levine is clinical director of Mark L. Levine, B.A.(hons), R.M.T., Pediatric + Family Craniosacral Therapy, providing craniosacral and osteopathic manual therapy services to infants, children and adults for a wide variety of physical, emotional, neurological and trauma related concerns.

Mark L. Levine, B.A.(Hons), R.M.T.
Pediatric & Family Craniosacral Therapy
310 Kerrybrook Drive
Richmond Hill, Ontario
L4C-3R1

905.780.2468
info@marklevine.ca
www.marklevine.ca

c

Creative Commons Licence
Some Rights Reserved
2001