198. Cranial Sacral Saved My Life And How Babies Can Benefit with Etienne Piersman

00:00:10 This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

00:00:21 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm so happy you're here. I'm Sandee Sgarlata. I was born in Virginia Beach and raised in the Baltimore Annapolis area and had very humble and tragic beginnings. And as a result, my life was a hot mess.

00:00:37 Thankfully, 33 years ago, I got my act together. And since that time, I have dedicated my life to serving others and raising awareness that no matter what you've been through, you can choose happiness and live the life of your dreams. Happiness Solved is dedicated to giving you content that is empowering, motivational, inspirational, and, of course, a dose of happiness. It's my way to give back to the world and share other people's stories. This thing called life can be challenging and my guests share their amazing stories, wisdom, and life lessons that demonstrate anyone can choose happiness.

00:01:13 You see, happiness is a choice, and the choice is yours. Today's episode is amazing and I am so grateful for you. Thank you for listening and don't forget to leave a review and follow me on social media at coach. Sandee Sgarlata. Enjoy the show.

00:01:35 Hello, Etienne. It's such an honor and a privilege to have you on today. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. All right, you're welcome.

00:01:43 I enjoy being here. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm so excited. Before I hit record, I was telling you I really want to have this conversation because I have not had anybody that specializes in craniosacral work. So you have an interesting story that I want you to talk about that happened, what, 31 years ago?

00:02:03 And we'll get into that. But just for our listeners, etsy and Piersman is I did say your last name correctly, you're two time author. Well, you're about to publish your second book, but your first one is Cranial Sacral Therapy for Babies and Small Children. That was published by Penguin Random House. That's huge.

00:02:23 And then your second book is going to be Tantric Aspects of Cranial Sacral. So I want to talk about both of those. But before we dive in to the work that you do, I would love to hear more about this story and how cranialsacral work became your life's passion. Well, there is so many aspects about that story. And to make it short, at one point, my former life, which was quite hectic, like most people searching for who are you?

00:02:54 What are you doing in society? And it was not really a pretty life, but all right, at one point I got infected with a bacteria, a quite heavy one, one of those staphylococca infections. Like a staph infection. Right, a staph infection. And they are nasty, nasty in a way that they will do stuff.

00:03:23 But I realized I'm so grateful for them to have been in my life because they made it possible for me to change my life fully around. But it started quite horrible. They ate away my valves of my heart. Oh, my gosh. Then they went to my kidneys.

00:00:46 They're looking for food. Yes. So they went to my kidneys, and one kidney at one moment was close to, I think, 64% dead material. One kidney, the other one was 87% dead material. Oh, my gosh.

00:04:02 That's a death sentence. No valves, no kidneys, basically. And somehow during a meditation, because my first reaction, of course, I was 40, something like that, my first reaction was total panic. Hey, my life is over. But I knew already how to meditate.

00:04:26 I had some foundation in meditation. So, yeah, as a last resort, what are you going to do when your body doesn't work anymore? You have no clue. No energy on top of it. So, yeah, the only thing to do is just sit down and close your eyes because there was no energy to do something else.

00:04:49 And during that meditation, about in the middle of it, something happened. I suddenly came out of the panic and landed in total no mind in total meditation, you could say. My mind just stopped functioning and I was in total happiness, total silence, suddenly. So there was quite a shock, actually, to go from total panic to the total opposite. Just acceptance.

00:05:23 Total acceptance. I did what I wanted to do before that, and I accepted the consequences. And the result was total happiness. Total happiness in a ruined body. So, yeah, the body was totally ruined.

00:05:41 So I had to go to the hospital. They gave me medication, injected me with all kinds of stuff to make the bacteria go away. The bacteria left, but still my body was ruined. The bacteria wasn't there anymore. So, yeah, what do they do in a hospital when your body doesn't function anymore?

00:06:04 They put you in a ward with people who are going to die. And I was together with I was 40, I was together with 80 year olds, 90 year olds, yet a whole room full of people that were literally at their last breath. Me too. I felt. And you're like, what am I doing here?

00:06:27 I'm 40 years old somehow. Yes. But on the other hand, that silence was total curiosity. I was so curious, what's the next step? What's going to happen?

00:06:42 So one night, one after the other died, and then it was my turn to die. It was like Canada geese in a row. One takes off, the other, the other, the other, they wait for each other. So when it was my turn, I could feel my body going through the process of dying, literally. And the explosion that happens at the end when all the atoms or whatever it is just explode into this cosmic reality.

00:07:16 And that's when something called me back. The person next to me, the last one in the row, he couldn't there was something emotional happening. And from 1 second to the next, I was back in the body, and it didn't fit anymore. I could feel that. But I went over to the person and I put my hand on his chest because there was something with his heart, and I was still in that other reality.

00:07:46 So I saw literally my hand going into his chest, and of course, that's not possible, but my reality was shifted to something different. So I went into his chest, touched his heart, and something in him loosened up, broke, actually, and he got over. Whatever it was, he stayed alive. And I was back in my body. Became very good friends afterwards, but here I was again in a broken body.

00:08:21 That experience of death was maybe the most dramatic thing I ever went through. And so beautiful silence. Unbelievable. All right, a broken body. What you going to do?

00:08:36 I knew they gave me medication in the hospital to keep my kidneys going and my heart going. And I knew, this is going to kill me, this medication. So that's when I called a friend. We were in Belgium now, in the Netherlands, and the friend came and he drove me to the woods in Belgium. In the south, they have these huge forests still.

00:09:04 We went to the woods, and we were in a small tent in the evening, and the energy of him and me in that tent didn't fit. So I got out of the tent, started walking around, and then I found a clearing in the woods that gave light. It was trees that were in a circle with a dip in the middle, and this was a pine forest, so the ground was very soft. And the strange thing was there was a light there. No electricity, nothing.

00:09:43 Middle of the woods, but it was giving light. And I knew, this is my place, so I went to sleep. And as soon as I lay down and closed my eyes, I left my body. And I watched the body laying there. And then so many animals came to look at, what the heck is happening here?

00:10:06 Now, do you think that was? Did you have another near death experience at that time? No, it was just the experience of I couldn't stay in the body. I didn't have the energy to stay in the body. But at the same time, I knew that was what was needed to be, not interfering, to just leave it.

00:10:34 You could say that it wasn't a dead experience, but my soul was out of the body, and the body was something that needed to be healed. And I had no business being in the body. That's how it felt. Not even that, but it was just a separation of the body and the soul. And that happened every night for four nights.

00:11:03 And in the day, when the sun came up, immediately I was back in the body. The heat allowed me to go back in the body. And I sat there the whole day, four days, basically. And every night I left the body. And in the day when I was back in the body, my friend came with some soup once in a while and I was just sitting there not doing anything.

00:11:28 Four days later I told him, all right, let's go back. I felt totally, totally better. So we went back in a few days later I went to the hospital for the checkup and my heart was functioning 100%. Oh my goodness, we're totally back. And my kidneys, this was 1986, my kidneys are still functioning like crazy.

00:11:54 Wow. Totally healed. That's a miracle. I mean, he really experienced a miracle. That's incredible.

00:12:02 Yes, but I had nothing to do with it. It just was intuitive, intuitive, intuitive, intuitive what I did. And yeah, that led me to cranio. I took a few months later, I had to regain my strength, my physical strength, and I thought at a certain point I'm going to do a massage training just to get the body going again. And in that we had a little snippet of craniosacral.

00:12:41 And as soon as I felt that experience, it reminded me of dying, it reminded me of being in the woods. It was the closest that I came to the total peace, the total absence of mind that I experienced in these two places. The experience of dying and the experience of healing myself. It was basically a recognition of the beauty of that. Wow, so tremendous.

00:13:18 And in cranio, that's what I found back, not doing anything. Because cranio, we don't do anything. We just sit there, put our hands on the body and pay attention, that's all. So can you explain to the listeners at a basic level because I understand cranial sacral work, it moves energy through the body. But how is that helping someone?

00:13:48 Say, for example, somebody comes to you because they're sick and whatever the reason, how does that help them? So what is it doing that's helping the body heal? Well, the main thing what we do there is a basic energy in the body and that basic energy moves up and down the spine, goes into your skull, around your brain. It is a very simple system of energy moving up and down. And life makes create so many restrictions.

00:14:24 You're not allowed to talk, you have to hold your tongue, you have to sit still. Education, growing up, working, you're not allowed to really be free with your energy. You have to adjust to the environment and that's basically what it does. It closes doors inside where the energy cannot move freely up and down. So these doors are so simple to find.

00:14:55 We all have the same doors and one of them that is closed is basically just the expression, hold your tongue. How many times do people hear that? So your truth freely, express so, all right, your energy is stuck there, but there's a few different places, we call them diaphragms. So we open them up. And that is so simple.

00:15:27 You just hold the space, and you don't do anything. That's so strange. We don't do anything. We're just present. But with our total energy yeah, we don't think that's a trick that we learned.

00:15:43 We don't think so. The energy just it's instant mindfulness of the body, and then when that spine is open, then we give maximum space to the brain. So basically, our healing process is connecting the client back to their own resources, to the energy they have. When the energy is free, it does what it needs to do, and that basically is the same as deep sleep. Every night, you have to spend so many hours cleaning the body.

00:16:26 That's what happens there. You're not present. It's totally dark, but the body is being cleaned. So we just replicate. That okay.

00:16:36 With a little difference. At night, you're all alone in that empty space, so you only have your energy available. With a practitioner, you have two energies that work together to clean the body that's on the table.

00:16:55 That's really fascinating, and thank you for that explanation, because I wasn't quite sure. Now, before we started recording, I told you that I had my own experience with craniosacral work, and it was in 1999. And because I was an amateur figure skater, I had a lot of lower back issues from falling in the way that I felt. And so my chiropractor eventually said, you need to go see a massage therapist. Like, I can't really help you.

00:17:23 You need to loosen up all these muscles in your back. So I had a referral to a woman, and she's so incredible. Her name was Smiling Cower Croixen. She was an American Sikh. She had, like, the head wrap and everything.

00:17:37 And so my very first session with her, she says, is it okay if I do cranial sickle work? I'm like, I don't care. I only know what it is. And she just held my head in her hands, and that was the very first time I ever experienced energy running through my body. Of course.

00:17:52 Well, fast forward eight months. I found myself being pregnant. Now, four years earlier, I was told that I would never get pregnant without scientific intervention, that it would never happen naturally. Eight months after working with her, I was pregnant for the first time. It was a topic.

00:18:15 Four months later, I'm pregnant with my son, and he's 22 years old now. Wow. I had a total of five pregnancies and one child. And it all happened after the work that she did with me? Yes.

00:18:31 And there's no coincidence there, because something happened. I don't care what it was. I have my miracle baby. He's 22 years old. He's a college a senior in college.

00:18:42 He's thriving, and what a blessing in my life. So when you scheduled to be on? I was like, oh, I can't wait for this conversation. So you wrote this book targeting babies so why did you write your first book targeting babies and children? Well, first of all, I've been working basically most of my life in the Netherlands and Belgium, teaching in a different language, writing articles in a different language.

00:19:13 So, yeah, then my wife was American. We came to the US. And at a certain point, babies started to come. And at a certain point I had about 4000, 5000 pictures of me treating babies because they come through a channel that's too small, right? But hey, that's the design.

00:19:41 It's like, all right, here you are. You have to be in the body. It's an embodiment. But afterwards and mostly because, yeah, women nowadays sit a lot, they're not as natural to give birth. So babies need a little help.

00:20:01 And with a little help from a friend, at that point, it becomes very easy to open up and bring back their total the space available for their brain, the total space. It's so easy at that point because they're so flexible. Now we have these huge amount of pictures and we basically put them in a book to elicit an emotional response from people that pick up the book. It's not about the text. The text, anybody could have written it.

00:20:41 Not really. But we put the text some people. Could have written it. I could not have written it. Well, you could have written your own story.

00:20:54 The text is just to make a book. But it's about the pictures and some pictures. It's a whole session that I give to a baby and you can see what happens to his body, how he starts opening his hands and how the smile comes, how he starts to relax. And every yeah, there is, I think, three or four sessions of 1015 pictures that you see the baby go through a certain experience. And yeah, that's actually the reason that we brought the book out, to tell people, hey, look, this is what we're doing.

00:21:37 Because it's easy to explain Cranio, but if they don't experience it, people don't really get it and tell Moms, hey, look what this baby goes through. And still to this point, this book came out in the 19 I don't even remember when it came out, but it's almost 20 years on the market. I still get response from Poland, from Czechia, from Taiwan, from wherever it comes out. Yeah, people are still calling like, yeah, can you come teach this? And of course I can.

00:22:22 That's incredible. Okay, so you have your second book coming out, tantric Aspects of Cranial sacral, when is that book coming out and can you just give us a brief summary of what that's about? It is coming out any moment, actually. We were focusing the last few months on online classes. It's the first time that Craniocycle is going to be available online to learn.

00:22:54 Okay, yeah, that's a novelty. So we were totally focused on that. And the book was on the shelf it's as good as dumb. We just need to review it. So it will be a month, maybe two months that it becomes available.

00:23:11 And what it is about it has all different subjects. One of the subject is lotus bird, which basically is birthing without aggression nowadays. And this has been going on for so long already. More than 50% of birds nowadays are Caesarean. Totally unnecessary.

00:23:39 Yes.

00:23:42 Birthing. Oh, birthing, okay. Yes. I thought you were saying birds. Okay, Clarification.

00:23:49 That's all right. Yes. And I was like, how are we doing? C sections on birds? Sorry about that.

00:23:56 But yes, I do know that. And I know that I have many of my friends that just wanted a C section. It wasn't even that it was required, they just wanted it. Yes, it's a choice. It is a choice.

00:24:12 And it's very selfish. There is so much because basically the baby is not biologically born. It didn't go through the proper channel. So there is something that we change with the brain, with the whole energy of that baby. So I'm curious, how does that change a baby if they're not born in the traditional way, coming through?

00:24:44 Well, first of all, the pressure on the skull is totally different. Instead of compression, you get almost an explosion. Those babies that come out, what they experience is a subtle change of pressure. And instead of gradual going through the canal, they suddenly that happens to them. So they suddenly find themselves their brain finds themselves in a space that's too big for their basic for their brain.

00:25:22 Wow. It's a very subtle thing. But at the same time, we all are so unique. Every person you don't see two people that are exactly the same. That uniqueness also comes from there is a specific spot and time that a baby wants to be born at a very specific moment and the baby chooses that cesarean.

00:25:56 Yeah. If you had a baby, you know that people don't know that. Especially men have no clue. So all the Caesarean bullshit is basically men deciding that this is easier. Yeah, because I have time on this day, at this time, and that's when your baby is going to be born.

00:26:20 And that schedule is the schedule of the club they belong to, so they can go golfing in the weekend, but it's not the schedule of that baby. So you screw literally, with the circadian rhythms, the biological rhythm of a baby being born at that spot, at that specific moment. And all these babies, they're all born in a hospital. That's really incredible. And I'm going to fill our space a little bit because you just froze up.

00:26:58 Just for a second, you started saying how we're screwing up the circadian rhythm of the baby. And that circadian rhythm is so important for humans. It's a vital part of our existence. Right. It's in a clock.

00:27:13 And our whole body, every cell, every organ, everything has that clock to hold on to. So if that's not there, what are they going on holding on to? They become very vulnerable, actually, for influence from outside, because there is no guide inside. Now a body is born or is developed nine months, there is nobody telling what needs to grow and then what needs to grow. That's all part of that circadian thing.

00:27:56 We call that midline, we call that no mind's wisdom, nature's wisdom. And suddenly we screw with that. Wow. I'm so glad that you're bringing that up to the mainstream, because that's something that makes so much sense to me. And at the same time, it's something that I never even considered.

00:28:20 No, of course not. It's considered only by those who have to give birth at this moment and doctors who perform that. So when you're doing the craniosacral work on a baby that went through a cesarean birth, how does the craniosacral work help them? Well, one of the things that we do is we hold their skull, and at a certain point, you feel that their skull is giving you the feeling, okay, compress, my hands will follow. It's not that I'm doing anything like a chiropractor.

00:29:04 My hands will follow what that skull wants. It's something very subtle, but okay. Those things you can learn. It's just adjusting your sensitivity. It's not difficult, but that skull will tell you, okay, press and you can see the baby just relaxing in that pressure, because suddenly there is something that they were looking for.

00:29:37 It's nature's way. One thing, then the next, then the next. If one thing doesn't happen, nature is going to look for completion every time there is a need for completion. So, yeah, we just hold the skull until at a certain point, you feel that the skull starts pushing you away. And all right, there is more to it, but that's a simple.

00:30:05 And what came to mind for me is that suddenly, if you're holding the baby's head and you're being guided and heads kind of going in, what that tells me is like, all of a sudden, they're like, wow, this is how it's supposed to feel. Because maybe they didn't feel like they were in their body. And the baby can't tell you that I don't feel something's not right. I don't know what it is, but something's not right. And so that's really incredible at TN.

00:30:35 Oh, my gosh. And it's so easy. Yeah, very easy to the sooner you do that, the easier it becomes for a baby to let them feel, all right, this is what you are supposed to feel. And once you do that, the baby will be okay. Wow.

00:30:57 Etienne, this has been so incredible. How can people find out more about the work that you do? And if they want to reach out to, how can they get a hold of you? Well, we have a little website that will guide people to our main website, and it's called Radiorocks.com Perfect. And I will make sure that is in the show notes.

00:31:19 And thank you so much for the work that you're doing. It's really incredible, and I'm so happy that you're bringing this out to mainstream because I'm sure any mother out there, if they thought by having a C section that their baby may be affected in some way, they want to take action right away. Because as a mother, that's the most important thing. Right in your face. I can see it.

00:31:47 Yes. There is so much more to tell, so reach out anytime. I'm happy to talk. All right, Etienne, thank you so much for the work that you're doing, and I really appreciate all of this knowledge that you have shared with our guests today. Cindy, all right.

00:32:04 Thank you, Samuel.

00:32:17 I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy, and happiness. Take care, everyone.