Our Lineage

Correcting the Record
Our Origin Story
Evolution to Modern Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy

Correcting the Record

“Lineages are woven in all of us: lineages traced through the bloodlines that crash in our bodies; lineages traced through the cultures of where we are from and the clash of all that is around us; lineages of the land and places we have lived; lineages traced through the windy roads of spirituality.”  ~ Sue Scavo

Our Origin Story

Knowledge is an ever growing pyramid, building atop layers and layers and layers. It rarely emerges whole & complete, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s head, but stands on and is indebted to many strands that provide the underlying structure. So it is with Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. 

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy’s roots arise from Osteopathic Medicine, developed by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still (1828-1917) in the late 1800s, which itself has its roots intertwined with traditional bodywork developed by Indigenous Peoples. Still defined Osteopathy as a “sacred, drug-free science that promotes the body’s natural healing power.” In his philosophy he emphasized the importance of the unity of the body, mind and spirit, the ability of the body to heal itself, and the necessity for the physician to understand the interrelationship of a person’s anatomy and physiology- revolutionary and subversive ideas to then current medical belief that relied on a cornucopia of drugs.

A.T. Still’s life encompassed a startling range of experiences, as farmer, hunter, inventor, physician, abolitionist, surgeon, legislator, author and finally as “Father of Osteopathy.” The lives of Still’s forefathers and immediate family, exemplified the harshness of frontier life and was beset by many challenges, losses and hardships. Their survival, from farming, carpentry, hunting, mill working, preaching and doctoring, maintained them through the many difficulties of pioneer life.

Still, born in 1828 in Virginia, the son of a Methodist preacher and doctor, spent his youth in the sparsely settled wilderness of Missouri. As a teenager, he studied medicine through his father’s medical books and did his own scientific research— skinning and intently examining the game he hunted for food.

Still’s medical career began when a cholera epidemic struck the the Wakarusa Shawnee mission in Kansas where his father was the practicing missionary-doctor. Apprenticing under him, Still treated the Shawnee people using current medical practices.

Though he spent barely a year at the mission, his time there with the Shawnee left a strong imprint.  Living alongside them, learning their language and observing their healing practices significantly influenced him. In his 80s he remarked that during his time with the Shawnee, “I learned all they could teach me about healing sickness.”  He noted their use of purgative herbs and their method of bone-setting which he drew upon in later years. Still retained a deep respect for the Shawnee faith, their laws and moral code throughout his life and was said to be a great defender of them, perhaps in allegiance to his own heritage which traced to the Lumbee Indians through his paternal great-grandmother. The Shawnee belief that nature was pervaded by sacred wisdom aligned with Still’s evolving spirituality in which God and Nature live in harmonious union.

Still’s departure from allopathic medicine occurred after he returned from the Civil War. The experience as a Civil War surgeon disillusioned him, witnessing how the barbaric amputations, using whiskey and opium to numb the pain, created drunks and addicts. It was the deaths of his children from a deadly meningitis infection and shortly after that of his wife, that finally caused him to disavow the approach of his colleagues. Their reliance on a pharmacopeia of arsenic, mercury and morphine, along with amputations, bleeding and blistering were frequently ineffective and often harmful. Though they had a good understanding of anatomy and physiology, when it came to disease they only knew to medicate, amputate or purge.

Still contended that the standard medical viewpoint looked only to effect, not to cause and disease was only the effect. “To find health should be the object of the doctor. Anyone can find disease.”  He envisioned that cause as a disruption of blood flow from some mechanical obstruction. Determining that became his focus and obsession as he exhumed hundreds of corpses from Indian burial grounds, dissecting some, preserving others in salt and removing bones for further study. In pursuit of his idea, he kept a complete skeleton to familiarize himself with the bone’s contours, whittling bones from wood, and drawing anatomical charts and diagrams.

Through practice he discovered that manipulating bones, removing misalignments, dislocations and muscle contractions relieved the restrictions on the blood flow and nerves and improved patient’s health without the use of drugs. He credited the Shawnee— though not in writing- for the growth of the idea from his early experiences with their method of bone-setting. Still thought that the human being, as a work of God, was perfect and that disease was the physiological effect of the “derangement.”  To heal it was necessary to look for the structural cause and solve it, at which point nature would make the necessary repairs. Still wrote, “All mysteries are hidden in nature. All facts are found in nature. Osteopathy is found in nature. Osteopathy is Nature.”

"A thought strikes [him] that the cerebro-spinal fluid is one of the highest known elements that are contained in the body, and unless the brain furnishes the fluid in abundance, a disabled condition of the body will remain. He who is able to reason will see that this great river of life must be tapped and the withering field irrigated at once, or the harvest of health be forever lost).”    

— From The Philosophy and Mechanical Principles of Osteopathy,” by A.T. Still

He viewed the body as a machine in which misalignment caused disease that manual manipulation could cure. However he oriented not only to the bones and their articulations. The connective tissue held great importance in his work as Still viewed it as the meeting place between spirit and the living body.  

His “laying on of hands” subverted current medical belief and he was accused of sacrilege and blasphemy. Still spent the next ten years scorned & vilified as an eccentric, a crank, a fanatic or medical heretic; his successes were viewed with skepticism or termed the devil’s work. Ostracized by both the medical and religious community, he moved back and forth across state lines until finally settling in Kirkland, Missouri. There the success of his treatment drew a stream of patients, a demand he could barely keep up with.

To answer that demand, in 1892 he established the American School of Osteopathy (ASO) in Kirksville, Missouri, continuing his role as an iconoclast by including five women in the first class. Osteopathy established a naturalistic and drugless medical approach to health and disease. An approach that viewed the body functioning as a total unit possessing self-healing and self-regulating mechanisms. He endorsed a corresponding attention to preventive measures, noting the importance of diet and exercise, leading some to contend his ideas pioneered the concept of “Wellness.” His holistic approach asserted that man is not reducible to parts but a synthetic whole which requires the union of mind, body and spirit to restore health. ”The soul of man, with all the streams of pure, living water seems to dwell in the fascia of his body.”

Students learned extensive anatomy, physiology, chemistry and “symptomatology,” spending time in clinics and treatment rooms to become “anatomical engineers fine-tuning God’s perfect machine.” In his teaching, he often used the simplicity of deep observation without the distraction of language, which he called “taking an Indian look.”  In the first year of ASO over 50,000 patients were treated. By the time of his death in 1917 there were more than 5,000 osteopaths in practice throughout the country.

As John Lewis wrote in his exhaustive biography of Still, “He was presenting a new paradigm for health, a new philosophy that can be universally applied. We are not islands but parts of nature, parts of the whole, and nature’s laws are absolute and unchanging…He teaches that nature’s truths and laws go beyond the physical. They encompass not only body’s anatomy, physiology and biochemistry in health and disease but also the wisdom of the body, and on to life and death.”

This article was written in collaborative effort by members of BCTA/NA 

Learn about the Evolution to Modern Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) HERE.

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