Witten 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.
Published September 2025
Students often ask us how long it will take to train, when they can use our CranioSacral Therapy with clients and why they can’t do core curriculum courses straight after each other. After all, it looks simple, doesn’t it? Light touch and a few gentle holds… Surely it can’t take that long?
One student, a few years back, told me exactly that. She came along as she thought she’d like to add a few ‘head techniques’ to what she did. Then she found herself (voluntarily!) learning more anatomy, taking much more time between classes than she expected (because there was so much in them), and even coming to additional classes (like Clinical Applications ones, where we have up to 6 students treating the instructors’ clients as well as each other).
Her initial expectations make her chuckle now. Not because she hadn’t learned anything or even been unprepared. She’d just discovered that CST was deeper, richer, and more multi-layered than she’d ever imagined.
So what takes so long?
Embedding the richness, the depth and learning to really listen…
First, it takes longer than you might expect to calibrate your hands. We work with a pressure of just a few grams – test out the weight of a 20p piece to see what I mean. Many of us have rarely used such a light touch. And the idea that you can listen and follow what the tissues are doing beneath, with such accuracy, with that level of touch can take a while to truly trust. Training your hands to that degree of subtlety takes time, repetition, and patience.
Then there’s the breadth of the course itself. Honestly, each day of CST1, and all the other courses, could be expanded into four days! The practical application of the ideas in the paradigm, the depth of each of our core principles, each technique, the anatomy, physiology and even pathologies each link to. There’s a lot in each class. It’s why practice, reflection, and assimilation are vital. Otherwise, the richness could be missed and we would end up ‘doing’ and ‘fixing’.
It may take a bit longer also because we are a smaller country: we need enough people in each class to make it work well, so classes tend to be a bit more spaced out – but we’ve tried running them closer together and people find they are just not ready!
This is also why we have a good number of study groups around the country, to go over and practice the intricacies of each of the things we learn in each class. They are so helpful.
So expect a couple of years, assuming you can also make your timetable work with ours! But there is so much to do in between…
What else is part of the training? You!
It’s not only about your hands. CST is about you too.
Receiving work is part of the training, and it takes time to go through your own layers. By the time you’re stepping into SomatoEmotional Release, you’re not just ‘doing techniques’. You’re learning to hold a safe therapeutic space where someone else can let their own story unfold and find what they need to find for their healing. You can’t hold that kind of space authentically without having done your own work first. It just takes time.
There’s also the anatomy to learn, the confidence to build, the gradual embedding of it all into your nervous system. Add in the realities of practice – how many clients you see, whether you’re running whole CST sessions or weaving techniques into other modalities, how often you’re able to swap sessions with colleagues – and you begin to see it needs more time than the few classes.
So you could learn CST in a year…
...if you could devote all your time to it.
If life had no other pulls on your time and energy. And it’s true that you could do the classes, pass an exam in a shorter time frame, get a certificate for the wall… then the work of really becoming a practitioner and embedding all you have learned would really begin.
It’s not impossible to do it that way round.
But here’s the beauty: you don’t need to rush it. Every single class gives you skills you can take straight back to your clients. You’ll see changes, notice shifts, and gain confidence step by step. And that journey, where each stage feels profound and useful in its own right, is what makes CST training so rewarding.
It really isn’t about racing to the finish line, it’s about unfolding, layer by layer. Just like the way the work works itself!
And actually, that’s what makes the training so extraordinary… and the certificate on the wall so treasured.
P.S.s
P.S. All that said, obviously, the sooner you start the sooner you will finish! Here’s the link to our first class, CST1.
P.P.S. Warning: if you do start and find CST is for you, you might also find you never want to stop learning and you might still be coming to classes 30 years later!
P.P.P.S. Why is it CranioSacral Therapy and why is it written like that?
Just so you know, CranioSacral Therapy is spelt like that: CranioSacral Therapy. The reason there’s a capital S in the middle is to make the CST acronym a bit clearer.
It refers to the head – cranium – and the sacrum – the bone at the bottom of the back – because these are key parts of the craniosacral system (I know – that one’s not capitalised… because it’s a system, like the cardiovascular system… sorry!)
It’s easy to not be sure and call it sacro cranial therapy, or sacral cranial therapy. Or even to misspell any of those… (sacrocraneal for example)
Or sometimes it’s referred to as craniosacral manipulation or massage. But it’s not really like a manipulation or a massage…
Prior to Dr John Upledger’s first book where he called what he was doing CranioSacral Therapy, those working with this system typically referred to what they did as cranial techniques, working with the craniosacral mechanism or working in the cranial field. So he was the first to use the term and give it a form and function, so to speak.
Other branches of CST (like biodynamic) are also called CST because they work with the same system, although they do so in a different way.
That does get confusing, I agree, because they can feel quite different to receive. That’s why we sometimes call what we do Upledger CranioSacral Therapy. It also incorporates SomatoEmotional Release… but that’s for another day…
