Is CST Training Right for You?
5 Signs You’re Ready, and 2 Reasons It Might Not Be For You
By Caroline Barrow, CST-D MCSS
CranioSacral Therapy (CST) training, as wonderful as many of us find it to be, isn’t right for everyone (gasp!). Maybe you do already know it’s for you and you’re ready to jump in. Maybe you know it is, but the timing’s not quite there.
Or maybe you’re just noticing a few things that are making you wonder… is there a nagging sense of something more happening for your clients that you clock but don’t quite understand, do you find clients get emotional during bodywork, or are you wondering what else could be going on in the head – with all those bones, the central nervous system and all that entails…
People find us for a variety of different reasons because we do address a number of these different aspects that you may not yet have delved into. If you’ve found your way here then maybe this post might help you figure it out! Take a moment to indulge your wonder a bit more deeply…
5 Signs You’re Ready
1. You have a nagging sense there’s something more
Your work is good, clients trust you and things do improve for them. But every so often, is there a session where you reach the end and find yourself wondering whether you got to the thing that actually needed addressing, whether there was something underneath what you were working with that you couldn’t quite reach? It’s usually good to follow these instincts – not to berate ourselves as therapists but to make us look further afield…
CST offers a different kind of clinical listening and ways to ask the body what it might be holding onto and why. Sometimes that different angle is what allows something to shift that hasn’t been able to before.
2. You have clients whose patterns keep not resolving
You know those times when the client’s headache eases – but then comes back? Or their back pain lessens, but still niggles or flares up again a few weeks / months later? You care about what you do, right? So it bothers you that things keep returning and suggests that you – and the client of course – haven’t quite got to the bottom of it.
Maybe there are other deeper structures – inside the head or face, vertebral column, cranial bones, fascia or even within the actual brain or spinal cord itself – that you just don’t know how to reach yet. CST will help expand your reach!
3. Anatomy genuinely interests you
Many of my students already know I’m a total anatomy geek – and proud of it! It does help when learning CST. Sometimes what happens when we treat effortlessly takes us from “I’m willing to learn it” to “wow this is actually really cool!”
For example: the way the dural membranes connect the cranium to the sacrum… what the sphenoid articulates with and what that means for the face and the cranium as a whole… why a restriction somewhere in the pelvis might be contributing to a headache.
The anatomy in CST training goes very deep, and if that prospect excites rather than concerns you – if the idea of understanding the body at that level feels like something you’ve been wanting – that’s a real indicator you’ll find some joy here.
4. Things have happened on your table that you couldn’t fully account for
You’re witnessing more sessions that go somewhere you didn’t direct. A client becomes emotional when you’re working on something you thought of as structural, or your hands are picking up things that you’re not sure what to do with.
Many therapists have those moments — and tend to file them quietly somewhere under ‘not sure what that was’. CST is often where that filing cabinet starts to make more sense!
5. You’re interested in the whole person, not just the complaint they came in with
The physical issue is rarely the whole story, and you can probably sense that. Can you see the way stress, history and unresolved experience live in the body’s tissue? A nervous system that’s been running on high alert for a long time has a certain feel to it. The emotional and social layers that sit alongside the physical ones affect them more than conventional training perhaps lets us say.
CST works at that intersection, and if its for you, it won’t feel like learning something new so much as finally having the language and the tools for something you’ve already been noticing.
2 Reasons It Might Not Be For You
1. You’re looking for quick techniques to add to what you already do
Which is a completely understandable thing to want – and there’s plenty of good training out there that offers exactly that. CST1 may offer you that, maybe even half of CST2 (which I would argue is only the start of what CST really has to offer)
Once you really get into it though it really isn’t that. It focuses on different anatomy, has its own way of listening, its own philosophy about how the body works and what our job as a therapist actually is. For many of our students, even from early on, it tends to start changing how we think, not just what we do.
One of our most recently qualified practitioners told me she’d originally come because she’d heard CST was good for headaches. She had a lot of clients with headaches, so she booked onto a class. She wasn’t expecting the depth of the anatomy or the breadth of the philosophy.
What she hadn’t known she was looking for, but what she found, was a completely different way to understand why sometimes things weren’t resolving for clients and a different clinical language from her massage and myofascial work, that could reach the psycho-emotional and social layers she’d been intuitively picking up on for years. It’s become, she says, an ongoing journey of learning rather than a module she completed.
So if a quick add-on is genuinely what you need right now, this probably isn’t it – though it might be worth sitting with what’s underneath that, in case it’s actually more.
2. Your own body might need to find and experience a little more space and treatment first
It’s worth pointing out that this work also hugely supports your own healing on many levels. Each CST class is four immersive days where you’re both giving and receiving treatment, and your own system will respond to that. Occasionally someone comes and their body has quite a lot of its own processing still to do, and four days as the container for that – alongside the learning – can be quite a lot. If you’ve been through a difficult period, or if you’ve never received CST yourself and aren’t quite sure what to expect of it, we highly recommend having some sessions first – so you arrive in a more settled place from which to learn.
Timing
A note on timing – when is right?
Some people have this training on their radar for years before they actually start, others find out about it, feel a ‘hell yeah‘ call inside of themselves and jump right in. We’ve totally learned to trust that people arrive at the right moment for them, and when they do, what’s on offer tends to land differently from how it might otherwise.
So whether you’ve been mulling this over for a while or only recently heard about CST, if any of the points above resonate and you feel the pull, or even the hell yeah, then get in touch. I promise that we have a lot to offer you and your clients.
CranioSacral Therapy 1
CranioSacral Therapy 1 will give you the foundational approach of this therapy along with a set of hugely effective steps and techniques for a whole body treatment you can take away and start working with. *
Written by Caroline Barrow CST-D MCSS
Director of Upledger Institute UK | CranioSacral Therapy Instructor | 30+ Years as a 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.
