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There’s 100 billion neurons in the brain. Each neuron has 10,000 connections to other neurons which therefore makes 1,000,000,000,000,000 connections for the whole brain or 1 quadrillion for short which is more than the number of particles in the Milky Way. So your brain is bigger than a galaxy. You have a galactic capacity to think and perceive that is enormously underused. Let’s test that theory by using our neural matrix to open up to the complexity and enormity of life as it’s perfectly designed for it. Your brain has so many potential connections it is way more powerful than the biggest computer system in the world and can organize and process information in ways you have never appreciated. Here’s an exercise to access this remarkable network and come into relationship with your galactic mind.
Let your mind settle for a minute by closing your eyes and letting your breathing slow. Come into body awareness and be in sensation. Notice your midline structures and the neural tone within them. That’s the activity of your neurons as they impulse. Know that there is an endless hum of activity here – day and night – streaming through your body. Most of the impulses are in the brain from neuron to neuron. Wait and listen to the synaptic melody that interplays through trillions of pathways and your mind will start to reveal how complex it truly is and how mobile. Feel into its 3D nature. The potential of the our central nervous system is almost limitless. Even though we live our lives in a groove our neural nature is able to offer much more remarkable abilities than getting up in the morning and running through the same events each day – it can open up to the stream of life by a mirrored relationship to the stars around us. It’s nature is to be complex and flexible. Your mind is galactic in its capacity, not just a small lump of material in your head but through its matrices of connections you are a galaxy.
Now that you’ve become open to the pathways in your brain, be interested in the space between them and the space of your neural matrix. That’s the space in your brain, just like the space out there in the cosmos. It’s what the stars move in. It’s what your mind operates in. Look at the pictures below and let the images filter into your system.
Exciting article below showing once again the link between behaviour and the neuroendocrineimmune system.
A study of 10 social groups of macaque females showed that the activity level of an individual’s immune genes was an accurate predictor of her social rank.
“A study of rhesus macaque monkeys may have solved a long-standing puzzle on a link between social rank and health.
In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team also showed that the monkey’s immunity changed when social rank was altered.
The work suggests that status drives immune health, rather than vice-versa.
A great many studies have shown associations in both humans and non-human primates between social environment and biological markers of health.
In previous studies of rhesus macaques, the so-called dominance rank has been correlated to levels of the stress-linked glucocorticoid hormones, sex hormones, the brain chemicals serotonin and dopamine, and white blood cell counts.
But one unanswered question concerns cause and effect: does a compromised immunity or imbalance of some chemical cause a particular social rank, or does taking on a particular social rank set the immune system and neural dials?
Jenny Tung, now at Duke University, and colleagues addressed this question by carefully assigning social rank to 10 groups of rhesus macaques, each containing five females.
This can be done by altering the order in which females are introduced into the group; the later she arrives, the lower her social rank.
The level of the blood’s immunity seem to respond to changes in social rank
The team then measured the levels of a broad class of immune cells, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in the bloodstream.
They found that on the basis of those levels of circulating immune cells alone, they could predict an individual female’s social rank with 80% accuracy.
Further studies that investigated the degree to which hundreds of immunity-related genes were “switched on” also showed increased immune activity in higher-ranking females.
What is more, the team found that as rank shifted among seven of the females, the data corresponding to gene activity was again enough to guess an individual’s new rank with an accuracy of 85%.
“The current results support the idea that changes in gene regulation help to explain links between the social environment and physiology, potentially supplying an important piece to the puzzle of how social effects ‘get under the skin’,” the team wrote.
Though the findings might seem to suggest that low social rank, or a decrease in social rank, can lead to reduced immune health, the team said it was “encouraging” that the effects can be counteracted by a change in the social environment.
“Our results motivate efforts to develop a nuanced understanding of social effects on gene regulation,” they wrote, “with the aim of both exploring its evolutionary and ecological consequences and addressing its effects on human health.”
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Here’s some interesting observations of our embryological development that might explain some of the phenomena felt by BCST practitioners. The first midlines of the body coalesce from the meeting of the three embryonic fluid spaces (chorion, yolk sac and amnion). Three germ cells create three midlines. From the primary ectoderm the neural tube develops. From the primary mesoderm the notochord and the heart develop. From the endoderm the gut arises along with the umbilicus.
The process of gastrulation in the third week after conception converts ectoderm to mesoderm so the embryonic disk becomes triple layered and the first midline emerges from mesoderm – the primal midline. However the process of initiation starts with the primitive streak emerging on the ectoderm layer. The area of the mesoderm at the top of the notochord is the cardiogenic area out of which emerges the heart. A similar process takes place in the ectoderm layer as the neural tube develops and the growth of the brain at the top of the tube to produce a unique moment in development at enfoldment when the heart and brain are right next to each other then as the face develops there’s a pulling apart.
Actually there’s so much similarity between heart and brain even though they become quite different structures with different functions – at their core they both retain the original chambers of life: four ventricles. This is a remarkable body reflection and as your skills deepen you will notice how similar the potency is in both sets of chambers, one set is full of CSF (blood serum) the other full of blood. At one point the heart is at the top of the notochord just like the brain is at the top of the neural tube, then as the heart folds into its place at the front of the body, the notochord moves between the heart and the brain and ends up moving through what will become the cranial base as the heart descends down the length of the developing spine to the the centre of the thorax.
The endoderm, gut tube and umbilicus are quite different in their development. The gut is design to be in relationship with the outside world and the heart/brain the internal world. After all the gut takes in food, it creates the lungs which take in air. Both ends are open to the world and there’s a development of the umbilicus which is entwined with the gut development and is part of an internal/external relationship. In fact, it’s our first relationship into the external world of the placenta, the uterus and mother/other. Consequently the potency of the gut and umbilicus is quite different to the heart and brain. The gut, the umbilicus and the amniotic space are all connected. This means that the space around us is an interesting mix of yok sac/gut/umbilicus and neural tube/amniotic sac with potency from the primal midline flowing into the space and constantly potentising it.
You can learn to know your body with a much greater awareness than is commonly experienced. In that awareness tremendous detail of your anatomy comes to you as you learn to discriminate the different structures and processes going on within you. This leads to an exquisite sensitivity that revolutionizes your body chemistry, your muscles and joints, your heart and blood flow and your nervous system resulting in a more balanced, stronger and energized state.
A BCST practitioner touches the client’s body with a highly developed felt sense of their own system and a honed ability to listen through touch that creates a phenomenal space which is both stimulatory, reflective and therapeutic. There’s a remarkable ability we all have that can only be tapped in relationship with another, it’s the ability to creatively reorganize our structure. The body can morph and adjust from within itself, through its own body intelligence. All it needs is the right environment which is supplied by the practitioner’s touch and presence. It’s a knowing presence that appreciates the body and can listen to the shape of things. When touch is able to open up to health and deeply acknowledge the overwhelming strength and order in our bodies then there is a revolution that produces new forms. Tissues and structures automatically shift and adjust in a sequence and order that is emerging from within the body system not from outside. The therapist is like an advocate of the client’s physiology and that empowers the body to drop into its deeper mechanisms of renewal that have their basis in how the body was formed during embryonic and fetal development. These forces often lie dormant in the background only to be catalysed into action through the right touch.
When health is sought for, traumatic patterns, pain and suffering can all be smoothly synthesized into a new order as the body dissolves into a deep fluid state that underlies the physical. This is a medium for the nervous system to regulate, muscles to relax and organs to transpose to a new chemistry. In the shifts and adjustments there is greater freedom of movement both at the micro and the gross levels.
The body holds huge possibilities for recovery and regeneration and joints that are painful and distorted can become at ease and mobile. The body can glide and re-posture as the BCST practitioner facilitates a relational field to the inherent life forces that are present in the body. Latent patterns of emotion and mental states emerge and resolve with the physiological changes to produce reorganization that is systemic. When change takes place across the whole body system there is deep integration and long term resolution is possible.
As the biodynamic model of craniosacral practice becomes more refined, a gap is starting to open in the nomenclature of it and older forms of CST, especially around descriptions of tissue adjustment and reorganization processes. In particular, the terms ‘points of balanced tension’ and ‘states of balanced tension’ have changed to ‘states of balance’ in the growth of the biodynamic field. This is an attempt to redefine the approach to a more accurate description of what happens in a BCST session since the touch has moved from a more direct and highly facilitated contact to a more indirect approach that has greater interest in perception and allowing the body to move from within its own wisdom. I wonder if a ‘state of balance’ is representative of what is happening within the biodynamic craniosacral field now. This progress is no longer part of an approach that seeks to create balanced states, but of allowing the body’s underlying embryonic pathways to reveal themselves. This is encouraged by the practitioner’s ability to both perceive and bear witness to the client’s natural organic body response whilst remaining in contact with the relational field that arises between them. This refers back to the original development of the embryo from both an internal and external perspective of which the body naturally and instinctively recognizes. In particular, the recognition of this process is felt in very fluid movements of change and experienced by both practitioner and client as streaming or flowing. This is different to what may have previously been understood or explained as ‘balanced states of tension’.
It took me a while to really appreciate the venous sinuses. The protocol I was taught was overly complex with lots of difficult handholds – it put me off for years to be honest. Last year I was teaching about the blood flow from the head and I came across a wonderful image in Theime of the jugular veins – the top left image is my attempt to generate a similar view. The image gave me another way into the venous sinuses.
By focusing on differences in flow between the left and right jugular veins, and only really orienting to the sinuses shown above, I found I have much clearer experiences of blood leaving the skull. It is a good orientation and really seems to help people drop into a deep space. I hope it works for you.
Here’s a podcast of a recent interview of Ged Sumner for a Minnesota Radio Show.
On a recent trip to Vancouver Island I took a ferry from the mainland which sailed through the south gulf islands. Truly one of the most beautiful ferry trips I’ve been on. It was a beautiful day with remarkable low lying clouds hanging over the small islands and as i watched from the upper deck i started to notice how interconnected the whole scene was. The interaction was palpable and what seemed like separate things in the sea, the boat, the sky, the sun, the clouds, the land and the trees slowly started to reveal a hidden relationship. See the pictures below. The clouds hanging over the islands completely confused my analytical mind. How was it that clouds could be so low and not moving, just parked on top of the small islands. Why weren’t they moving? There was definitely wind blowing across the boat, so that made no sense. For the first half an hour i couldn’t work it out then suddenly it just revealed itself. The trees were holding the clouds to the land. What was missing to the eye was the water vapour that stretched like an invisible fog in all directions and bridged the gap from the sea to the clouds. It’s what we never see unless it gets so dense it becomes clouds, fog or mist but it’s always there in dynamic relationship to the sea and the sky. It’s a huge part of the atmosphere and it’s composed of water. Water in the sea, in the vapour, in the clouds and in the trees in a tensile relationship.
The scene suddenly looked like the trees didn’t want to let go of the clouds and maybe the clouds didn’t want to move away from the islands, so they morphed to the shape of the island and sat there almost on the treetops as I passed by on the ferry. Clearly the wind wasn’t strong enough to break the linkage nor was the sun’s rays strong enough to disperse the clouds, so there was a balanced membranous tension that was all about water and its property to attract other water molecules, and I realized that the only way I’d worked it out was to shift away from what I was seeing and feel the scenery through my body and its fluids. And now when I consciously dropped into the fluid volume of my body it totally made sense. The depth of the sea and its dynamic connection with me and all water forms around it, and then the clouds felt like they were an extension of my fluid volume, more like whispy organs than separate objects. The trees were like me, no different, structures with water in the them and now I felt the sunshine pouring through the vapour field into me and scintillating my fluids, exciting the water molecules in my body. Then, for a while, I don’t know how long, I lost my sense of separateness and the interactions became so beguiling and the water molecules almost hummed in constant motion and vibration, and from second to second everything was feeling its way with everything else and that is what we call movement but all it seemed like was a shifting of millions of water molecules finding balanced tensions and maintaining it by altering their positions. The surface of the sea was like a cell membrane with water entering and leaving the body of the ocean constantly and the clouds were doing the same in a huge endless field of vapour. And the sea and the clouds were dense versions of the vapour and the trees were taking in and giving out water too and so was my body, it was an exchange constantly taking place between everything and that’s how we relate. We are in constant flux with our environment, each other and water is the currency. We feel through water. We sense through water. I’ve no idea how we do that but it’s extraordinary.
- ‘The skull of a man who had been kicked by a horse. This caused a swelling which slowly increased in size; his left eyeball and the jawbone were gradually squeezed outwards. Eventually, the swelling started leaking and began to stink. After 21 years of suffering from the swelling, the man died in 1771. He was dissected by Andreas Bonn.’ Text from exhibition: ‘De ontdekking van de mens. Anatomie verbeeld’ Bijzondere Collecties Dec 2011
Above are images of a skull I saw in an exhibition about representation of the body in Amsterdam at Bijzondere Collecties. You can clearly see how over a period of 21 years the growing swelling caused the bones to grow into a different shape. Bones grow in response to the forces exerted on them – Wolff’s Law.
You would never see a skull like the above in todays world; hopefully modern medicine, and we would say cranial work, would be able to stop the underlying swelling.
In the cranial paradigm the most common conditional forces that distort skulls are due to birth processes and/or head trauma. Unresolved conditional forces from early experiences continue to shape the ongoing dynamic production of bone. The images show that if we change the forces acting on a skull even adult bones will remould themselves.
Here’s my favourite books of the year:
Human Anatomy, Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today – Rifkin, Ackerman, Folkenburg (Thames & Hudson)
One of my favourite books ever. A remarkable collection of anatomy images spanning 500years – basically a history of anatomy and anatomists from Vesalius (1514-1558) arguably the father of anatomy through to Henry Gray (1827-1861) and modern anatomists. It’s also a book about the change in Western culture as anatomy and the study of the body moves from the divine and mystic through to the scientific along with attitudes towards the body and death. An absolute must for all anatomy lovers. Here’s a few images from the book all in the public domain but not easy to get hold of:
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The Tell-Tale Brain – VS Ramachandran (Heinemann)
A leader in the neuroscience field and a very charismatic character who has spend his career making huge headway in the understanding of neural communication and consciousness through his study of phantom limbs and neuropathology. He’s not scared to hypothesize and has a good look at the development of language and how introspection evolved. Great sections on empathy and aesthetics. Love the chapter on ‘the neurons that shaped civilization’. Here’s a link to a youtube video of him speaking about this……
The Epigenetics Revolution – Nessa Carey (Icon)
There aren’t too many books around on this fascinating subject especially ones that are accessible and easy to fathom. The author elegantly and scientifically explains what epigenetics means and its implications for understanding health and the body. There’s some quite full on biochemistry in some sections but worth persisting to get a good handle on the science. Here’s a wonderful excerpt:
An abusive or neglectful environment when young is clearly a major risk factor for the development of later neuropychiatric disorders. We are so aware of this as a society that sometimes we almost forget to question why this should be the case. It just seems self-evident. But it’s not. Why should events that lasted for two years, for example, still have adverse consequences for that individual several decades later?
One explanation that is often given is that the chidren are ‘pyschologically damaged’ by their early experiences. Whilst true, this isn’t that helpful a statement. The reason why it’s not helpful is that the phrase ‘psychologically damaged’ sin’t really an explanation at all – it’s a description. It sounds qutie convincing but on certain levels it doesn’t really tell us anything.
Any scientist addressing this problem will want to take this description and probe it at another level. What are the molecular events that underlie this psychological damage? What happens in the brains of the abused or neglected children, that leaves them so prone to mental health problems as adults?
There is sometimes resistance to this approach from other disciplines, which work within different conceptual frameworks. This seems rather puzzling. If we don’t accept there is a molecular basis to a biological effect, what are we left with? A religious person may prefer to invoke the soul, just as a Freudian therapist may invoke the psyche. Both of these refer to a theoretical construct that has no defined physical basis. Moving into such a model system, where it is impossible to develop the testable hypotheses that are the cornerstones of scientific enquiry, is deeply unattractive to most scientists. We can probe for a mechanism that has a physical foundation, rather than defaulting to a scenario in which there is something which is assumed, somehow, to be a part of us, without having any physical evidence……..
The human brain possesses sufficient flexibility to generate different adult outcomes in response to similar childhood experiences. Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells. Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s a quadrillion. It’s hard to imagine this so let’s visualize each connection as a disc that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion disks on top of each other and they will reach to the sun and back, three times over.
Thats a lot of connections, so it’s perfectly possible to imagine that our brains have a lot of flexibility. But the connections are not random. There are networks of cells within the giant grid which are more likely to link to each other than to anywhere else. it’s this combination of huge flexibility, but constrained within certain groupings, that is compatible with a system that is mechanistic but not entirely deterministic.
The Hidden Reality – Brian Greene (Alfred A. Knopf)
Amazing physicist with an ability to convey maths and physics in a very clear and exciting way. He’s deeply interested in the string theory and the idea of multi-dimensions and multi-universes. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s definitely a useful mind expanding process. He explains it really well on the embedded video:
Steve Haines
Ged Sumner
