Written by Caroline Barrow CST-D MCSS
Director of Upledger Institute UK | CranioSacral Therapy Instructor | 30+ Years hands-on therapist | Founder of College of Body Science 25+ years developing courses and teaching anatomy, physiology and pathology for complementary practitioners | Passionate about and committed to bringing CST to the world’s awareness and helping people find their own inner wisdom.
Published September 2024
We learned a new way to work on / with our eyes recently!
We have a class called The Brain Speaks which is about working with different areas of the brain (obviously…). ‘Speaking’ (less obviously…!), means we ask what different brain areas may have to share with us as we treat. Part of the therapeutic imagery, in our CranioSacral Therapy paradigm.
I’ve done the class before and it’s definitely one of my favourites, but this piece was new. Why it excited me so much is because I used to work with eyes and vision.
I used to work with vision improvement!
Back in the day, I hated wearing glasses. I found a few variations on sets of exercises and other things you could do to help improve your vision. One was called the Bates method, another was a book was written by someone called Robert Kaplan. I met and studied with him in Canada, to learn how to teach this myself.
I also managed to cut my prescription in more than half. To the disbelief of my new optician when I got home1
Because he wasn’t having any of it (“vision doesn’t ‘improve'”) we agreed that he would first test my eyes, then check out my previous glasses, then tell me if indeed they were different.
I’ll never forget his face when he came back and said my eyes tested at 2 diopters less than my glasses were… (from a -4.25 down to a -2.25 if that means anything to you…)
But what do you guess was the trouble with trying to build a business teaching people eye exercises?
Yep… they just didn’t keep doing them for long enough.
So I gave that up!
But its always been lurking in the background for me, even though I’ve never got rid of the need for glasses completely.
These new techniques were the missing piece I wish I had had back then.
We worked with the eyeball, the optic nerve, its tracts and the part of the brain that processes this. We simply used our typical CST approach on these structures.
It was incredibly profound.
(Would you believe me if I told you a couple of students actually said: “who needs s*E(X when you can do ‘this’ “? I have the proof on video, though I’m not going to share it!)
(Please also don’t jump to any negative conclusions about that part of their life or about what we were doing in those techniques. Nothing remotely dodgy in any way shape or form – just to be crystal clear!)
(The comment came more from the depth of the experience of working with such an important sense organ I think!)
Extraordinary.
And crazy maybe.
But hey, if your brain and eyes could speak I wonder what they might say?!
