About Me
“what on earth . . you didn't do anything, how did that happen?!”
Hi, I’m Kirsten . .
I first experienced craniosacral therapy when my midwife suggested I take my newborn child after our emergency cesarean. The room went still, the baby gazed intently at a Buddha statue on the shelf and went very quiet. The baby was a week old and shouldn't even have been able to focus that far away. Sleeping, feeding and tummy were all much better that night. I thought to myself "that was cool, I should get a session for myself one day".
Life, parenting, you know how it is . . so hold that thought for seven years or so. Then I was in an intensely stressful period in my life, and the right hand side of my neck and shoulder were locked-up like an underground concrete bunker. I tried lots of different things, many felt great and gave some temporary relief, but it just kept seizing up again. It was obviously affecting my movement, but also my sleep, my mood and my general resilience.
Somewhere in the middle of one painful night I remembered "what was that thing we did with the baby?". So I hopped online and looked around, and the next time I went to Melbourne (the closest one I could find) I went and had a session.
I sat up on the table after that session and said “what on earth was that, what did you do - you didn't do anything, how did that happen”. After the second session, with a delightful movement in my neck and shoulder, I enrolled in a 2-year training and this practice has profoundly changed and shaped my life since then.
Going a little deeper . .
This work is deeply personal for me. Six years ago I was deep in the burnt-out confusion of “my life is fine, it’s good, but I don’t want to live like this”, spending far too many waking hours looking at a screen and being grumpy and distracted from people, relationships and life all around me.
I had a successful career doing something that felt good for the world, running a not-for-profit organisation I’d co-founded and grown for 13 years. We had secured more funding than we’d ever had and were rapidly scaling up the team. Happily partnered, parenting two gorgeous healthy young children, and helping run our regenerative farm. From the outside, I had delivered myself a most excellent ethically-aligned and happy life.
But, inconveniently, I started to have a pervasive and unsettling feeling that “this isn’t it, this isn’t what you’re here for, this isn’t enough”.
Burnout? Peri-menopause? Inflammation . . sure, but is my body sending wake-up calls?
My journey since then has been profoundly unsettling and enlivening. Learning to listen to the quiet, insistent and wise stories of my body and my heart. Hearing them tell me just how much I needed to change to be really fully alive and in service to life in these incredible times.
Allowing that change to unfold, through a deeply uncomfortable shedding of my adult and professional identities. Navigating the very quiet space between what I was and the not-knowing ill-definement of what I am becoming. Allowing movement and direction to come from deep within the quiet stillness, guiding me on a very different path.
A big part of this change has been moving my attention from ‘saving the world’ i.e. trying to change what’s ‘out there’ - to working very closely within myself and other people to heal connection wounds, pain and trauma that keep us from connecting deeply and being fully alive. Many of us raised in the environment movement know the phrase “Think Global Act Local” . . well it doesn’t get more local than right here, right now, inside ourselves.
In a world gone mad, with unresolved trauma and disconnection insanely acting out and repeating and repeating - the biggest question for me right now is “how on earth do we actually, really heal?”
Discovery and practice of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy has been a major part of my journey, along with many other teachers and lineages (see Acknowledgements below).
An inconvenient, pervasive and unsettling feeling that “this isn’t it, this isn’t what you’re here for, this isn’t enough”.
Quiet whisperings in dreams and increasingly insistent messages from my body - the refusal of my eyes to participate in late-night online meetings anymore; an inability to care about my work without ever-increasing dosing of caffeine; wired nervous system making me snappy and volatile, and not the parent or partner I wanted to be.
Burnout? Yes, for sure. Peri-menopause? Yes that too. And yet, this increasing sense that my body was trying to get my attention - the emergency alarms getting louder and louder . . but what was it trying to say?
In a world gone mad, how on earth do we (humans) actually, really heal?
“Think Global Act Local” starts right here - inside ourselves
Acknowledgements
I live and work on Taunurung, Bangerang and Yorta Yorta Country in North-East Victoria, and sometimes practice on Country of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. I acknowledge their deep knowledge and care for the health of people and Country over thousands of millennia - more than 2,000 generations. I offer my respect to their Ancestors, Elders past and present and acknowledge that the land has not been ceded - always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I pay the rent here.
I am in awe of and deeply grateful for this Country that I live and work within, with continually deepening relationships and guidance of magnificent and wise trees, plants, waters, stone, fire and sky.
My practice of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy has been developed primarily through the Body Intelligence Institute and Etienne Piersman. In addition to the Western lineage of this modality (primarily Osteopathy), it is also important to recognise its origins in Native American bone-setting traditions (more here), as well as likely being informed by many other cultures for whom it has been a known way of healing.
Significant streams of my adult learning and practice have also been shared from Native American lineages such as Apache via Stalking Wolf and the Lakota Woptura traditions, via people (too many to name) and organisations who are teaching me how to become still and deeply connect with myself, nature and spirit. These include: Helpers Mentoring Society, Firekeepers, Nature's Apprentice, Wild Heart and 8 Shields Institute. I pay my deepest respects to the courage and determination of those who have guarded knowledge and kept ceremonial containers alive, and the generosity and vitality of those who share it with us now. Deepest gratitude also for the healing and guidance that has come direct from country and spirit within these practices.
I am queer, green, and strongly oriented to community, social, racial and environmental justice. I have been enabled and shaped by movements and action in all these domains, as have the perspectives and and practices that I now bring to my work. I thank the generations and multitudes of activists who pioneer and persevere in pursuit of a fairer and safer world, for all of life.
I was born in Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara, Aoteroa (Wellington, New Zealand). My ancestry is mostly Irish with a little English and Danish, and I was raised in the Catholic Church. The courage and determination of my ancestors to live and to thrive in all circumstances inspires me to honor them by doing the same.
And I acknowledge Susan Raffo, whose book “Liberated to the Bone” showed me the importance of being clear who I am and taking time to acknowledge and name it!
