“You will just have to live with it? – Take these drugs and the problem will go away – We have done everything we can – That is normal for babies – Surgery is your only option – You are imagining it.”
The Last Resort First
Kenmare,
Co Kerry, Ireland.
From John Dalton
February 27, 2023
Hello,
Let me ask you this – Is your faith in the medical system shattered? Has your wallet been emptied by overconfident therapists? Have you been on the emotional roller coaster, rising with the hope that each new approach is going to work, then crushed when it doesn’t? Have you tried everything and still not got the results you wanted?
You’re not alone.
In fact, you’re like so many of the people who have come to me for help and got it.
Who am I?
I’m going to explain a bit about what I do but first, let me tell you about myself so you can put what I say in context.
- I’ve been practicing craniosacral therapy since 1993.
- I’ve treated over 2000 people.
- My success rate averages 85-90%. Meaning 85-90% of the people who come to see me get the result they were looking for.
- I developed the first Government accredited diploma of craniosacral therapy in Australia. (I lived in Australia for 10 years)
- I was a founder of The Australian Institute of Cranio Sacral Therapy.
- I have lectured internationally on craniosacral therapy.
- I produced the Craniosacral Therapy Masterclass DVD series.
- I wrote the book Why do we get sick? Why do we get better? – A wellness detective manual.
So now that you have a better idea of who I am let me start off by telling you what I’m NOT going to do . . .
I’m not going to make any claims that what I do is going to work for you.
You see, here’s the thing.
If a therapist tells you they can guarantee that you’re going to get better or that they are going to heal you, well . . . they are kidding you.
And probably themselves too.
We would all like guarantees but when it comes to health, there are none. When you come right down to it, what we look for is an approach that has the most likely possibility of working.
An executive from pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smith told Britain’s, ‘The Independent‘ newspaper. “I wouldn’t say that most drugs don’t work, I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 percent of people.”
30 to 50%!!
My success rate averages 85-90%
How do I arrive at that figure?
Very technical.
I go through my patient records and add up all the successes.
What constitutes a success?
When someone first comes to see me I ask them what they want me to help them with.
“I want to stop having chronic back pain.” “I want the fibromyalgia pain to stop.” “I want to stop being depressed.” “I to get back on track in my life.” “I want to stop feeling so anxious.” “I want my neck pain to stop.”
If at the end of their treatment program, they have what they wanted at the beginning, I consider that a success.
That’s not very scientific.
I’m not going to try and convince you of the scientific validity of craniosacral therapy. Let’s face it if a scientific approach was going to help you it would have done so by now and . . . well, you wouldn’t be reading this.
At best craniosacral therapy is acknowledged scientifically as having, “A substantial amount of anecdotal evidence in its favor.” Which is an academic way of saying, “Lots of people are saying this thing is really good.”
When I am working with someone my focus is always on finding the root cause of the problem because without dealing with the root cause you don’t get permanent results.
How it works.
If you fall and bruise your elbow, do you have to think about how to fix it?
Me neither.
Some part of us just knows how to do it. It knows because your body is designed to fix itself. And it manages to do this very well most of the time.
It is part of the balancing act your body is continually engaged in. The technical name for it is homeostasis.
A bit like riding a bike, your body is continually balancing itself as it goes along, adjusting to the external changes it encounters.
You run up a hill, you’re heart rate increases and you start to sweat. You have a big meal so your body puts all its resources into digesting the food and you feel sleepy.
When you look at the workings of your body in this way, “healing,” is part of that same balancing act. You bruise your elbow, you’re body fixes it. You get an infection, your body kills it off by raising your temperature. What we call, “healing,” is just another part of the balancing act your body is engaged in.
You only run into a problem when, for some reason, your body has to over-compensate to maintain balance. It would be like trying to ride the bike with a big stack of boxes hanging off the side. You may be able to keep going but the effort, over time would be draining and eventually you would crash.
Traumas are like the boxes. Normally they are small like bruises or infections. A big stack of boxes would be major physical trauma.
Let’s say a person is in a car crash and they hit the steering wheel at 70 kilometers an hour. That is obviously a lot more serious than a bruised elbow. That impact will put a deep imprint in their body. The broken bones and lacerations caused by the accident will heal within a matter of months, but the physical after-effects can go on for years – causing anything from headaches to depression or worse.
Our bodies never stop trying to release the deeper residual patterns of trauma. If the imprint is too intense it overwhelms our body’s repair mechanism. The prolonged effort of trying to release a traumatic imprint that is stuck is exhausting and after years of trying your body can feel very low in energy.
Birth Trauma
One of the most common causes of trauma is birth. Modern birth is often mismanaged from the outset. Labour can quickly become a frenzy of, “emergency procedures,” which often leave the baby with deep physical trauma.
Even with a natural, problem free labor, if a baby gets stuck and distressed during delivery, even briefly, it can put substantial restrictions into the baby’s system that may not show up for years. I have treated hundreds of babies for a wide range of symptoms that all originated from birth trauma.
And it’s not just babies, unreleased birth trauma can remain trapped in our bodies for years. 78 years is the oldest birth trauma I have helped release.
That’s right – 78 YEAR OLD MAN RELEASES TRAUMA FROM BIRTH!
This doesn’t just apply to physical trauma, emotional trauma is just as devastating in your body as physical trauma.
Your body has lots of different movements and rhythms going on all at the same time. For example, the movement and rhythm of your breathing or the movement and rhythm of your blood pumping around your body.
When your body is trying to repair itself it has a movement and rhythm to it too. It is very subtle and takes years of practice to be able to feel but being able to feel this movement of repair is crucial to knowing where your body is getting stuck in the process. I can feel this movement and then help your body complete the repairs. I’m a bit like google maps when you’re lost. I don’t drive the car I just help your body find the way.
The Journey to Distance
A couple of months ago I was helping a man in Australia with tinnitus and chronic sensitivity to radiation. The tinnitus, which is a continual ringing in the ears, was nearly driving him insane, and the chronic radiation sensitivity meant he had to live in the middle of the countryside away from Wi-Fi and cell phones. He was so sensitive he would feel nauseous if the person in the car in front or behind him on the highway were using their cell phone.
Our work progressed well, the tinnitus improved as did the radiation sensitivity. One day he asked if I could help with his left eye as it was a bit dry in comparison to his right. He said it wasn’t a big deal but if I could look at it that would be great.
I asked him if he had any trauma to that part of his face and he told me he had been beaten up by the police some twenty five years previously.
We had our session and I did what I could to help the assault trauma release.
When I saw him the following week I asked him how his eye was doing. He told me that the morning after our session his wife asked him what had happened to his eye. He looked in the mirror and was amazed to see that he had a black eye. His left eye was black just as it had been twenty five years previously.
As the trauma was releasing it expressed itself as a black eye.
While this is a remarkable story, what is even more remarkable is that the whole time I had been helping him in Australia, I had been in Ireland, 9,393 miles away.
How is that possible?
How did I come to be able to do this?
It started in 1993, and much much closer.
When I started training as a craniosacral therapist one of the first skills we were taught was how to feel the craniosacral rhythm. This is a very subtle movement in the body, a bit like breathing but slower and much more subtle.
To get this skill we started with what were called the, “listening posts.” These were places in the body where it was easier to feel the craniosacral rhythm. We would start at the feet, then move to the shins then on to the thighs, then the iliac crests, or hip bones, and so on up the body.
We worked with our eyes closed and tried very hard to feel what was under our hands.
It felt to me that my contact on the person’s body was like a flashlight in the dark. In the beginning, it was very close to the person’s body so all I could see was what was directly under my hands.
In time, and with a lot of practice, it was as if the flashlight pulled away from the body a little, the circle of light became bigger and I could, “see,” more.
If I had my hands on the person’s feet I could also feel what was happening in their shins. When I had my hands on their shins I could feel what was happening in their feet, shins, and thighs all at the same time.
The more I practiced the more I could feel until eventually, I could feel the whole body from any point of contact. I could have my hands on a person’s feet and be able to feel minute restrictions in their brain.
Toddlers
The next expansion in my ability came from working with children, particularly children who didn’t like being touched.
I would make contact with their body, get a sense of a restriction in their head, for example. Take up a good contact on their head and then seconds later my hands would be swatted away by the child.
I would gently replace my hands, reconnect, then they would swat my hands away again.
This pattern would repeat over and over again.
“Let the nice man put his hands on your head Timmy. He is trying to help you,” the parent would smile at me embarrassedly.
Over time I began to see that having my hand swatted away didn’t actually affect my connection to the child’s system. Each time my hand was swatted away my connection would stretch like glue but not break.
My hand was away from physical contact with the child but I could still feel everything as if my hand was still in physical contact.
The connection was elastic, it stretched but didn’t break.
This newfound ability was most helpful when working with children on the autistic spectrum. I was able to connect with them long before I approached them physically.
Once the child was in the room I could connect and begin the process of working with them, while I was talking with the parents, for example.
I would then wait for the child to invite me to approach them with my hands. Once the invitation came it was easy and natural to begin to work directly with my hands. From the parent’s perspective, this was miraculous. “He normally never lets anyone touch him, particularly his head!”
Family dynamics
I was also able to use this ability when working with babies. Not with the babies themselves, there were usually no issues with them but instead with the parents. Often the babies’ restrictions were influenced by their parent’s unreleased traumas.
The atmosphere in the room could become very tense when the baby was close to releasing and the possibility of one of the parents grabbing the baby and running out of the room felt very real.
I found that I was able to connect with the parent’s systems as I worked with the baby. Sometimes the whole family were in the room, parents, siblings, and the baby. I discovered I could connect to and hold them all, and help soothe the parent’s systems for long enough for the baby to release what they needed to.
Friends in faraway places.
Over the years I have trained many people to be craniosacral therapists. In the course of their training, I was able to pass on these skills. A number of former students asked me to work with them remotely which I was happy to do. From my perspective, the process is almost identical to working with the person in person.
I didn’t promote this aspect of my practice because there wasn’t an openness to it with the general public.
When the lockdowns began I closed my in-person practice. As they continued a new openness to many things emerged. Working remotely in all its different permutations became very acceptable.
It wasn’t long before people started to get in touch asking me to work with them remotely and that is the way I have been working ever since.
So that is how I was able to work with the man in Australia and while the black eye was dramatic it was small compared to the massive improvement to his life that the reduction in his tinnitus and radiation sensitivity had.
The moon doesn’t touch the ocean
yet the tide goes in and out.
It became a joke among my students and graduates that we were actually in the resort business because for most of the people who came to see us, we were the last resort.
When you understand that craniosacral therapy helps trauma release from your body, then it makes sense that once restrictions are released in this way, they are gone for good.
Most people feel the benefits immediately. If it takes longer you will generally see enough improvement after 4 treatment sessions to know that it’s going to work.
There are many approaches that will give you complete reduction of your symptoms. The trouble is the reduction only lasts for a short period of time and then you have to return from more treatment. Eventually, this kind of approach makes your body dependent on the treatment.
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How much would you pay to get better?
In modern medicine, we no longer have the luxury of wondering if alternative approaches work. We are more concerned with the question of whether we are going to get treated by . . . anyone!
Lengthening waiting lists, patients on trolleys and the threat of superbugs roaming our hospitals are forcing many people to consider becoming, “Medical Tourists.” Medical tourism is one of the largest industries in the world with global revenues of approximately US$ 56 Billion in 2018.
56 BILLION!!
And even then the success rate is not great. Kerry O’Brien of Australia’s ABC recently did a story about an Australian man who went to India for a knee reconstruction which cost him roughly €4800 including flights and hospital stay. He was quoted €4200 for the implant alone in Australia.
Unfortunately, there were complications and the implant had to be removed when he returned to Australia. So he was pretty much back where he started minus €4800.
I charge €110 per session. On average, it takes between 8 – 16 weeks to get better. So, at most you could spend €1760 to get better.
To get better.
Just to put that in context, a common procedure like back surgery will cost about €16,000. That’s not counting time off work etc. How much of that you pay will depend on your health cover. I have helped lots of people avoid major procedures like surgery of one kind or another. It is almost impossible to calculate the value of finding a remedy for the problems of a child.
I can only see 8 people a week and I fill up pretty quickly.
This is intense work to facilitate and I have found that any more than 8 people a week and I start to burn out pretty quickly.
Not For Everyone
While I obviously think craniosacral therapy is fantastic, it can’t help with everything. I vividly remember a woman who came to see me for an assessment. She was in a wheelchair and had a severe palsy which was slowly spreading throughout her whole body.
She had been seeing a ‘cranial’ therapist twice a week for the previous eight weeks, who told her that her skull bones were very tight. The woman’s symptoms weren’t changing. She was desperate and I really wanted to help her.
But . . .
When I assessed her I could find nothing wrong with her craniosacral system. Yes, her cranial bones were a little tight but nothing that would cause the kind of severe symptoms she was manifesting.
Sadly, for us both, I had to tell her that I didn’t feel that craniosacral therapy could help her.
I really hope you find what you are looking for, regardless of whether it’s with me or craniosacral therapy. Feel free to email me with questions about your particular situation. I’d like to hear from you.
All the best,
John
P.S. When it comes to your health and getting better there are no guarantees. Anyone who tells you different is kidding you.
Once you accept that, you realise that what you are trying to decide on is what approach has the best possibility of working.
As I said, my success rate is 85-90%. When you are finished treatment you never have to come back for follow up treatments for your original complaint.
I can tell you in the first session whether I think I can help you or not.
Bear in mind that I have a waiting list and may not be able to see you straight away.
P.P.S. I have seen too many people come for treatment after they have spent lots of money and time on treatments that didn’t work. They have come to me as a last resort.
I encourage you to save time and money and most importantly heartache and come to the last resort first.