Restore resilience at its developmental source through energy medicine When neuroscientist Stephanie Mines started practising the hands-on healing art of Jin Shin, she began to unravel the mystery of trauma and the secret to resilience. As a survivor of early childhood abuse, police brutality as a social justice activist, and a series of dysfunctional and abusive relationships, Mines was profoundly curious about how the human nervous system finds resilience despite the cumulative burden of chronic stress and traumatic life events. While earning her doctorate in neuropsychology, she met Mary Iino Burmeister, master of the art of Jin Shin, through one of Mary’s first American students, Pamela Markarian Smith, founder of the Jin Shin Institute. Jin Shin consists of non-invasive touch, using the fingertips, on sites of the body that are similar to acupuncture points. After Jin Shin helped Mines resolve her own trauma and awaken her innate resilience, she began to incorporate it into her clinical research. She discovered that the Jin Shin sites correlate with the Chinese Extraordinary Meridians or Rivers of Splendor, which develop prenatally. She then began investigating our earliest neuro­developmental processes and was able to correlate the Jin Shin sites with specific embryological events. She found that subtle touch on these sites in combination with trauma resolution amplifies neuroresilience, enhances creativity, restores motivation, and heals the fragmentation and disconnection associated with trauma and shock. Sharing her personal journey as a wounded healer, Mines reveals not only how to unlock the secrets of resilience for individual healing but also how embodied resilience will help us heal our wounded planet.

In this volume, Sills offers students and practitioners an in-depth, step-by-step guide to the development of perceptual and clinical skills. It provide students with clinical exercises and explorations to help students and practitioners learn the essentials of a biodynamic approach.

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) is commonly seen as the spiritual approach to craniosacral therapy (CST); in fact, BCST as taught by Franklyn Sills, the pioneer in the field, is quite different from conventional CST. Biodynamic work is based on the development of perceptual skills where the practitioner learns to become sensitive to subtle respiratory motions called primary respiration and also to the power of spontaneous healing. Through the Breath of Life, which, Sills asserts, echoes the Holy Spirit in the Judeo-Christian tradition, "bodhicitta" in Buddhism, and the Tai Chi in Taoism, students of BCST learn to enter a state of presence oriented to the client's inherent ability to heal.
In "Foundations in Craniosacral Biodynamics," Sills offers students and practitioners an in-depth, step-by-step guide to the development of perceptual and clinical skills with specific clinical exercises and explorations to help students and practitioners learn the essentials of a biodynamic approach. Individual chapters cover such topics as holism and biodynamics; mid-tide, Long Tide, Dynamic Stillness and stillpoint process; the motility of tissues and the central nervous system; transference and the shadow; shamanistic resonances; and more.