
April 26, 2019
Ode to Kai – Life in the Old Dog Yet
To be kept informed of upcoming open-house sessions for parents & babies, please sign up to the email list – and receive 4 tips on how to stabilise your baby’s stress hormones:
Becoming pregnant brings about huge changes to your world, resulting in shifts in relationships with your partner, children and work. It can all become a juggling act, with expectations, hopes and fears all piling up at once. Add to this juggling the fact that you live abroad, away from your life-long community and support networks and something that’s absolutely a natural thing can feel quite daunting.
Luckily, by reading this BCT newsletter, you are already in contact with a great support network and valuable resource. Another resource that can help expecting and new parents is a super-gentle treatment known as craniosacral therapy (aka cranial osteopathy).
Craniosacral therapy (CST) allows there to be space for all these natural anxieties to be articulated, both verbally and bodily. Your body holds onto its experiences in your tissues. CST gently works to settle both mother and baby’s nervous systems, through a light contact on the body, at either end of the spine, along with modelling communication skills. Babies may be cuddled or fed during treatment and older babies can play with their parent and therapist.
Craniosacral Therapy helps the whole journey flow more easily, helping mum-to-be discover a new way of connecting with themselves as a new person – a mother. By working together with a craniosacral therapist, parents relearn to see, feel and hear themselves and their little ones in a new way. It is typically a time when one’s own birth dynamics come to the fore and it is useful to learn to differentiate betrween what is yours and what is your baby’s “stuff”. The anxiety you may feel now can be a reflection of the anxiety you or your mother felt in your own birth experience.
Babies are unable to differentiate between mother and themselves until about 9 months old. Until they are able to verbalize, their memories are stored as bodily sensations. Your world is their world. Your emotions become their emotions and vice-versa.
Are the overwhelming feelings you feel in fact your baby’s overhelming feelings?
It takes baby’s new brain four times as long as an adult to process what is going on around them, meaning they need you to slow down so that they do not become overwhelmed and can “catch up” on a sensory level.
Babies can experience feeding difficulties, colic or perhaps a sore neck. They may cry a great deal and have difficulty settling down. This can be their expression of trauma or the frightening effects from their birth.
Birth is remembered through the baby’s body and nervous system. How baby perceives their birth will unfold under the therapist’s touch. CST can help you to know yourself and your child in a deeper way, by allowing you to trust your body and make choices from a calm and resourced place.
By treating and helping you react from a calm, resourced space, baby will feel safe and will quickly adapt to new experiences and will often recover in just a few sessions, enabling you both to enjoy this special time together.
To be kept informed of upcoming open-house sessions for parents & babies, please sign up to the email list – and receive 4 tips on how to stabilise your baby’s stress hormones: