Relational touch - the quality of the practitioner’s touch sets the scene in which the client can experience safety, perhaps for the first time in her or his life. Relational touch is compassionate and without judgement, it signals unconditional acceptance of the client. When we talk about the ‘holding field’, relational touch defines how we literally ‘hold’ our clients in our hands. This open, listening touch makes the biggest contribution to the co-regulation that takes place between the practitioner and the client in Biodynamic practice.

 

Diagnostic touch – reading the ‘nuances of the tide’ is a key skill for cranial practitioners. Tidal motions of fluids and tissues carry the imprints of individual experience. Our listening hands can read or hear the individual biography stored in the body. We can learn to localise these patterns of experience with great precision -an adhesion between the layers of mesentery, infection persisting in a lung and so on.

 

With diagnostic touch we can recognise these patterns of experience but our touch can also delve into the deeper felt sense of that experience. This could include an emotional charge but also the meaning of a particular experience from the past and how it impacts the client’s life in the present.

 

Therapeutic touch – simply hearing the story told by the body through our ‘listening hands’ can have a deep healing effect.  Yet we can use our therapeutic touch in a direct way to engage the historical patterns which impact our health and limit our potential. We can support transformation in the depth of a state of balance; we can rekindle the power of entrapped potency to do its healing work. In this seminar we will revisit the subtle territory between ‘doing’ and ‘not doing’ and experiment with ‘touching beyond listening’.