GAIL CREEKSONG WAS drawn to craniosacral therapy, or CST, which she does out of her office in Bristol. The practice, whose names comes from the “cranium” or skull, includes Creeksong listening to the body with her hands.
Independent photo/Caroline Jiao

BRISTOL — Shoes off, body laid flat on a treatment table (or not, if you prefer not to), surrounded by warm-toned lights and light green wallpaper. 

As of May 2024, patients have come to Gail Creeksong craniosacral therapy (CST) at 25 Mountain View St. in Bristol seeking various services.

What, one might ask, is craniosacral therapy? Well, “cranio” came from “cranium,” or skull, and “sacral” came from “sacrum,” which is a shield-shaped bony structure located at the base of the spine and connected to the pelvis. Craniosacral therapy, or CST, is often defined as “a type of bodywork that uses gentle touch to evaluate and improve the function of the craniosacral system. That system refers to a continuous membrane of deep tissue, called fascia, that connects the skull and spine, plus the brain and central nervous system. 

There hasn’t been scientific research that can verify or quantify that CST could have consistent result with patients. And yet many of her patients have responded with positive results and a lot of gratitude. 

A Creeksong client who suffered from a spine fracture noted on her website that they had felt “a sense of peace and clarity.” Other clients said the treatment had alleviated or cured jaw pain, back pain and other chronic pain and tension. Some have regular sessions as part of their wellness program. The processes of these transformation are perhaps unmeasurable or undetectable through scientific or statistical methods, it doesn’t stop clients from expressing a sense of healing and relaxation genuinely felt. 

According to Creeksong, her work at Gail Creeksong CST (the name of her business) involves many facets, despite the backbone of this work (no pun intended) is craniosacral therapy. The practices include Somato-Emotional Release Therapy, Polarity Energy Therapy, and Compassionate Communication. 

“There are other modalities involved which I’m trained in and have practiced,” she said. “Over the years the work has evolved into something beyond the parts. I’m not sure what that’s called, so I call it body therapy.”

Creeksong said patients who seek her therapy range from birth to death, mainly people from age 30 to 80. Referrals come mostly word of mouth, while there are also doctors and therapists who refer patients to her treatment. She currently receives around 12 clients a week. 

Some confuse Creeksong’s work with massage, which she made sure to clarify. Despite initially being trained professionally as a massage therapist and having practiced it for several years at the start of this career, what she does now is not the same thing. 

“This is not just massage,” Creeksong said. “It’s not like I come to the client with a recipe, like ‘so and so has a frozen shoulder, and these are the steps you do for that.’ It’s not like that at all.”

Creeksong explains that her bodywork emphasizes deep listening to the body, a technique that is crucial for all her treatments.

“When I’m listening to a body, I’m receiving directions as to how and where to work, and all the modalities that I’ve trained as well as all the anatomy and physiology or deep dives into immunology and neurology, they all provide references for what I’m detecting and tools to draw on. But every time, I’m connecting to a body, with hands or with words, I’m doing that as a direct response to what this body is asking for in the moment.”

By “direct response,” Creeksong matches and applies the pressure or movement of her hand with the cues she had received from a body. She says she uses her hand to “listen” to the body’s energy through many venues. 

“(I would) listen to the skin, the fascia, the muscles, even the nerves and the bone. I’m also listening to the fluids that go up and down the spinal cord, and that rhythm reverberates and gets echoed through the rest of our body. So that also provides clues,” she said. “What I’m drawn to is tension. It could be tension in the energy, it could be tension in the way the fluid flows, could be tension in the muscle, or something going on in the bones.” 

She believes a body can be self-healing. According to Creeksong, there’s an innate knowingness to the body as to what it means to heal, and her hand follows that energy as if attracted by a magnet.

“Everybody that comes to the table is unique,” she said. “There’s this wisdom in their body that knows how their body got to be this way, and what to do about it, and that’s what I’m keying into.”

Because of this, no two sessions look the same. 

“I let go of any ideas I have as to what should happen,” she said. “What I would like to have happen, what the client would like to happen. I just let it go. I’m just holding the tissue exactly as it is and allowing it to be that way. And if change wants to happen, it will.”

Creeksong believes her sessions in general provides a mediating space for people to pause and reflect. 

“It’s a time when people can … have focused time to be in their bodies and connecting with it,” Creeksong said. “We spend so much time in our heads, and we spend a lot of time trying not to be in our bodies or just rushing through life in a way that doesn’t allow us to pay attention at the deep level.”

Creeksong said that sometimes people seek her not because they have a broken body, but a broken heart.

“They’re suffering from emotions, and it’s painful for them to be in their bodies,” she said.

In Creeksong’s opinion, the well-being of our bodies is deeply intertwined with that of the mind. Often, pain or discomfort in the body mirrors tensions in the mind or emotion. 

“Trauma is often something that gets trapped in a body,” she said. “Eventually it’s not sustainable. It needs to come out.”

Creeksong recalls the case of a child she treated. 

“He had a nervous tic of pulling his shirt around his neck,” she recalled. “He’d had it for a long time, but it was just getting really constant. He was in second or third grade. It was interfering with his ability to be comfortable at school. 

“I asked his mom about his birth. I think he was her last child, and she had a number of children before, so she said, ‘Oh it wasn’t any big deal.’ … but then she said, ‘But the chord was wrapped around his neck three times.’ 

“When she said that, I felt his body go into what we call a ‘significance detector,’ which is where something significant is happening. His body directed my hand to where it needed to be, which was around his neck, and he reenacted being born. He started acting like an infant coming out of the birth canal, pushing his way through, and my hands were like the chords that were coming off. The report I got back was that the nervous ticks were 78-85% better.”

Throughout the session she repeated verbal check-ins with the boy, hearing his positive replies every time. She mentioned always having parents or guardians in the room during sessions with children.  

“That’s the beauty of this work: there’s no need to go through a painful process to heal trauma. When you can listen to the body, the healing flows in a natural way,” she said.

GETTING STARTED

Creeksong admitted she had never imagined becoming a bodyworker in her younger life. 

“Here’s me in my early 30s, if someone had told me ‘When you get older, you will be a massage therapist or a bodyworker,’ I would’ve been like, ‘No I’m not, and you’re standing too close,’” she joked. 

She had done various things before she sat down and wondered about her life’s purpose. 

“My body had gone through trauma as a young person, so I had learned to distance myself from my body. As I got older, I realized that this isn’t sustainable,” she said. 

In the early 2000s, Creeksong saw an advertisement for an open house from Cyprus Health Institute in Santa Cruz, Calif., which she decided to attend, just to check it out.

“The energy those people exuded was so amazing and palpable,” she recalled. “I was like ‘Whatever you all are doing, that’s what I want to do.’”

Sure enough, she graduated in 2007 from the program, where she studied massage therapy, polarity energy therapy, and deep tissue massage. Five years later she was hired as an instructor at the integrated massage therapy course and taught for four years there. 

She had started taking courses in CST in 2010 through the Upledger Institute in Florida. Moving to Vermont in 2020, Creeksong continued her practice of CST therapy. Despite already having a technical certificate, she thinks the learning is ongoing and probably will never stop. 

A usual session of her treatment is an hour long and costs $100, but there is a sliding scale. 

“Our bodies are like these vast mysteries that we’ll never know everything about. I just had so much curiosity about that,” she said. 

“Most of us have lived experience where we learn that our bodies are not to be trusted and might even be seen to be dangerous to inhabit,” Creeksong said. “That creates a painful gap that is really hard to heal. That’s been a lifelong endeavor for me to learn how I can feel safe in my body, and how I can help with other people feeling the same.”