Tips on Practicing the Gillespie Approach
Thank you, John Malloy, for reminding me of “overthinking” at a Gillespie Approach Training.
As my students were treating each other, I used to walk around the classroom and say, “Stop thinking.” Do not use your rational mind to figure out why this is happening. I tried to figure it out in 1980 and could not. Just be in the present moment and feel.
I used to say, “Let the fascia talk to you.” When you are holding the craniosacral fascial system, let it tell you its story. There are probably many trapped emotional and physical traumas. Listen to what it has to say to you. Just hold the body and allow the strains to come out.
When you are in the rational thinking mindset, you tend to lose that intuitive sense and go into the “fixing” mode. It is hard to fix the fascial web because it has a mind of its own, stubbornly releasing its traumas in its own space and time. Stop thinking, get out of your ego, and just feel.
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I found the most difficult student for me to instruct was the control person. This student judged everything and tried to control the session. I failed miserably as that person in the 1970s.
It is very uncomfortable for the controlling student to allow the patient to do what s(he) has to do to heal because s(he) is constantly judging good and bad and right and wrong.
The session is not about the therapist but about the patient’s healing. S(he) has to go to a place that may bring up uncomfortable memories and revisit a lifetime of soft tissue injuries.
S(he) may even be back into her/his birth traumas—a place in healthcare now thought to be long forgotten. No one ever connects the forever headaches to untreated soft tissue birth trauma. But the fascial web remembers it all.
You cannot control authentic healing. Trust that the fascial web knows what it needs to do to heal itself and just get out of its way.
That concept has never failed me.
Gillespie Approach–Craniosacral Fascial Therapy Articles on Health Conditions
