Our Mission
The goal of Castellino Prenatal and Birth Training is to make Prenatal and Birth Therapy available to the world community for children, adults, and for babies and new families with the highest possible integrity, efficiency and compassion.
Mary Jackson, RN, LM, RCST® and Tara Blasco, PhD, RCST® are continuing the training of professionals in the work pioneered by Ray Castellino, DC, RCST®, BCPP, RPE
New Online Learning Website
Visit our new online learning site - online.castellinotraining.com featuring workshops and monthly free talks by Catellino graduates.
About Dr. Castellino
Raymond Castellino, DC (retired 1997), BCPP, RPE, RCST®, drew on 50 years of experience as a natural health care practitioner, consultant and teacher. He was a pioneer in the field of Pre and Perinatal therapy and of using energetic and somatic approaches to facilitate attachment and bonding. His practice focused on the resolution of prenatal, birth and other early trauma / stress and on developing teachable methods of supporting families and adults in small groups. He drew on decades of experience as a Polarity Therapist and a biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist as well as his extensive knowledge of the body from his Chiropractic practice.
He discovered and developed clinical approaches and skill sets for working with individuals, couples, families with children, small groups of adults and large gatherings. BEBA, About Connections, the Womb Surround Process Workshops, The Foundation Training, Body into Being, supervision and community outreach seminars and workshops constituted wings of an integrated pre and peri-natal facilitation and educational system.
These innovations include the Castellino 8 guiding Principles for small groups and families. These principles are cornerstones for the creating safety, the high level function and the optimal growth of babies and children in the context of relationships in their families. They are also the framework for working in small to large groups of adults.
He developed a teachable method for working with families and small groups of adults as an energetic relational field. This innovation is a major game changer for facilitating families and adults in a relational social nervous system field.
He developed approaches that support families and small groups of adults to efficiently and safely evolve into harmonic resonance and co-regulated states while supporting individuation and differentiation at the same time. Together with Mary Jackson, home birth midwife, he developed a system for evaluating the needs of pregnant mom’s, their babies and the father that involves establishing “two layers of support” for the baby, the mother, the father and also the birth team. They have clinically discovered that when the layers of competent support are in place, the mother and baby are free to find the impulses they need to birth from the inside out.
He worked with the primary rhythms developed in families and in small groups of adults; he discovered and continued to do ongoing clinical research on the slow rhythms that govern coherence and high level attunement in relationships. He measured this rhythm to oscillate at 5 minute cycles. This rhythm is substantially slower than the Tidal Rhythms as defined by the Osteopathic and Craniosacral healing disciplines. He called these slow occulting rhythmic cycles “relational field cycles” and observed that the relational field cycles govern the innate knowing of birth, bonding and attachment.
He developed a series of protocols for facilitating families and small groups when the families or groups were manifesting “double bind” paradoxical energies. These protocols are self-published as part of his professional training manual available to trainees in his professional trainings.
Ray researched and taught the manifestation of “sequential behavioral patterns” that originate from “sequential imprinting” from ancestral, conception, gestation and birth experiences.
He developed numerous integrated somatic/psychological approaches for discovering how all beings implicitly remember early pre and perinatal experiences. Some of these approaches include facilitated movement, supported attachment, dynamic creative opposition, dynamic squeeze.
Lastly, with his work with Mary Jackson, Tara Blasco and Anna Chitty he discovered and developed several ways to anchor into universal resourced states that he and Anna Chitty refer to as the “Blueprint Energies.” These blueprint states of consciousness provide a basis for gently and safely discovering and working with early imprint implicit somatic memories. Some of the key components are intention, the co-regulation tempo, movement in highly cooperative relational fields and connected social processes.
These approaches are all applicable for pre-nates, mothers, couples, families and small groups of adults and formed the basis for his work in BEBA, About Connections, Womb Surround Workshops, his Foundation Trainings, Body into Being and other professional seminars.
-
In addition to his work at Castellino Training through which he offered serveral year Foundation Trainings (15 of them) and several-day Womb Surround (hundreds), Ray was involved in three other major projects:
- He is co-founder About Connections with home birth midwife Mary Jackson, where they prepared families for birth, supported the birth process, and did follow up integration. The methods they developed reduced home birth transfers to the hospital from 20% to 3% in over 100 births. They also worked with families and individuals of all ages to resolve the effects of early imprinting.
- He co-founded in 1993 and from 1997 was the Clinical Director of BEBA (Building and Enhancing Bonding and Attachment), a non-profit research clinic in Ojai, CA devoted to strengthening the bonds between babies/children and their parents and to optimizing children's physical, emotional and mental development.
- He co-taught 3 rounds of a 5-module training with Anna Chitty, RPP, BCST, SEP, ABD Body into Being: Understanding and Facilitating Attachment through Somatic and Energetic Processes.
Dr. Castellino was a frequent presenter at national and international conferences including the Association for Pre- & Peri-natal Psychology and Health, the American Polarity Therapy Association, the Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America, and others. He was a founding board member and continuing contributor of the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children.
He practiced and taught in the healthcare field from 1970 to 2020, and offered prenatal and birth therapy from 1993 to 2020.