I meet Cristina Fino by ‘chance’. We are at the Festival dell’Oriente in Carrara, she is presenting a video book: “Soglia di mare d’Elba – Le onde sulle spiagge dell’isola”.
It is a beautiful and original idea: a fixed shot on the beaches or on the rocks, at the zenith: the waves come and go, and as in a video installation, images and sounds fill the environment, capture the observer and lead him into the rhythm of the sea, creating that attention to nature that produces relaxation and wellbeing, through perceived beauty, the suggestion that it evokes.
I explain that we, as craniosacral practitioners, experience the body as a polyrhythmic system in practice. There are obvious and easily perceived rhythms, from the breath to the heartbeat, but by going deep into a state of tranquillity and deep listening we can hear rhythms that are like harmonics, involving all the fluids, from the cephalorachid fluid to the cellular fluids and the extra-cellular matrix.
These rhythmicities have been called Tides not by chance, and are distinguished into the Medium Tide, which has an inhalation (or exhalation) of about 12 seconds, and the Long Tide, or simply more constant Primary Breathing, which passes through us, with a frequency of about 100 seconds, cycles of 50 seconds of inhalation (and 50 seconds of exhalation).
What evidently happened is that Cristina, in the ‘contemplative mediation’ produced by the observation of the film and its processing in the editing, spontaneously entered into the perception of her fluid body, in contact with the internal tides.
Is there a relationship between vision (attentive and meditative vision of something that activates the subcortical areas) and the perception of tides? Evidently yes, although we caregivers consider the hands (touch, proprioception) and the heart as vehicles of listening, Cristina’s experience tells us that the eyes, under certain conditions, can also ‘take us in’.
Paolo Maderu Pincione, founder of the Institute for CranioSacral Therapies, ITCS, and the Professional Association of Craniosacral in Italy, now ACSI
