What the Body Carries
She had been in a war zone as a young child. I had known her as a friend for years and had no idea.
It came up at the start of our second session, when I asked how she’d been since our first treatment and checked in about one of the areas that had been sensitive to touch. She told me the sensitivity wasn’t physical pain — it had surfaced a memory. One that hadn’t fully clarified for her until a few days after we’d finished. As a young child, during an air raid, she had been grabbed by the arm and hurried downstairs to a shelter. Bombs. The fear of what might happen.
I let that sit for a moment. There was gravity in it and it deserved a few seconds of silence. I acknowledged how frightening that must have been. Then, gently, I brought us back to the present — the routine questions about sleep, digestion, how her body had been feeling.
Good to remember that while trauma may have happened in the past, treatment happens in the present.
It was a profound reminder of the trust and responsibility that comes with this work.
Our first session had been fairly typical. Getting oriented with a new client takes time and patience. There were adjustments to make — holds I’d been taught that didn’t quite suit her, places she wasn’t comfortable being touched. All of it valuable. I was grateful she could tell me.
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy doesn’t impose an agenda on a client’s system. It listens. The practitioner learns to feel into what the system is presenting — not to decide what needs to be done, but to create the conditions for the body’s own intelligence to lead. Before we began that second session, I settled into my own grounding ritual, something my teacher had been careful and thorough in teaching me. That settling is what allows me to receive a client openly, without projection.
What her childhood history clarified was something I’d already sensed in our first session without fully understanding it. She had never suffered physical injury during those years, but her body had held the trauma — the accumulated stress of a family bracing against the possibility of loss. That kind of holding doesn’t announce itself. It lives quietly in tissue and tone, in the nervous system’s reluctance to fully rest.
Session by session, that began to change. Her system settled in ways that deepened over time. The areas that had been difficult to approach became less guarded. Chronically held tension released. Her parasympathetic nervous system — the part of us that allows true rest and recovery — found more room to express itself.
She’s still a client. Life continues to bring its own new challenges, as it does for all of us. But the early presentations that brought her in have largely resolved. What she gave me, thanks to her courage and ability to engage openly in our dialogue, was an education in how uniquely each person carries their history — and how much is possible when the conditions for healing are simply, carefully, made available.
If something in this resonates, I’d welcome a conversation. [Contact Me]