This year, during the third week of March, an estimated 736,000 Sandhill Cranes (a record high number) stopped along a 75-mile stretch of the Platte River, a stretch that is located about 1-2 hours west of Lincoln Nebraska. This is where, annually, an estimated 80% of the entire North American population of these large (4-foot tall) birds stop to gather the bulk of their sustenance before completing their arduous journey north (to Canada, Alaska and even Siberia), where they breed and raise their young before starting the long trip back south. Knowing about this annual migration is why I suggested (ok, pleaded) that the Postural Restoration Institute schedule this year’s live-stream Cranial Resolution course in Lincoln during that third week of March. They kindly obliged, and I got to experience not one, but two, awesome Crane(ial) highs in one magical week.
Just like this year’s bird migration, this year’s March 21-22 Cranial Resolution course, which Jen Platte moderated, hit a record high number of attendees (54) who all funneled (or at least virtually beamed) through Lincoln Nebraska from all over the globe (people from over 13 countries attended, various European countries along with Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan). Hopefully all of them gathered enough substantial information to be more successful during the remainder of their (sometimes) arduous PRI journey; information that will help them understand the importance of gravity, not to defy it to take flight, but to help them empower it to get people to better sense centric positioning and respect it for more functional oscillation of the autonomic and central nervous system.
These concepts sound esoteric (i.e: Ron-ish) when you first hear them, but with each rendition of this course, I try to make them make more sense in a clinically logical and applicable way. And from the questions and comments I get both during and after the course, it seems like this is happening. It truly excites and energizes me to see all the ah-ha moments. The concepts aren’t that difficult, it is just that this course tends to look at them from a different perspective, from a cranial perspective regarding how we process and influence patterns of tensegrity, patterns that we have been addressing through respiration in every single PRI non-manual technique we have ever learned. To me, this course makes what we have been doing less mystical, less scattered. It brings things together (much like the pinch of the hour-glass migration pattern of those cranes).
I always love and am honored to instruct this course. I am constantly learning from the diverse group of attendees, this time ranging from PT’s, athletic and personal trainers and massage therapists to physicians, ophthalmologists, dentists and even a horse whisperer (who works with the equine autonomic nervous system). It was particularly rewarding due to the folks that came to participate in person, of which a third of them (2 out of the 6) had flown in from Alaska to be there. These people were still in my thoughts when the day after the course concluded I drove out to the Rowe Sanctuary on the Platte River to tuck myself into a bird blind to watch the Cranes rise and dance as the sun came up (an experience I highly recommend). I had to smile when our guide said that about a third of the birds before us would be flying back to Alaska. Wow, it really was a week of Cranial Resolution parallels.
-Jen Smart
