About Keith

I have had a lifelong interest in body, mind and spirit.

After 12 years of teaching and lecturing on meditation, I trained as a Polarity Therapist. From 1985 I practised and taught Polarity Therapy with its remarkable understanding of the human energy fields.

In 1993 I took a further training in Craniosacral Therapy with Franklyn Sills and subsequently decided to make Craniosacral Therapy the primary focus of my therapeutic work. Craniosacral Therapy works with both the detailed anatomy and physiology of the body and the underlying energy dynamics at its very core.

My experience is that Craniosacral Therapy can facilitate the resolution of a wide range of health related conditions. I use it to maintain my own health.

I practise according to the Biodynamic approach. This supports the inherent intelligence of our own body to determine how our conditions will resolve. This results in an optimal form of treatment, because our own bodies know best what they need in order to regain their health.

Working with adults over time, I realised that a lot of the conditions I was seeing were built on body patterning established right at the start of life. Namely, patterns arising from less than ideal births or from compression during the last few weeks of pregnancy. Helping infants to clear these early body patterns means that the infants’ bodies will be more flexible and adaptive for the rest of their lives.

Qualifications

I am a fully trained Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist having trained primarily with Franklyn Sills co-founder of the Karuna Institute.

I am insured and registered on the Professional Register of the Craniosacral Therapy Association in the UK and am registered with The International Affiliation of Biodynamic Trainings.

Polarity Therapy

I was introduced to Polarity Therapy by Franklyn Sills in the early 1980s. I had been looking for energy based bodywork, which both challenged boundaries and respected them and which was open to a spiritual understanding of life.  I found all that in Polarity Therapy and I practised it professionally for 10 years before I retrained in Craniosacral Therapy.

Continuing Professional Development

I follow an ongoing programme of Continuing Professional Development in Craniosacral Therapy and other areas of health care. For example, working with trauma, Craniosacral Therapy for mothers and babies and Pre and Peri-Natal Therapy. I have had shorter trainings in Applied Kinesiology and Process Oriented Psychology.

Training in the following therapeutic approaches has helped me develop the way that I work now.

Trauma therapy

Knowing how to work with trauma (overwhelm) when it is present in a person’s history, is vital in order to avoid re-traumatisation. Working with trauma requires a completely different approach to working where no trauma is present.  An initial training with Babette Rothchild and weekend workshops with Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges have been instrumental in me developing a body based approach to working with trauma.

  • Trauma Healing Peter Levine’s site.  Peter Levine has been a major figure in understanding and developing a way of working with people with trauma.  The method he developed is called Somatic Experiencing and there are practitioners throughout the world. He is author of the excellent books Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice.
  • Bessel van der Kolk founded the Trauma Center in Boston MA and wrote the best selling book The Body Keeps the Score which emphasises working with trauma at the body level.
  • Stephen Porges‘ Polyval Theory is one of the keys to understanding how the nervous system responds to overwhelm.
  • Somatic Trauma Therapy Babette Rothchild’s site.  She is author of The Body Remembers and the 8 Keys Self-Help series of books
  • David Baldwin’s Trauma Information Pages a large resource on trauma work.

Focusing

Based on his research into what makes the difference between therapeutics work being successful or not, Professor Eugene Gendlin developed a system called “Focusing”. This seems to me to be a key theoretical understanding and practical approach for anyone who is working with the psycho-emotional process in body-based therapy.

  • Focusing Eugene Gendlin’s own site
  • Focusing Resources Ann Weiser Cornell’s site, a well known advocate and author of “The Power of Focusing” which is arguably the best book on the subject.
  • British Focusing Association a UK site, which includes the focusing teachers in the UK

Mindfulness

At long last, the value of mindfulness has entered the mainstream of western culture.  It is a foundational practice for most therapeutic approaches which involve the body and mind.  I taught meditation, mindfulness and stress management for many years in the 1970s.

  • Thich Nhat Hahn is a Zen Master who has done a huge amount to spread the value of mindfulness.
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn is probably the main person who brought mindfulness into the main stream of western culture.

Nonviolent Communication(Compassionate Communication)

NVC is based on an understanding that all humans have the same needs but employ many different strategies to get their needs met.  Conflict often arise at the level of these different strategies that people adopt, possibly to meet the very same needs.  Understanding and empathy arise once deep listening clarifies what needs people are actually trying to meet.  A very helpful practice for one’s self too.

Movement Practice

There are many forms of movement practice. The most helpful for healing are those that help us bring our attention to the natural expressive movements in our bodies. Free expression of our internal dancer taps into the inherent health of the body and its willingness to restore health and wellbeing. One of the best forms of dance I know that does this is the 5 Rhythms movement practice.

  • 5 Rhythms Gabrielle Roth’s site – the woman who developed the 5 rhythms practice
  • Dancing Tribe Scotland Scottish 5 Rhythms and associated movement practices

Process Work

Arnold Mindell has come to incredible insights based on Taoism, modern physics and Jungian psychology. It gives a helpful approach to understanding and working with energetic process generally, whether that be in the body, in the mind, in groups, in society or in nature generally.

The Emotion Code

All emotional states are also body states – one cannot feel an emotion other than through and in the body.  So when an emotional state is overwhelming, gets repressed or is otherwise incompletely expressed, this is achieved by establishing a bodily holding pattern.  This pattern will remain in the body and continue to affect our behaviour, responses and our bodily states (i.e.our health) unless it is actively cleared.

Dr Bradley Nelson has developed a therapeutic system which he calls  The Emotion Code. I have found it to be an extremely effective yet simple way to clear emotions which are stuck in the body.  It can be learned for one’s personal use from his book of the same name.