Craniosacral therapist Lionel Gougne lays his hands palm down over my feet with the lightest touch imaginable. He asks me to relax, and so I do, stretch out fully clothed, warm and comfortable on a couch seven floors above Shibuya on a cold damp spring morning.
"I'm monitoring the rhythm of your craniosacral system to detect any restrictions and imbalances," he says quietly.
He finds one. Seems I have a blockage. The rhythm flowing from my cranium down my spine to my sacrum has met an obstacle, a kind a hiccup. As he begins to seek out the source of the problem, he meets another problem, acute pain in arthritic knees, at which point he embarks upon what is called a somatoemotional release, and I begin journeying into old deep-seated trauma.