When the average person pictures going for a massage, the last part of their body likely to be anticipating a rubdown is their head. However, we carry a great deal of stress in our faces, scalps, and sacrum, many of us translating this tension from stress or poor sleep into migraine headaches that can debilitate entire days at a time.
Cranial Sacral Massage targets areas of tension in the head, applying pressure strategically to create a “flow” of spinal fluid meant to provide relief from pain, including back pain, TMJ syndrome, and fibromyalgia. Like chiropractors, physicians and therapists who provide this particular form of treatment are somewhat controversial. Though it is a wildly popular form of massage, the scientific community does not feel there is enough tangible evidence to support a claim of health benefits from the practice.
If you are receiving cranial sacral massage in the US or Western Europe, it may very well also be called Indian Head Massage Therapy. While technically these are two different things, invented by two different historical physicians, the general points of pressure and benefits are similar enough that they have become synonymous in modern culture.
The primary difference between the two is that cranial sacral massage therapy is intended with a purely physiological benefit in mind, whereas Indian Head Massage Therapy involves internal “energies” and a variety of spiritual benefits related to the chakras believed to exist in the face. However, as the two have become more and more intertwined, you will often see references to “energy” in descriptions of cranial sacral services.
With over a century of history behind both methods and growing popularity in both the East and the West, it’s difficult to imagine that (scientific proof or not) there are not those out there experiencing benefit from the method. The theory, which has been studied and documented since its inception, with neither proof nor disproof anchoring it definitively in the scientific community, is that the cranium and the sacrum move in unison. The motion of both the bones and the forced flow of cerebrospinal fluid is thought to be therapeutic and soothing to the recipient.
While mainstream medicine may not have bought into the cranial sacral method, it is offered by many chiropractors and massage therapists around the country, and often included in basic training for massage therapy certification. This leads us to suspect that there is a high enough demand for Indian head massage to keep it in the mainstream for a good while yet.
Tags: cranial sacral massage, cranial sacral massage therapy, indian head massage, indian head massage therapy