So has the time come for the head and I’m going to use cranio sacral therapy as a starting point. Until the mid 1900’s, the opinion was that the different parts of the skull was grown together. William Garner Sutherland, PhD, filled a skull with dried beans and placed the cranium in a bucket of water. As the beans swelled, the bones of the skull was pushed away from eachother, and this lead to the discovery that the seams between the parts of the skull meet in different angles. The parts meet in 128 different angles och for these angles there is a technique developed by Alain Gehin. At the end of the 1970’s Dr. John Upledger proved that the skull does not grow together during life, and that there are elastic fibres, non-elastic collagen fibres, and blood vessels inside the seams, just like there are in all joints in the body. He also found nervthreads in the seams, that he traced back to  Choroideus, a flap that controls the filtering of the spinal liquid from the blood. He draw the conclusion that the driving force behind the so called cranio sacral rythm, is the opening and closing of this flap, which makes the scull expand and retract.

The parts of the scull is: occipital bone, parietal bone, frontal bone, temporal bone, sphenoid, maxilliary bone, mandible, nasal bone and ethmoid bone and the outer ear cavity (not sure about the name in english). Of course we also have the brain, but I won’t go into that here.

There are also the spinal meninges and cranial meninges. They are a series of specialized membranes, that surrounds the spinal chord and the brain. The cranial meninges keep the individual skull bones in place and seperates them from the brain. They need to be strong enough to hold the skull bones together and flexible enough to let the seams move. The cranial meninges and the spinal meninges, consists of three layers that surrounds the brain and the spinal chord.  They provide the necessary physical stability, protection, nourishment and schock absorption. Nearest to the cranium is the outer of the three layers. It is called Dura Mater. The cranial meninges is divided into two parts where the outer part protects the inside of the cranium and the inner forms pleats that protects the different parts of the brain. All of the spinal nerves passes through the spinal meninges on their way out into the body. Therefor the effect of the nervsignals can be affected if the spinal meninges is tense och warped. The meninges can lose their elasticity through fever, infections, physical traumas, chronical stress and medication.