Dr. Cloe Couturier, DMQ, CO, CST-D, EHP-C

A Practitioner Who Is Teaching What She Practices.

She did not develop this work in a laboratory or a classroom. She developed it over 40 years of daily practice, 30,000+ hours of clinical work, 13 years beside Dr. John Upledger, and a life that demanded every skill she had ever learned.

Born in France, Dr. Couturier discovered meditation as a young girl and recognized early that the health of the body, mind, and spirit are inseparable. That conviction has guided everything she has built since.

Today she teaches. Not to create patients who depend on her. But to create students who no longer need her — because they have learned to activate the divine intelligence they were always designed to carry.

Formed at the Hands of Masters.

The Osteopathic Foundation

Osteopathy, in its truest form, is the original merging of Eastern and Western medicine. It treats the person as one unified whole, body, mind, and spirit inseparable. The late osteopaths (Still, Sutherland, Becker, Fulford) wrote extensively about energy as the next frontier. They were pointing toward something. Dr. Couturier would eventually discover what it was.

The Qigong Lineage

• Dame Dr. Effie P. Chow, PhD — founder of the World Congress on Qigong, Tai Chi, and TCM, and one of the world’s foremost Medical Qigong GrandMasters
• Professor Jerry Alan Johnson, PhD, DTCM, DMQ — one of the few internationally recognized non-Chinese Grand Masters
• Master Binhui He with Dr. Kevin Chen, PhD — one of the 12 forms recommended by the Chinese Government
• Dr. Dennis Alexander, DMQ — International Institute of Medical Qigong

She earned a dual doctorate in Medical Qigong therapy from the Beijing Western District Medical Qigong Science and TCM Research Institute in Beijing, China, and the International Institute of Medical Qigong, Overseas College of Medical Qigong, Henan University of TCM, United States. This makes her one of the few individuals in North America to hold this advanced degree.

She has served on the faculty of the World Congress on Qigong and Integrative Medicine since 1997 — the year she first publicly presented her work on CranioSacralQigong® alongside Dr. Upledger and Dr. Chow.

The Upledger Years

Dr. Couturier came to that relationship not as a newcomer to cranial and CranioSacral work, but as an osteopath already trained in classical cranial osteopathy to a depth that surpassed most of the practitioners around her. Dr. Upledger recognized this. He worked with her privately, coached her through the integration of her skills, and taught her in a way that went far beyond the standard course curriculum.

In 2003, Dr. Upledger invited her to speak at his international conference “Beyond The Dura” — a formal recognition that what she was developing was something new. Something he supported. Something he had pointed toward but could not yet name.

It took her five years to integrate everything fully, not forgetting her osteopathic formation, but fine-tuning every perception until she could feel what he felt. When that moment came, what existed between their hands was beyond CranioSacral Therapy. It was the beginning of CranioSacralQigong®.

Not a Blending. A Fusion.

Dr. Couturier practiced Qigong every day not as a philosophy but as a necessity. Without it, she did not have the quality energy for the work or for her life. And it was in that daily practice, maintained during and alongside the CranioSacral process, that she first realized something had changed. The Qi was amplifying. Building into the hands spontaneously. The person she was working with was no longer passive. Something new was happening that had no name yet.

The CranioSacral system, the dynamic movement of cerebrospinal fluid from cranium to sacrum, was not just a therapeutic target. It was the central energy panel of the body. And when Qigong was brought into that space, the entire system responded: meridians, organs, nervous system, consciousness. The result was a new practice with its own integrity, its own principles, and its own name.

CranioSacralQigong® is not CranioSacral Therapy. It is not Medical Qigong. It is what emerged when a cranial osteopath who practiced Qigong every day allowed those two traditions to meet fully, and discovered that they had always been pointing toward each other.

She first presented this work publicly in 1997 at the Second World Congress on Qigong — the First American World Congress on Qigong — alongside Dr. Upledger and Dr. Effie Chow. In April 2026, she presented the Yi Qi Li framework at Harvard Medical School. The work continues to grow.

There is another reason Dr. Couturier has practiced every day for 40 years.

Her son Dorian was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Western medicine offered no remedy; only a prognosis. He would not live past his teens.

Dr. Couturier refused to accept that as the final word. She searched for help and found it in the two traditions that would become her life’s work: CranioSacral Therapy and Medical Qigong. Together they gave Dorian what no medical intervention could, breath, mobility, and time.

He never required a tracheotomy. He lived independently. He graduated from college magna cum laude. And he lived to nearly 32 — more than double his prognosis, on his own terms, in his own life, surrounded by people who loved him.

Through Dorian, Dr. Couturier did not just learn about healing. She lived it. Every day. And that is why she teaches, because she knows with certainty what becomes possible when the body’s divine intelligence is given the conditions to do its work.

These are not anecdotes. These are clinical results.