Dr. Sutherland Is The Founder Of Cranial
He Introduced Biodynamics 80 Years Ago
And It Has Evolved Into A Journey Of Love

This blog is for anyone interested in Sutherland's osteopathic biodynamics and wants to compare it with non-osteopathic biodynamics.

There are about two hundred osteopaths practicing biodynamics worldwide. By contrast, over two thousand non-osteopaths practice an alternative biodynamics. That means the marketplace is flooded with ten times more non-osteopaths offering biodynamics than there are biodynamic osteopaths. Consumers have to choose between two vastly different biodynamic approaches without being informed about the differences between them. The lack of informed consent is an ethical issue because without it, consumers will be confused about the type of biodynamic cranial that are receiving. This confusion is compounded by two factors:

1) Osteopaths do not allow non-osteopaths to take their biodynamic trainings. This created an empty void that got filled with inaccuracies, which non-osteopaths used to form their own separate biodynamic curriculum. 

2) Marketing leads consumers to believe that non-osteopathic biodynamics is equivalent to biodynamic osteopathy. That is not true; non-osteopaths created a biodynamic curriculum that is actually functional cranial when it is compared with Sutherland's osteopathic biodynamics. Biodynamic osteopaths consider this to be a given fact; while non-osteopaths deny and are offended by that assertion.  

Let's buckle up and explore this conflict by looking at Dr. Sutherland's original osteopathic biodynamics and comparing it with the biodynamics that emerged 50 years later in the non-osteopathic cranial field.

Dr. Sutherland discovered cranial work and developed three types of cranial osteopathy:

1) Biomechanical (pre-biodynamic).
2) Functional (pre-biodynamic).
3) Biodynamic cranial practice for the evolution of consciousness was Sutherland's parting gift.

CHART

My first book Stillness Biodynamic Cranial Practice and the Evolution of Consciousness (2006) presents the osteopathic definitions of Dr. Sutherland's three cranial practices. In Stillness, you can find all the references in the osteopathic literature for your research. That way, you can discover the facts for yourself in the literature and see how Sutherland and his Legacy practitioners precisely defined biomechanical, functional, and biodynamic cranial practices. As his parting gift, Dr. Sutherland left essential biodynamic instructions on his headstone:

BE STILL AND KNOW

His wife, Adah Sutherland, completed these instructions on her headstone 20 years later:

I AM

Together, the Sutherland's characterize the biodynamic journey to evolve consciousness through touch: 

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

Sutherland dedicated his life to the evolution of consciousness through cranial work as a living process; he went as far as saying that cranial work "is not mine." Here is a quote from Dr. Sutherland's final lecture on how he practices touch:

We had a visit from a young lady, a ballet dancer whose name is well known on Broadway. In our living room, she gave a dramatic and reverent dance interpretation of the biblical saying 'Be Still and Know that I am God." In her impressive presentation, we could see that she lost all awareness of the physical senses.

"Be Still" these physical senses, and get as close to your Maker as you can, closer than breathing. Where you realize what is meant by the Breath of Life, not the breath of air, the breath of air being merely one of the material substances which man utilizes in his walkabout on earth. It has been my endeavor to get as far away from the physical senses as I possibly could, that is, to a point where one begins to experience - to realize 'Be Still and Know.' That is why I have so much to say about information gained solely through laboratory tests and experiments and information often gained through the application of erring or unreliable physical senses.

How many of you have the same degree of vision? The same degree of touch?

     ~ April 25, 1948 The AOA Millennium Yearbook

If You Follow Sutherland's Guidance
Your Biodynamic Practice 
Naturally Evolves To Post-Biodynamic 
Which Occurs After I AM Implodes Into Your Cells
 And A Non-tidal Enfoldment Emerges

This post-biodynamic non-tidal enfoldment of consciousness is called Pure Breath of Love, which in Kashmir Shaivism is called the Spanda. This non-tidal Sacred Pulse emerges after we realize I AM and we choose to let I AM descend our midline and implode into our cells. Here, our cells are suffused by Pure Breath of Love that pulses in tandem with the pulse of the SA node (Stillness Ch 9 & Stillness Touch Ch 9).

Pure Breath of Love is a post-biodynamic non-tidal enfoldment of paradoxical consciousness.

My book Stillness Touch Union of Body & Love 
details this post-biodynamic path
that begins with your Grail Journey
as the descent of your Soul into the body's cells under the guidance of Pure Breath of Love

Osteopathic Biodynamic History 

For an interview about Sutherland's view of potency, read this: Unerring Potency

My book Stillness Touch introduces the philosopher-mystics Swedenborg and Russel who deeply influenced Dr. Sutherland and Becker. Stillness Touch also points out what Dr. Sutherland taught to his inner circle of osteopaths who became Legacy Practitioners and evolved his biodynamics. It was Dr. Rollin Becker who coined Sutherland's work biodynamic. Becker further developed Dr. Sutherland's impulse by characterizing the official biodynamic map that began in neutral and ended in Dynamic Stillness. This osteopathic biodynamic map was refined by the New England Study Group that was founded by Sutherland's inner circle student Anne Wells and Becker's student James Jealous. From those findings, Dr. Jealous created a nine year biodynamic course and disseminated osteopathic biodynamics worldwide. 

As mentioned, if we follow Sutherland's instructions on touch it self evolves. If for a prolonged period of time we practice Be Still And Know I AM, it evolves into a post-biodynamic journey that lands us in a non-tidal descending domain of consciousness that enfleshes love. I call it 'post-biodynamic' because at this stage the biodynamic tides disappear after we realize the cellular implosion of I AM. As a reminder, I AM is the end of the osteopathic biodynamic journey: Osteopathic Biodynamic Map

After you realize I AM at Dynamic Stillness  
 your consciousness expands to infinity 
and the tides disappear

As mentioned - IF YOU CHOOSE - to inwardly wait in nothing for nothing, I AM descends your midline and implodes into your cells. This is THE FULCRUM, a pivotal event that creates a deep state of neutral called Sacred Repose. The state of Sacred Repose leads to enfleshment where we realize a cellular suffusion of infinite consciousness that unites our body with the sacred pulse of love. Here are some inner-body indicators of enfleshment:

1) Infinite Consciousness descends your midline and implodes into your cells that then pulse love with every SA Node emanation.

2) The midline absorbs the tides and you no longer sense them.

3) The dissolved tides perceptually disappear because we integrated or united with them.

4) Your ascending tidal journey to realize I AM marks the end of osteopathic biodynamics.

5) After the midline descent and cellular implosion of I AM, the Sacred Pulse of Love emerges.

6) Then, every heart-beat pulses a love that creates all things.

7) You feel bodily connected with everything.

For a deeper dive into the descending journey spiritual paths, see my newest e-Book Stillness Touch Path of Union: Click Here

With Dr. Sutherland's non-doing practice of BE STILL you realize I AM.

Realizing Be Still And Know I AM is the fruit you harvest when you practice Sutherland's biodynamic cranial.

Your path is clear if you wish to follow Sutherland's instructions and choose to ardently evolve cranial as Sutherland did. I can verify this personally: practicing as Sutherland taught, your cranial touch becomes a living force that self-evolves. After we realize I AM, we are presented with a conscious free-will choice:

At I AM You Choose To Wait 
 In Nothing For Nothing
For As Long As It Takes 

Eventually, your waiting for nothing cultivates an deep inner state called Sacred Repose. Here, in Sacred Repose, your consciousness invaginates and implodes inside your cells and unites with Pure Breath of Love. Then, every cell vibrates with the sacred pulse of love that emanates in tandem with the pulse of your SA Node. From then on, your every heart beat emanates love.

When a non-tidal pulse of love
emanates in all your cells
in tandem with pulse of the SA Node
- that marks your second birth -
which is the enfleshment Pure Breath of Love.

After I AM descends into your cells,
the biodynamic tides dissolve in your midline,
and the biodynamic tidal map disappears

The tides disappear because we integrated them
Integrate means we 'unite with'

What emerges after the cellular implosion of Dynamic Stillness? A post-biodynamic non-tidal domain of consciousness:

The Osteopathic Biodynamic Tidal Journey
Is To Ascend Our Consciousness To I AM,
Which Frees Us From Ego Control
↓
At I AM, We Realize BODY AS CONSCIOUSNESS:
↓
BE STILL AND KNOW I AM
↓
 When The Tides Disappear At I AM
It Creates A Fulcrum:
↓
If We Choose To Wait
For Nothing In Nothing 
↓
 I AM Descends And Implodes In Our Cells 
↓
All Cells Emanate The Sacred Pulse Of Pure Breath Of Love
↓
BE STILL AND KNOW I AM LOVE
↓
This Descending Non-Tidal 
Post-Biodynamic Journey
 Is Guided By The Sacred Pulse,
Which Unites Body, Consciousness, & Love
↓
We Call This Enfleshment

Here are two AI interpretations from Claude and Grok that correlate Pure Breath of Love with the Spanda: CLICK HERE

The key to realizing Sacred Repose is simple: we eliminate whatever prevents our realization of the Spanda. The biggest culprit is efference, which manifests as fear and desire.

FEAR & DESIRE
Are Two Poles Of Efference
That Lead To
Ethical Misconduct

Here is a Chart

Desire 

Efferent, outer-directed, desire prevents enfleshment. Numerous graduates have told me that desire is the underlying tone of the curriculum in the Biodynamic Cranial Approach (BCA) and the Institute of Craniosacral Studies (ICS):

1) Students from both schools are subtly taught obey the cranial teacher as if they are a guru who declare 'I am always here for you in all ways.' 

2) They are taught to enquire into the tides to gain meaning and achieve blissful spiritual states, which leads to a clinging to the tides.

3) Practitioners use stillness as a bypass to avoid discomfort, which holds consciousness hostage in the bliss of the ascending tidal planes.

4) This cultivates an addiction to the innate bliss of the tides and dynamic stillness.

5) ICS also teaches students use Upledger's unwinding while the receiver visualizes themselves going through their birth canal to realize the second birth.

Dozens of BCS and ICS graduates have expressed frustration that their schools use the language of DESIRE, which is drenched with ecstatic, radiant, bliss-filled manipulative words of projection that lure students to feel that they will miss out if they do not join their courses (Read the BCA and ICS websites, social media, and newsletters). Ironically, if you join these trainings, most likely you will miss out: you will not descend into the body. Rather, you will remain stuck in ascent, which means enfleshment is not possible. How do I know this? As mentioned, I have received direct reports from BCA/ICS students, and for years I have observed the BCA and ICS practitioners in my Master Classes: these students stand out in class - for all to see - they are utterly and unknowingly stuck in Spiritual Bypass. Also, both founders of these schools have gurus, they trained in and they teach my work without my permission in an extremely distorted form, as noted above.

Fear

On the opposite end of the practitioner bypass spectrum is FEAR. Based on student reports along with a review of their curriculum, fear is the primary teaching modality in Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB) and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST). The CSB/BCST trainings developed outside of cranial osteopathy based on Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST), which started as a lay training for parents to treat children, but later became hugely popular with non-osteopaths.

Here is a chart of some of the fear-based efferent practices taught in the BCST curriculum: CHART

The BCST international institutions market that its trainings are connected with and equivalent to biodynamic cranial osteopathy. However, osteopaths vehemently disagree with that assertion. Instead, they insist that the BCST curriculum distorts and desecrates the biodynamics that was taught by Dr. Sutherland, Becker, and Jealous. Biodynamic trained DO's are enraged by this blatant breach of biodynamic integrity.

For context, first read this ARTICLE and then read CLAUDE AI evaluation. Now, read what Dr. Jealous writes:

"Be careful of experts who believe they understand Osteopathy. Why should they anyway? They have never practiced Osteopathy or studied with Sutherland or his students. To practice Osteopathy is not anything like what I have been told by craniosacral therapists (CST) that they do. I have witnessed this deception: non- Osteopathic persons taking Osteopathic ideas and presenting themselves as teachers of this work. I have met some of these people and they do not understand Osteopathy in any form but (from) their own imaginings."   ~ James Jealous, An Osteopathic Odyssey p. 123-124.

---

Practitioner efference bypasses 
an embodied realization of Dynamic Stillness, 
which requires the descent of consciousness.

Remaining in ascent
and stuck in an empty void of stillness
projects a shadow biodynamics
that is created by the ego & Superego
to abort our second birth into the enfleshment of love

Warning: Contrary to what my haters say, I am not criticizing these schools. The fact is CSB/BCST developed outside of and separate from osteopathic biodynamics. Their marketing compel me to set the record straight by accurately reporting the historical facts. I am qualified to report cranial history because I was trained by an osteopath student of Dr. Sutherland for eighteen years, beginning in 1974. However, my blog may infuriate readers who believe the BCST/BCA dogma that "Charles puts down other biodynamic cranial approaches so he can assert that Stillness Touch is better than the other biodynamic approaches." My perspective is this: all of Sutherland's cranial approaches have their rightful place and I practiced all of them. 

Aspiring cranial students deserve to be truthfully informed of the exact type of training they will receive
before they enroll in an expensive program

Here is a fact: the biodynamics taught in non-osteopathic schools is not the biodynamics that osteopaths learn during their 9-year training

If you are interested in Sutherland's original biodynamics, do the required in-depth research and study the osteopathic literature. You will then see for yourself that the biodynamics Dr. Sutherland created, Becker developed, Jealous disseminated is not "better than" the functional work taught as 'biodynamic' by non-osteopath BCST teachers. No approach is better than any other. However, it is crucial to understand that functional and biodynamic approaches are vastly different (Read Stillness Ch. 3-4).

I revere Sutherland's pre-biodynamic biomechanical cranial; recall that one sutural session opened my consciousness to infinity for one month, which changed my life. His functional cranial work I enjoyed practicing for 23 years until biodynamics spontaneously emerged in me in 1995. After that, I followed Dr. Sutherland's instructions and stopped all efferent pre-biodynamic functional medical practices. I admit that it was a relief to stop being the doer who knows.

In 1948, Dr. Sutherland said, in essence, that after biodynamics emerged in him, he saw that any efferent practice is an 'outside force' that prevents the biodynamic neutral.

Sutherland stopped using his hands to feel because he realized that they are 'erring' physical senses.

Again, pre-biodynamic and biodynamic practices involve different domains of consciousness with specific practice boundaries. I have thoroughly walked Dr. Sutherland's cranial journey and I practiced all three types of his cranial for five decades. I am able to distinguish between the different biodynamic cranial approaches. Again, these distinctions are detailed in my two books Stillness and Stillness Touch.

Just because a school markets their training as biodynamic does not make it so 

Do you want to know what you are getting into before you sign up for a training? 
Then digest the original osteopathic definitions of the three types of cranial
and see for yourself what type of cranial a school offers.
If you do not pay attention to exactly what is in a curriculum,
and instead, you blindly believe their marketing, you will be deceived

Who does Charles think he is?

After fifty years of study and practice of Dr. Sutherland's cranial work, I feel qualified to present an accurate historical picture of Sutherland's osteopathic cranial work. Again, by grace, I learned cranial osteopathy directly from Sutherland's student, osteopath Dr. DeJarnette, beginning in 1974. Recall that Sutherland publicly introduced his original biodynamic principles of non-doing in 1948. This was thirty five (35) years before Upledger introduced his craniosacral therapy (CST) to parents.

Sutherland privately taught biodynamics to his inner circle legacy osteopaths, but it was not called biodynamic until Becker coined it. Sutherland's biodynamic principles and practices were introduced fifty (50) years before Franklyn Sills created  Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB) or its equivalent, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST).

For context, I had been in practice for 10 years before Upledger introduced Craniosacral Therapy (CST) and 20 years prior to Sills' Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB) in the mid 1990's. Having trained in Sutherland's non-protocol based cranial osteopathy, it was impossible to appreciate Upledger's ten-step protocol: it was not anything like cranial osteopathy. Nor was I able to grasp how Sills' CSB offering could be construed as biodynamic. I cannot imagine how angry the cranial osteopaths feel about the way that these two schools marketed their cranial work. More on that later.

The founder of a Swiss school wrote me "Why do I have to name the above?" I name it because Sills' biodynamics is not derived from Dr. Sutherland's biodynamics. Sills dropped out osteopathic school, and he was trained in Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST). Again, CST started as a lay training for parents to treat their children. Then, due to the explosive demand, CST was offered to bodyworkers. Sills' CSB began as a Legacy Upledger Course, according to John Wilks:

"When Franklin first started in 1995, we had a Legacy Course based on Upledger's training, really, to be honest, and then he (Sills) began to introduce biodynamic concepts from that time on." (Transcript of the Dynamic Stillness Interview).

Before Sills went public, he spoke to James Jealous about his new school and Dr. Jealous asked Sills to not call his work biodynamic. Sills went ahead and called his work craniosacral biodynamics (CSB).  

As mentioned, I witnessed the emergence of Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST). It felt like and insult to the Sutherland cranial osteopaths that Upledger marketed himself to consumers as the "founder of cranial sacral therapy." Then, a decade later, his legacy student, Franklin Sills, similarly marketed himself as the "founder of craniosacral biodynamics" in the 1990's. These marketing strategies imply to consumers that CST and CSB are equivalent  to the cranial osteopathy and biodynamic cranial osteopathy that Sutherland founded, which is deceptive:

Dr. Sutherland founded all cranial approaches

Sutherland introduced biomechanical cranial in the 1900's, which evolved over time into functional cranial that was guided by the cranial rhythmic impulse. Sutherland taught functional cranial until the 1940's. Then, he introduced biodynamic cranial (even though biodynamic was not yet a term until Becker coined it) and Sutherland ceased all his efferent functional cranial practices. Sutherland's precise cranial definitions were refined and evolved by numerous osteopathic cranial practitioners over the decades. You can read these exacting osteopathic definitions in one place because I gathered and reproduced them in my book Stillness Chapter 3 and by scouring the osteopathic literature (references are included) you can read for yourself the definitions in the literature.

If you are not interested in the original biodynamics
that Dr Sutherland taught to his inner circle
skip what I offer.

 Laying on of hands is an ancient art practiced by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still
the founder of osteopathy.

My book Stillness documents the osteopathic cranial history and definitions and illuminates Sutherland's biodynamic cranial. If reporting the osteopathic factual history, presenting the original osteopathic biodynamic cranial definitions, and pointing out which practices are not biodynamic according to the founding osteopaths is considered as being critical, a put down, or 'better than' BCST, so be it. 

Marketing damaged the consumers perception of osteopathic biodynamics
 and promotes a shadow biodynamics 
that distorts the essence of Dr. Sutherland's non-doing practice of BE STILL

 The teaching of functional cranial
- as if it is biodynamics -
created the death of biodynamics
outside of osteopathy

What Is A Shadow Biodynamics?

My book Stillness points out that "life manifests in the white-hot polarity between the dynamic tension of opposites." Therefore, a shadow biodynamics emerged as a counter-force to Dr. Sutherland's living impulse. Again, the essence of Sutherland's biodynamic teaching is BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

~ Get Away As Far As You Can From Your Physical Senses While Touching
~ Do Not Use Your Hands To Feel - They Are Erring Unreliable Physical Senses
~ The Practitioner Is Not The Doer
~ The Unerring Potency Heals
~ Touch Is A Path To Know I AM
~ Trust The Tide
~ 

Do we dare to recognize and look straight into the eye of a shadow biodynamics that compels a practitioner to be the doer, teaches us to feel the tides with our hands, and asked us to enquire into tides to gain meanings from them and gain spiritual insight, and to use stillness as a bypass to avoid discomfort? For example, biodynamic osteopaths are NOT taught to manage the nervous system's (NS) natural fight, flight, freeze reactions to stress and trauma. This is an efferent practice that creates false-fulcra, which leads to dissociation, why? Because navigating the nervous system is functional work, and we are not operating from a biodynamic neutral and we not in our midline. 

Today, the collective shadow of the Beast drives the consciousness of the masses to operate from a post-truth disposition, according to Steiner. It feels tragic to see thousands of innocent unwitting cranial practitioners getting trapped in bypass with zero contact with the biodynamic neutral, the unerring potency, the tides, or Dynamic Stillness. The sad part is, as long as we bypass, we will not realize Dynamic Stillness or Pure Breath of Love.

Bypass occurs whenever efferent fear & desire guide us and we feel with our hands, look for tides and midlines, or we treat recipients to relieve trauma and symptoms 
in the name of biodynamics.

This blog is not about functional cranial,
which is an excellent medical treatment model 

However, calling efferent functional cranial work "biodynamic" is dishonest and it amounts to ethical misconduct. Why? Because Dr. Sutherland taught that biodynamic cranial touch is a non-doing, non-efferent practice of 'BE STILL.'

The practice of BE STILL is not possible if we enquire into the tides. Enquiry bypasses the biodynamic neutral and prevents contact with the unerring potency, the tides, Dynamic Stillness, and Pure Breath of Love. 

Bypass occurs the moment a practitioner uses any efference
be it due to fear or desire

It is practitioner efference - fear or desire - that recoils our awareness up and out of our inner-body sanctum, which projects consciousness into the ascending planes, and then, the ego sends our consciousness into our hands to feel motions in the client, so we can 'read' their nervous system, feel the presence of trauma, evaluate the anatomy, discern the cranial motions, or feel the tides, ... all this is used to diagnose the craniosacral system for lesion patterns that dwell inside the client's subtle body.

The above efferent methods are not an aspect of a biodynamic practice, according to Dr. Sutherland. Again, he taught biodynamics to his inner circle of osteopaths as the practice of Be Still. The osteopathic biodynamic cranial practices taught by Drs. Sutherland, Becker, and Jealous require that we realize a living inner contact with the unerring potency.

Potency is only realized in a biodynamic neutral.

We contact the potency and the tides when we realize the biodynamic neutral - defined as a whole-body stillness - after which, the ascending current tides guide us to the realization of Dynamic Stillness as I AM, which is the source potency that creates the body. However, the BCA and ICS schools teach desire-driven methods to practitioners, as mentioned

1) to efferently enquire into the tides
2) to misuse stillness to bypass any contact with the potency
3) to engage in a co-dependent guru-disciple relationship
5) to unwind to realize our second birth

On the other hand, the fear-based BCST schools teach us 

1) to feel and evaluate with our hands
2) to orient to anatomy, particularly the nervous system to evaluate trauma
3) to apply treatment protocols - as intentions or suggestions - to relieve symptoms
4) to visualize long tide as an outside force

All the above efferent practices are the opposite of what Dr. Sutherland taught as biodynamics

When practitioners are unwittingly taught efferent cranial practices, that's fine,
but that is functional work: it is not Dr. Sutherland's non-doing biodynamics.

Anyone can falsely assert 
that an efferent functional practice is biodynamic

As any biodynamic trained osteopath will tell you, a Sutherland-inspired biodynamic session begins in neutral, which is the moment that stillness pervades your whole inner-body space, and from this whole-body stillness, there emanates primary respiration from within the midline that suffuses potency throughout every cell of the whole body.

Stillness emanates unerring potency from the midline to within the cells
this same potency creates the forces of life that make the body 

Dynamic Stillness Emanates
A Template Of  Wholeness 
That Makes The Body

By Feeling Anatomy With The Hands, I Bypass The Unerring Potency Of Dynamic Stillness

 Any Practitioner Efference Projects A Field of Inertia
That Recoils The Potency
And Alters Function

As Sutherland often asked "Do You See the Point?" 

It may seem radical to a non-osteopath biodynamic practitioner to suggest "do not enquire into the biodynamic tides, do not feel with your hands, do not orient to anatomy, do not evaluate the nervous system for trauma, and do not adore your teacher like a guru." However, Drs. Sutherland, Becker, and Jealous all taught that biodynamics thrives in mutuality as a communal sharing among equals. Let's read again what Sutherland wrote in 1948:

"Be Still" these physical senses and get as close to your Maker as you can, closer than breathing. Where you realize what is meant by the Breath of Life, not the breath of air, the breath of air being merely one of the material substances which man utilizes in his walkabout on earth.It has been my endeavor to get as far away from the physical senses as I possibly could, that is, to a point where one begins to experience - to realize 'Be Still and Know.' That is why I have so much to say about information gained solely through laboratory tests and experiments and information often gained through the application of erring or unreliable physical senses."

Instead of using our hands to feel the anatomy or to evaluate the nervous system for trauma (functional work), Sutherland teaches us to contact the unerring potency that dwells within our own body. The unerring potency exists prior to anatomy. The emanation of potency creates the entire body. In other words, Dr. Sutherland says that the source of healing that makes the body is the unerring potency that dwells within. 

Again, feeling anatomy with the hands requires efference, which recoils our awareness out of its inner-body sanctum and thrusts our consciousness away from any contact with the neutral, the potency, the tides, Dynamic Stillness, or pure Breath of Love.

How Does Feeling The Nervous System And Anatomy With The Hands Bypass Potency?

The final product of the potency is anatomy, which is many steps removed from source.
We can only sense potency in neutral, amid a whole-body inner contact with the presence of stillness.

To practice Dr. Sutherland's non-doing, we use no efference.
Instead, we inwardly open to the potency, as the wisdom of the body, that emanates the embryological whole-body blueprint that exists prior-to anatomy. 

 Potency Makes The Whole Body  - And It Exists Prior To Anatomy

To let the potency be in charge of our sessions, we withdraw our awareness inside to contact the indwelling potency. Again, it is the indwelling presence of stillness that holds the template of wholeness that makes the body. If our awareness goes out in the opposite efferent direction, our consciousness gets projected out of our midline and we dissociate. We leave our inner-body sanctum, and enter into our hands to feel anatomy and the nervous system inside the client's subtle body. If we visualize primary respiration as though it is an outside force, we also bypass the indwelling potency, which is the formative force that makes the body. Sure, this force exists outside, but the source potency is inside our body (review the study of the heart's SA Node in my book Stillness).

The end result of efference is we lose contact with unerring potency and the tides.

The inner or outer direction of our awareness during a session
is a choice point of freedom for each practitioner

BE STILL amid the Indwelling Potency is the essence of Dr. Sutherland's biodynamic practice.

Whereas, we can use efference that orients awareness outward to treat; that is a wonderful functional cranial method. Functional cranial is an excellent medical approach for symptom relief.

However, it is the unconscious mixing of two polar currents, 
the outer ascending and inner descending
that causes the confusion that is rampant in the cranial field
 outside of the osteopathic cranial field

Chart

Again, when we use efference, we bypass the potency. However, using efference is an unconscious habit due to the ego's terror of crossing the threshold - beyond your 'known' - and over the horizon. The journey to freedom requires letting our separating consciousness die to the known, while you open and let your consciousness cascade over the horizon into the unknown, which unites with the black infinite Dynamic Stillness of I AM. 

In esoteric circles, crossing the threshold of the abyss means we allow our consciousness to expand beyond infinity until we reach a portal - fulcrum - that frees our spirit from the grips of the ego and Superego control, which liberates our Soul from the prison of the narcissist. Again, the Sutherland's etched the total biodynamic journey of the ascent of consciousness on their headstones:

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

Click Here for Osteo Biodynamic Map

The Ego And Superego Are Terrified Of Divine Feminine Power

The ego and Superego harbor a subtle core terror that "if I cross the threshold beyond my known, I will loose control, be extinguished, or go crazy." Or, "I'm afraid that I cannot bear a direct contact with the power of love that made the body." That, and many more ego stories of terror can prevent any contact with the potency. Terror also prevents a direct contact with the tides and it recoils us from the Divine Feminine power of love.

Hence, we may unconsciously misuse efference as a bypass to get us as far away as possible from any contact with the unerring potency or the tides. With efference, we leave our inner-body and project our attention outward to objectify a recipient, to separate them from us. Then, we treat a recipient based on our clinical treatment skills that we learned in our cranial training. The ego uses efference to recoil our awareness away from contact with the unerring potency, the ascending biodynamic tides, and the descending Divine Feminine wisdom and love. Contact with Divine Feminine essence, or the Breath of Life, characterizes Sutherland's biodynamics (See Stillness Touch Appendix 3: Quotes From Osteopaths And Philosophers).

The habitual use of efference creates in us an unconscious habit of chronic bypass that, over time, can so alienate us from the source potency that we cannot find our way back home inside our inner-body sanctum, which is the indwelling midline potency. Instead, we live in a virtual biodynamic shadow domain that is bereft of any direct inner experience of the potency or the tides. Shadow biodynamic practitioners possess an intellectual understanding based on theories and definitions, and the use of biodynamic terms. Students are subtly encouraged by a cranial teacher guru to use biodynamic terms in place of a direct experience of the potency and the tides. (To gain more insight into bypass, see below: Ways a Practitioner Bypasses Direct Embodied Contact with the Breath of Life)

Sutherland taught us how to contact our Source, the unerring potency that creates anatomy 
instead of feeling the anatomy with our hands

---

The invisible forces of potency are within our midline as the presence of stillness. Dr. Becker taught that our midline stillness possesses an unerring potency that dwells within. By inwardly waiting ... in stillness ... for nothing, a mutual conversation without words emerges with our recipient. Although Becker did not use the word, he operated in mutuality.

In this stillness-to-stillness silent mutual conversation without words, the unerring potency emerges to guide our sessions.

I mentioned that Becker coined the word 'biodynamic' in cranial osteopathy, but it was German Embryologist Erich Blechschmidt who first used the word biodynamic after he directly observed a 'biodynamic activity' that creates the forming fields of function, which then makes the anatomy that served the already-existing functions. Blechschmidt upended the structure-function medical dogma. Even though there was a loose association between Steiner and Blechschmidt because the Anthroposophical Press published Blechschmidt's first book, it is unclear whether the term 'biodynamic' was sourced by Blechschmidt from Steiner's biodynamic gardening, but it is likely.

Blechschmidt Discovered That Function Creates Form

Dr. Blechschmidt's findings validate why we do not orient to anatomy. He observed tens of thousands of slides of the stages of embryonic development, which refuted the medical dogma that structure creates function. He saw for himself the opposite: there is a biodynamic activity that creates developmental motions in the metabolic fields that become forming functions that then creates specific anatomical structures. For example, before the heart is formed, there are channels created by the pulse of the SA Node cells within the embryonic protoplasm that eventually become blood vessels. It is the emanation of the SA Node from the periphery that fills the channels, which become vessels filled with blood cells, and finally, the heart forms (Read Stillness p 206: SA Node Pacemaker of the Heart).

Blechschmidt's discovery that function creates form because he saw that anatomy arises to accommodate the already active functioning. Function is an expression of the invisible biodynamic formative forces that in turn, make the anatomy. This anatomy-making power comes from the potency that emanates during each pulse of the SA Node cells. As the potency builds within the axial midline - the column of stillness - it informs the creation of whole body.

How do we contact this potency in the column of stillness for ourselves? We practice non-efference, or pratyahara.

Pratyahara means to turn attention inside the body to contact the divine 
presence of stillness,
an unerring potency that is within you from conception until death

Cranial bones, the nervous system, organs, tissues, ground substance, and all other structures of the human body are created by the potency - an invisible power that arises from an unknowable Divine Feminine Intelligence. This Intelligence holds the template of wholeness that creates the body. Dr. Sutherland called this the unerring potency of the Breath of Life Unerring Potency.

Stillness Touch: Supports Your Grail Journey To Enjoy Embodied Evolution of Consciousness

Now let's begin a brief journey from a biodynamic to a post-biodynamic approach to touch.

A living biodynamic session ignites a profound evolutionary journey for practitioner and client in mutuality. Once a biodynamic neutral emerges, stillness pervades your whole inner body space - this is the biodynamic neutral. The neutral's unerring potency emanates a whole-body primary respiration that ebbs and flows from within the midline and distributes potency to the whole body. If the primary respiration is fluidic, body-wide, and extends into our auric field, it is known as the fluid tide. Subsequently, fluid tide can expand your consciousness beyond the ego and nervous system's control of the body. If your evolutionary process continues, you realize the next harmonic of neutral that extends your consciousness to the edge of your known and emanates a primary respiration called the long tide. Here, your consciousness expands from the body and aura into a vast global luminescent consciousness.

If your consciousness continues evolving, it expands into the beyond - across the threshold of your known - to infinity, and then, infinite consciousness implodes inside your cells. Meanwhile, your awareness spills over the edge of your 'known' and disappears into an infinite black Dynamic Stillness, I AM. At I AM, your consciousness is freed from the tyranny of the ego's false sense of a separate self, which disappears along with the tides, which are absorbed in your midline.

Realizing I AM is essential as the end-stage of osteopathic biodynamic consciousness. The ascending current frees us from the grip of the ego. By crossing the threshold into the black abyss of Dynamic Stillness, we realize an infinite, unknowable Pure Consciousness. Sutherland characterized this as a "vision through the small end of the microscope, followed by the view through the big end of a telescope to observe the material elements disappearing into endless space." (Read Appendix 3 Stillness Touch).

After waiting in Dynamic Stillness, I AM implodes inside your cells, while your Radiantly Awake Self unites with Pure Breath of Love - and you sense a primordial pulse in every cell that emanates Divine Feminine Will. This is the power of love that creates all that is and which is stronger than death.

You then enjoy a living in a union between the Body, Consciousness, and Love
This is the Second Birth

Realizing Pure Breath of Love Is Impossible Amid The Slightest Whiff Of Efference

That is why using the hands as physical senses to feel anatomy, the nervous system, trauma, or to mix the three types of cranial work together is a spiritual bypass. Biomechanical and functional treatment methods require efference and objectification to separate the nervous system and all the anatomy into parts. When our presence is efferent, it transmits gross digital quality that collapses the delicate field of potency that emanates a fractal breathing field as the motion of life; namely, the biodynamic tides. I am not knocking the medical model of touch, it is a fine practice; I practiced biomechanical and functional cranial for 23 years.

However, by definition, medical touch is not a path that evolves consciousness.

Why not? Like the opposing ends of a magnet, the slightest practitioner efference recoils us from the potency. Efference creates an empty void within the body that is subsequently filled with inertia from the nervous system's digital activity. Dr. Sutherland was acutely aware of this, and he articulated it publicly in 1948, referring to inertia as an 'outside force' as we shall see.

Once biodynamics awakened in Dr. Sutherland in the 40's, he ceased all doing. From then on, he implored his inner circle legacy practitioners to be still.

He said "do not use any outside force." "You don't even have to test the sphenobasilar joint." and "Trust the unerring potency of the tide." In other words, Sutherland's biodynamic practice involved no doing, no efference, and no treating of symptoms. Why? Because the practitioner is not the doer who heals, the potency is what heals.

Becker more strongly echoed Sutherland's non-doing principle of 'Be Still' by saying 'the highest known element does not need our help.'

Sutherland's Three Types Of Osteopathic Cranial Practice Have Specific Definitions

Perhaps the osteopathic biodynamic path was not part of your training because your BCST teachers were trained in Upledger's CST and Stone's Polarity. Therefore, you may not be aware that the essence of Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamic teachings are based on practitioner non-efference. Again, that means no outside force is used by the practitioner. Sutherland emphasizes the practice of Be Still in non-doing after he witnessed first hand that the unerring potency is the doer that heals.

Sutherland's inner-circle of osteopathic legacy practitioners espoused a biodynamics in which a practitioner does not use the hands to feel the nervous system or anatomy, nor does the practitioner apply functional methods while offering a biodynamic session. Furthermore, there is zero expectation of motions, and that includes the tidal motions.

However, that will not be obvious to you without having studied biodynamic cranial osteopathy, so it is easy to mistakenly believe that the biodynamic cranial approach (BCA), and biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST) aligns with Dr. Sutherland’s non-efferent principle of BE STILL. If you would like to study Sutherland’s original definitions of his three types of cranial work from the osteopathic literature, read Chapter 3 in Stillness. 

In Chapter 3, you will read what Sutherland called the "proof in the pudding." 

If we study these osteopathic definitions objectively, we clearly see that BCST is based on Sutherland's definition of functional cranial work.

For a synopsis of Stillness Chapter 3, click here: ORIGINAL OSTEOPATHIC DEFINITIONS OF THE THREE TYPES OF CRANIAL

Again, a functional practitioner, by osteopathic definition, objectifies a client, uses the hands to efferently enter the client's craniosacral system to evaluate the status of the nervous system to feel for lesion patterns. Then, the practitioner applies intentions, suggestions, visualization, or physical techniques as outside forces that are projected inside the recipients' craniosacral system to the treat lesion patterns.

Functional work is an excellent modality that Sutherland developed,
but he ceased its practice after biodynamics dawned in him

Biodynamics, or Bypass into the Empty Void?

Clarity, integrity, honor, and truth were important principles when I began my cranial studies in 1973. I trained for over a decade with a student of Dr. Sutherland’s. Through his stories and anecdotes, my osteopath teacher Dr. DeJarnette, emanated the living spirit of Dr. Sutherland. It felt as though Dr. Sutherland was present in our classroom. As a result, I enjoyed, by grace, a deep inner body-felt living connection with Dr. Sutherland.

It is due to my deeply-felt inner connection with Dr. Sutherland's living impulse that I am compelled to fiercely uphold his non-doing biodynamic principles, which I have done for 52 years and I will continue to do so. Hopefully, the Stillness Touch Legacy Practitioners will do the same in the future.

That same direct emanation I received from Dr. Sutherland sparked the living flame of biodynamics in Dr. Ruby Day, Dr. Rollin Becker, Dr. Anne Wales, Dr. Robert Fulford, Dr. Jacques Andreva Duval, Dr. James Jealous, Dr. Zachary Comeaux, Dr. Bernard Darraillans, and so many other cranial osteopaths who carry the torch of a non-doing biodynamics. These practitioners consciously choose to carry Dr. Sutherland’s impulse as though it is a precious living being that they each keep alive by transmitting his non-doing principles in their own way.

These osteopaths know that a practitioner is not the doer, because they have directly experienced how the potency moves the practitioner's attention and hands during a session - this is the essence of Sutherland's osteopathic biodynamics. 

When Offering Non Doing Touch, it is not You, Rather It Is Stillness-as-Potency That Moves Your Hands

In actual practice, even though it may look like functional cranial work, the contacts that emerge during a biodynamic session do not arise as intentions from the practitioner. Rather, it is the unerring potency within that moves our hands.

One could characterize this as 'non-doing doing' or stillness moving. This is opposite to what occurs when a practitioner is the doer: they feel with their hands the nervous system and apply dozens of efferent techniques, or intentions, to treat a client's symptoms. This is not a criticism, it is a fact.

In contrast to functional work, osteopathic biodynamic practitioners use no efferent outside force; instead they trust the potency of the tide to do everything.

Biodynamic means the movement of life. It is a subtle force that will disappear the moment a practitioner applies the slightest degree of efference, objectification, intention, naming, feeling with the hands the anatomy and the nervous system, or makes suggestions to clients, and uses visualization.

Primary respiration is omniscient, and it will disappear from our consciousness the moment we use efference to orient our attention outward and use the hands to feel the nervous system, anatomy, to establish a relational field, or to treat.

When awareness moves outward, it repels us from the potency within; this is how we can bypass and avoid a direct inner contact with potency and the Breath of Life.

Then, an empty void fills the recipient with inertia, and that tempts us to enter deeper into the client’s subtle body to name, treat, or do something to help them, or, we help the Breath of Life. 

All these efferent activities collapse our inner contact with the whole-body breathing field of primary respiration.

According to biodynamic osteopathy, efference leaves behind an inertial field of false fulcra that are bereft of life 

When an empty void of inertia floods a recipient's subtle body, the practitioner may feel a need to fill that void by accessing the nervous system and the anatomy, naming, manipulating by intention, establishing a relational field, creating space, visualizing primary respiration or the midline, applying intentions, managing trauma, shifting into particular tides or zones, and on and on it goes (See Stillness Touch Ch. 3) Also, review this CHART.

The empty void of stillness is misused by the ego to bypass the living potency, which leaves a practitioner bereft of contact with the Breath of Life.

Efferent practices project our awareness out, leaving us several steps removed from a direct living contact with the invisible potency that creates the body.

Potency is prior to anatomy and the nervous system.
Practicing efference is a strategy the ego uses to bypass and avoid our contact with the potency.

If the living field of primary respiration is not present inside your practitioner neutral, the subsequent inner void will collapse the whole-body breathing field in your recipient. The result is a practitioner will transmit the empty void (that is bereft of the motion of life) into the recipient. While inside this empty void, a practitioner may unconsciously lay down additional efferent tracks of inertia inside the recipient's subtle body; these 'false fulcra' are filled with inertial patterns.

This may be confusing to a practitioner not trained in biodynamic osteopathy, and they mistake the inertial void for living stillness, or, they feel that the tracks of false fulcra are the inherent treatment plan. Repeatedly creating false fulcra inside a client’s system instills doubt and distrust in the boundless power of a non-doing biodynamics.

Although baffling, because it runs counter to Sutherland's teachings, working in their vacuum of shadow biodynamics has motivated the BCST international organization to add more efferent treatment methods than ever.

Hundreds of BCST graduate practitioners have told me personally that they feel disheartened after they realize what it means when Dr. Sutherland says ‘BE STILL.’

This may be particularly painful after you experience the fruits of 'being still' when it is then juxtaposed with how much doing a BCST practitioner is taught.

A practitioner who is efferent is too busy dealing with inertia and navigating trauma
to enjoy living contact with the Breath of Life, despite deeply longing for it.

Subsequently, over the last two decades, thousands of BCST graduates, teachers, and owners of BCST Schools have taken my Dynamic Stillness School's classes, despite that the BCST organizations boycott my work and books.

These brave practitioners think for themselves and have courage. Why courage? Because a BCST practitioner has to buck the systemic collusion, as well as give up all the efferent functional methods that they learned from their BCST teachers.

It seems like a big sacrifice, yet every practitioner who has the courage to Be Still is rewarded with a living contact with the potency that emanates the whole-body expressions of primary respiration. Then, by applying the inner-body practices I teach, these practitioners can offer biodynamic sessions the way that Dr. Sutherland taught us. If living contact with the potency and the tides interests you, ponder this:

Do you want to feel nervous system's inertial forces of death,
or yield your ego to Pure Breath of Love that made the body?

The nervous system projects a virtual empty void of inertia that is made of lifeless digital patterns, which create a permanent holographic record of ones past history. The nervous system expresses this hologram as cranial wave patterns in the tissues - biography becomes biology. In contrast, the Breath of Life emanates fractals out of the potency of the full void of Dynamic Stillness, the source potency that creates the body.

From Stillness, there emanates a Dynamism of the Divine Feminine Will, a Power that manifests all of creation. In Kashmir Shaivism this is called the Spanda.

That is why you inwardly repose in Dynamic Stillness.
You can then realize Dynamic Stillness if you practice what Dr. William and Adah Sutherland advised:

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

'Be Still' means that we cease all efference.

Again, Be Still means you do not use your hands to feel for motions or tides, to evaluate the nervous system or the anatomy, you do not enter your recipient's subtle body or listen to the cranial wave, or seek contact with tidal motions, and you do not intend techniques or project your attention outward to the horizon to visualize and connect with primary respiration 'out there.' Sutherland said that we contact the indwelling potency realize primary respiration as an expression within the body. Here, Michael Shea demonstrates a contact and the practice of visualizing Primary Respiration as an outside force: BCST Contact Demonstration

How is Stillness Touch Different from BCST in and Actual Practice?

During a Stillness Touch session, a practitioner reposes inwardly a disposition of non-doing and not-knowing and waits in nothing for nothing for as long as it takes. This will lead to neutral, as a whole body stillness, which is the essential prerequisite for realizing a living embodied contact with the potency that emanates the whole-body primary respiration, weather it is expressed as the fluid tide or long tide. The tides emanate from Dynamic Stillness. When you realize this infinite stillness it is the fulcrum that places you in a direct contact with the post-biodynamic non-tidal domain of consciousness that we call Pure Breath of Love.

Again, if you want to practice biodynamics the way that Dr. Sutherland instructed his inner circle osteopaths, you do not use your hands to feel anatomy or evaluate the nervous system for trauma, and do not visualize primary respiration or look for tides 'out there.' Further, you do not engage in conversation skills with your client, you do not establish a relational field with them, create space, manage trauma, nor do you seek neutral, midlines, or tides, etc. In other words, do not add any outside force even by intention to heal when touching your recipient. This chart depicts the Practitioner disposition of neutral as compared to not being in neutral while touching which amounts to Practitioner Ethical Misconduct:

Taylor's Chart: Practitioner Neutral

Furthermore, we do not look for or treat symptoms, such as attempting to relieve the neurological effects of trauma. Also, we do not use a treatment protocol, nor harbor any agenda, or goal. Instead, the essence of Dr. Sutherland's biodynamic cranial practice is:

"Trust the tide in its unerring potency" while maintaining the disposition of "Be Still And Know I AM."

Any practitioner activity other than Be Still is NOT Sutherland's osteopathic biodynamics

Sutherland suggests that we practice touch until we can fully embody what he and his wife Adah meant by “Be Still And Know I AM.” Their epitaph is pre-meditated conscious advice that is permanently etched on their two headstones in a graveyard on Asilomar Blvd. in Point Pinos by the lighthouse in Pacific Grove, California.

When you practice the touch the Sutherland's taught to his inner circle legacy osteopaths - even from the beyond after their last breath - it is a biodynamic practice that ignites the evolution of consciousness in any practitioner who is willing to heed their advice.

'I Have No Contact With The Tides' 

Here’s what a BCST teacher wrote after participating in a Stillness Touch post-biodynamic class:

“You have brought us the illuminated essence of biodynamics. So many BCST practitioners are ready because they have felt the potential of the evolutionary work, but no one teaches the deepest layers except your Dynamic Stillness School. It must have been arduous for you all these years, given that the BCST schools are against your teachings. Unfortunately for them, not every BCST practitioner is ready to accept the evolutionary path. I can imagine how many BCST teachers, and the therapists trained by them, must be upset that their therapeutic concepts will have to come crashing down in order to practice the Sutherland-inspired Stillness Touch.”

The above quote sums up the tragedy that I to have witnessed in my Stillness Touch post-biodynamic Master Classes. I've seen too many BCST graduates who have no direct experience of the unerring potency, and they do not enjoy inner-body contact with the living whole-body breathing inside their body. Unfortunately, according to the above BCST teacher, the BCST School's International Curriculum teaches a virtual biodynamics. Why virtual? Because their 'contact' with primary respiration is in their minds as a virtual, conceptual, shadow biodynamics that lacks experience of Sutherland's non-doing biodynamic tides as states of consciousness. Sutherland warned us about possessing shadow knowledge in place of experience. This insight unveils a tragic secret: 

Efferent, doing-to practices taught in the BCST curriculum 
 fosters the death of biodynamics outside of osteopathy

In a shadow biodynamics, neither the BCST practitioner nor the client realizes a living inner-body contact with the forces of life that make the body. Every BCST practitioner I have met in my classes are sincere in their desire to practice biodynamics as taught by Dr. Sutherland. Practitioners long to learn the biodynamics that Sutherland taught from the disposition of “Be Still And Know I AM.”

If that interests you, the Dynamic Stillness School openly welcomes you.

If you are mature and open to unlearning, we are happy to un-train any BCST practitioner
who desires to practice a living biodynamics the way that Dr. Sutherland intended.

Be Still means Non-doing, No Efference, and Not Knowing
Which Is The Essence Of Dr. Sutherland’s Biodynamics

One renowned BCST teacher and author confessed his ignorance of Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamics by asking on of my teachers 
“Charles just hangs out in Dynamic Stillness, why can’t he help the Breath of Life out?”

Here is the BCST teacher's unconscious confession:
"By Helping the Breath of Life, my ego thinks it ca be the intermediary between God and the recipient"

"Charles, why don't you help the Breath of Life out?" My answer mirrors what Dr. Becker said ‘the highest known element does not need my help.’ Instead of helping the Breath of Life, what did Becker teach us? Abide in stillness. The moment the whole-body stillness of neutral emerges inside him during a session, Becker would take his hands off his patient. He knew that the instant whole-body stillness of neutral arrived, his participation is no longer necessary. Why? Because in neutral, the Breath of Life that made the body is actively present in the recipient, so he lets that be in charge of the session. Becker characterized neutral as the moment the practitioner and patient’s ego has yielded to the Breath of Life and the nervous system ceases controlling the body. In neutral, the body is under the guidance of the Breath of Life. 

Becker emphasizes that a biodynamic session begins when the will of the practitioner yields to the Divine Will

It is obvious that Becker trusts the unerring potency of the tide, because he directly experienced how the Breath of Life does all the healing in his patients. In subsequent follow-up sessions, Becker witnessed the patient's progress and he gained an appreciation of the power of the potency of whole-body primary respiration, which he called “life in motion.” Becker walked the talk of his teacher Dr. Sutherland who taught him to get away as far as you can from the physical senses, do not orient to the cranial wave, no motion testing, do not apply outside force, trust the tide, let the unerring potency be the guiding force. How do we practice it?  'Be Still And Know I AM.'

"Helping the Breath of Life out" is opposite to surrendering my ego to the unerring potency that made the body.

Dr. Becker did not treat his patients, he did not orient to their nervous system, nor did he participate in trauma management. Becker did not mix the three types of cranial together. Instead, he would dwell inwardly in stillness in a non-doing neutral that naturally synchronized his attention with the whole-body breaths of primary respiration, which are the forces of life that do all the healing.

Using your hands to feel the nervous system, anatomy, tidal motions, or to resolve trauma
is not part of an osteopathic biodynamic practice

Do Not Use Any Efference

In one of my Stillness Touch post-biodynamic classes, a seasoned BCST graduate practitioner asked “can’t I use a little bit of efference to treat my client?” I said “The use of efference is fine if you do not want a living contact with the Breath of Life.”

Functional cranial work is a beautiful practice

However, it is not until you can ‘be still’ that you ‘know’ the invisible unerring potency that made the body, which characterizes Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamics. Do you want to enjoy a living contact with the whole-body expressions of the Breath of Life? Then cease all efferent practices because they by-pass and block your contact with the unerring potency of the Breath of Life inside you. And, do not mix the types of cranial practices during a session. Why? Because mixing contaminates the potency and weakens it, which also opposes Sutherland's non-doing, non-efferent, biodynamic principles.

Without an actual body-felt contact with primary respiration “be still” is an empty phrase

It angers some BCST practitioners when I suggest that if they want to learn biodynamics the way that Sutherland taught it, then do not take courses with teachers who are certified by the BCST organizations. To understand why I make such a radical assertion, let's look as osteopathic cranial history and see what it reveals. 

Cranial Osteopathic History (Also, if you are interested, you can click to read: Dynamic Stillness School History)

Dr. Sutherland publicly characterized his non-doing principle in the preface to his 1948 edition of Cranial Bowl. Sutherland wrote

“allowing the physiological functioning within to manifest its unerring potency, rather than the application of blind force from without.”

Then, after he moved to Pacific Grove, California, Sutherland was emphatic about practicing biodynamics in an utterly non-doing manner: no testing the spheno-basilar joint for lesion patterns and do not add any outside force.

The practice of this non-doing touch was so unconventional that even Sutherland called it ‘uncanny.’ Before going public with his non-doing principles of touch, Dr. Sutherland orally transmitted his biodynamic impulse to his small inner circle of about 15 legacy practitioners. Here is the essence of Dr. Sutherland’s oral instructions to his legacy practitioners who have faithfully carried on Sutherland's impulse:

when you can be still, you naturally synchronize with whole-body primary respiration within you, which is an expression of the Breath of Life. After he realized the boundless power of the Breath of Life to heal, Dr. Sutherland never again suggested in any way that we use the hands to feel the nervous system, anatomy, or intend cranial techniques. No longer did he treat symptoms, or mix the three types of cranial work - biomechanical, functional, and biodynamic (Read Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, p.166 the original Rudra Press edition).

Franklyn Sills, who was trained in Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy, founded craniosacral biodynamics or biodynamic craniosacral therapy. He says he discovered BCST even though Dr. Sutherland discovered, created, and developed all three cranial types beginning at the turn of the century. To this day, Sutherland remains the source of all cranial practices that exist. Cranial osteopathy precisely defined each type of cranial work based on Dr. Sutherland's original work. Again, these definitions are in Stillness Chapter 3. You can read the osteopathic sources yourself by researching the osteopathic references in Stillness to the books, articles, and page numbers to see for yourself.

If you are not aware of the definition of biodynamics 
that Dr. Sutherland taught to his inner circle of osteopaths 
it is because your BCST training did not teach his principles  
which have existed for seven decades in the professional licensed osteopathic cranial field  

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The BCST national organizations only pay lip service to Dr. Sutherland’s non-doing, non-efferent principles by using his biodynamic terms against the wishes of the biodynamic osteopaths. You can review the international 2-year BCST curriculum at the end of this blog to see how obvious it is that students are taught biodynamics in the opposite way that Dr. Sutherland taught his biodynamics to his inner circle osteopaths. Here is a letter I received that illuminates the confusion that the BCST curriculum creates when functional is called biodynamic:

“Dear Charles,

What confuses me is how you say that biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST) is a medical model. In my experience, any biodynamic teacher worth their weight in salt is going to practice a non-intervention, non-medical therapy that is absolutely aligned with the principles of evolution you write about. So it's confusing, especially to the public, who practitioners like me are serving, to label it medical model.”

As part of my response to this sincere BCST practitioner, I sent a copy of the BCST sanctioned 2-year curriculum (See the end of the blog for the curriculum) and here is what he wrote after reading it:

“It's clear after looking at the BCST curriculum you sent me that it is tissue oriented, and feeling into it, I would have to guess that it maybe has 5-10% "in common" with the biodynamic teachings I've received, although that might be generous. The curriculum you sent helps me to be grateful, and appreciate what I've been given. My teacher offers true non-doing biodynamic principles, and he begins his teaching with the doorway of the neutral. It is amazing to me how the BCST curriculum jumps into some elements on day one that, in my opinion, shouldn't even be brought up until there is the cultivation of a strong practitioner neutral and the development of afferent consciousness. And it is even a little horrifying to me that they would jump into working on infants as part of the core curriculum, even if at the end. Yikes! The whole curriculum seems resonant with Sills' books, which are useful resources. However, I honestly have a hard time reading them and most other BCST texts and I am super grateful that I've had the guidance to be able to tell when the writings are self-contradicting and muddled with conflicting principles. What a mess for unsuspecting students trying to figure it out without a real guide!”

---

The above BCST practitioner perfectly characterizes the tragic fact that is kept a secret:
First, the BCST curriculum is functional cranial. Second, BCST sanctioned practices prevent the unerring potency and the tides of primary respiration from emerging in your awareness.

This explains why most BCST practitioners do not enjoy a living embodied contact with primary respiration.
How to tell if you are in a virtual biodynamic practice?
You are unable to clearly characterize your sensual tidal experiences without using the jargon biodynamic terms.

---

An example of this BCST secret occurred in Italy in 2013 when I was invited to teach a Stillness Touch post-biodynamic class. All 64 students were BCST graduate practitioners. These "biodynamic" practitioners confessed in the class during circle time that they had never experienced a living embodied contact with primary respiration. This was because their Italian BCST teacher taught them to employ 12 efferent steps as part of his virtual biodynamic training. He compiled these 12-steps into a chart that you put on your wall so that while treating clients you can apply the 12-step protocol during a session. The teacher was proud of his chart. His practitioners were taught to orient to the nervous system, feel the anatomy, evaluate the nervous system, feel for trauma snd lesions, and on it goes. Whereas by contrast, Sutherland's biodynamics does not involve efferently working with clients. Let us examine why. But first, review this Chart again to see some of the efferent steps that the Italian teacher taught his students.

The cranial wave is a digital record of the past, it is not a living fractal tide in the present

The cranial wave (CW) is a compensatory neurological reaction to stress. The CW rate changes based on the amount of stress that is present. CW expresses digital, electro-charged, automatic repeating patterns that create a holographic record of your past. This permanent record of your history is etched in the ground substance and tissues that affects all cellular function throughout the body. CW, therefore, is a record of your biography (history) that is frozen in time inside an inertial empty void that is locked in your tissues as cranial wave patterns.

By contrast, the fluid and long tide is living, and it can be sensed as a whole-body breathing of potency as fractal expressions of the Breath of Life that emanate out of Dynamic Stillness in NOW. Indigenous people unexposed to modern life do not express the cranial wave, claims James Jealous. But for argument’s sake you might ask “But we are in the modern world and people have cranial waves, don't they? Why can’t I feel for the nervous system lesions and intend in the cranial wave?”

Practicing that way is fine, yet it is not biodynamic.

Why do I say it is not biodynamic? First, the cranial wave, that Sutherland coined the cranial rhythmic impulse, is a neurological motion that constantly modulates its rate and quality in response to the degree of stress present. The cranial wave is not a whole-body fractal tide; it is a local digital reaction to stress that etches a holographic digital signature recording of an event into the tissues. The breathing fractals of life are modified by the nervous system’s reaction to stress - this changes tides to the cranial wave.

Second, the cranial wave radiates electro-charged digital signals that are so crude that it recoils the delicate fractal expressions of the breathing tides in the affected areas of the body. Nervous system activity collapses the whole-body field of primary respiration, which leaves an empty void inside the client’s subtle body.

Third, the canceled fractals leave behind digital tracks inside client’s subtle body that are laid in the ground substance. These tracks are known in biodynamic osteopathy as false fulcra, which are electro-charged, digital, inertial patterns that turn the ground substance from liquid to a gel. The motion inside gel discharge digital patterns that create cellular dysfunction and eventually symptoms and disease arise.

Finally, and most importantly, if you wait in a non-doing whole-body stillness as neutral - without expecting cranial wave patterns or tides - the cranial wave will not appear. Instead, the neutral deepens, as a whole body stillness emerges, out of which primary respiration breathes the fractal forces of life body-wide.

Therefore, if you feel the nervous system and expect the cranial wave or biodynamic tides to appear, or, if you visualize primary respiration as an outside force, that is an efferent activity which lays down inertial tracks of false fulcra inside the client. Practitioner efference adds to the fossilized record of the past, which is already entombed in the gelled ground substance and armored tissues. The result is increased dysfunction, more symptoms, and the potential for disease, all of which accelerates the onset of death.

The cranial wave is a holographic record of our past biographical events that dwell in an inertial empty void. 
Motion of the past is not the living motion present

To contact primary respiration in the living present, be still and wait within ... without expecting any motions; this includes not expecting tides or visualizing primary respiration. When neutral arrives as a whole body stillness, a whole-body primary respiration then emerges. There are two tidal expressions in the biodynamic field: the first is the fluid tide, and the next expression is a vast luminous global breathing called the long tide.

"Mid-tide" Is A Contrived, Misleading, Made-up Term, Having No Connection To Sutherland's Biodynamics

Inexplicably, BCST changed Dr. Sutherland's original term fluid tide to mid-tide? Fluid tide, coined by Sutherland, is the first biodynamic tidal expression of primary respiration that Sutherland discovered. "Mid-tide” or middle tide, implies that there is a tide before mid-tide. Is there a beginning-tide, a mid-tide, and an end-tide? But that would imply that the cranial wave is the beginning-tide, but the cranial wave is not a tidal expression. Rather, cranial wave is a local, pre-biodynamic digital expression of nervous system reactivity to stress. Can you appreciate that the term 'mid-tide' confuses things? Why would anyone change Sutherland's original term fluid tide and make up a new non-sensical term mid-tide? 

Expectation Is Efferent

When you expect any motions - the cranial wave, the tides, or the cessation of motion as Dynamic Stillness - that is an efferent practice, which creates false fulcra. Inertia is by definition an anti-life force - a death force that turns the ground substance from a liquid to a gel. When gelled, the ground substance emits digital static, as electro-charged cranial wave patterns that cannot transmit the entire Template of the Whole, which emanates from long tide as fractal instructions from the potency of the Breath of Life to the cells. Only a liquid protoplasm ground substance can accurately convey healthy fractal tidal functions that emanate from the whole body as primary respiration to all the cells. ANY expectation of motion or anticipation of stillness is efferent, and efference depletes the potency, which in turn, diminishes cellular vitality that leads to symptoms, which become disease ... death draws that much closer toward us. This is why Sutherland told us to trust the unerring potency of the tide.

Here is a letter that I received from a biodynamic cranial osteopath who verifies that they were taught zero efference:

“I was in a group of post-graduate osteopaths in Holland and Belgium between 2003-2011 lead by Dr. Jealous. From day one he made it very clear that transmutation, disengagement, synchronization, and augmentation are all effects of the Breath of Life, primary respiration, through neutral. We augment by synchronizing with neutral. What you teach is not different from what he has taught us, and it is in perfect alignment with the later teachings of Sutherland: no forces from outside by the practitioner are used whatsoever!”

It’s your choice how you practice biodynamic cranial work. However, be honest and do not tell your clients that you offer biodynamic sessions when they are functional. If you deceive your clients, their subtle body knows it, and it perpetuates the post-truth cultural movement on behalf of the masses that we are mired in today. Haven't we had enough of that?

Just because the BCST international organization use the word biodynamic to characterize their efferent principles and functional practices does not mean it is teaching a biodynamic, non-doing practice in the way that Dr. Sutherland taught it. Are you at all interested in Sutherland's original biodynamics?

When you practice Sutherland’s non-doing biodynamics, it evolves your consciousness, which requires that you enjoy an authentic, embodied contact with the unerring potency and the living whole-body breathing tides of primary respiration.

An embodied contact with the unerring potency and the tides means you have to give up every form of efferent by-pass that impedes contact with the potency.

If you want to offer biodynamic cranial in the way that Dr. Sutherland taught his Legacy Practitioners, you give up all efference.

The following impediments are taught in the curriculum of biodynamic schools - outside of osteopathy - and all of these methods are defined by osteopaths as efferent:

The Efferent Ways Practitioners Bypass Direct Embodied Contact with the Potency 

* Objectification, efference, enquiry into tides, using stillness as bypass, the practice of absolutism, expectation, visualizing, intention, treating.

* Practitioner establishes a relational field.

* Naming tides, or describing to a recipient what is occurring in them during a session.

* Feeling with the hands: be it to evaluate the nervous system for trauma or feel the anatomy as if they are separate parts, such as bones, dura, CSF, nervous system, muscles, organs, fascia, spine, diaphragms, midline, fulcra, tides, primary respiration, Dynamic Stillness, etc.

* Feeling the nervous system and anatomy to evaluate with the hands the functioning of each part and then treating it.

* Treating symptoms by using techniques as intentions to heal.

* Holding an idea of a motion - be it pre-biodynamic cranial wave, biodynamic tidal motions, or the post-biodynamic pulse of love.

* Orientating to anything outside the practitioner's inner body space during a session, such as Primary Respiration.

* Feeling for neutral and visualizing tides, primary respiration, midlines, fulcra.

* Shifting into a particular tide at will (zones).

* Entering the client’s inner subtle body space - the craniosacral system - to look for inertia, cranial wave patterns, tides, still points, midline, fulcra, the status of the nervous system, anatomy, trauma, etc.

* Treating an anatomical compartment of the body.

* Suggesting stillpoints to a client internally or verbally.

* Intending cranial techniques to balance inertial patterns.

* Negotiating space or creating 'zones.'

* Conversation skills during a session, asking permission each time you make a contact, and getting permission to remove that contact, or telling a client what you feel in them, such as the presence of potency, the tides, the midline, lesions, activities, states, stillness, etc.

* Using a treatment sequence during a session.

* Trauma management, be it pre-birth, birth, or present life trauma. Trauma is organized by the central nervous system in the brain stem, limbic system, hormonal system as the stress fight or flight regulation system. Trauma management orients to the fight, flight, freeze response, as well as to shock, shutdown, dissociation, titration, soothing the ego, etc,. As such, trauma management is a neurological, pre-biodynamic cranial wave offering, which is a fine medical model modality. But it is NOT biodynamic. Trauma management is not taught to DO's during their 9-year biodynamic training, except that Jealous teaches that it has no place in biodynamics. The same goes with unwinding: DO's only know what it is because Jealous talks about it in his biodynamic course: unwinding it is a neurological recoil to the potency.

In my 1922 Master Class in Prague, here is what I witnessed with the students of a "biodynamic" cranial teacher who owns her own school:

* Practitioners were unwinding on the table  

When I asked about it, I learned that the teacher teaches her practitioners this: Four practitioners unwind one practitioner on the table to navigate them through their birth canal to realize their second birth. 

* Engaged in a Guru-disciple co-dependent dynamic with their cranial teacher. 

* Diminished the importance of shadow work and exalted virtual "bliss, light and love." 

*Disdain for Pure Breath of Love.

A student in a BCST training from a Swiss teacher told me what they learned:

*During biodynamic sessions, we make three different contacts on the client's feet while we ask the client which feels better to them.

*The Swiss teacher goes ballistic when students mention post-biodynamics.

All functions that protect us from trauma come from the ego, the nervous system, and the cranial wave

Here Is A View On The Resolution of Trauma
by Catherine Fehrmann, MD

"Many of us don't have major episodic trauma, but rather developmental trauma from childhood as the repetitive lack of needs being met with something aggressive or shaming coming in throughout the phases of development. This includes early infancy attachment wounds. These patterns live in the nervous system and determine the tone of physiology and psyche. These patterns also reflect our karmic patterns and our habitual conditioning.

So, rather than us needing to take something in (from out there) to heal, we need to work with the obscurations, be it trauma, bugs, toxins, or habitual conditioning to access our true nature (Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, etc.).

Obstacles are not negative things to be eliminated. They are the source of our awakening. In Vajrayana Buddhism, the "demon" is fed and an encumbered pattern transforms into a Wisdom Dakini. Not conceptually, but energetically, in the body.”

Following the Parts Without Sensing the Whole

Let's suppose you do not expect cranial wave, you are not orienting to it, nor are you being guided by or intending in the cranial wave. Instead, you wait within in stillness in non-doing. Neutral arrives as a whole body stillness and the fluid tide emerges. Your attention moves with the fluid drive and the motion that is present. So far so good, however, if you are not also synchronized with the whole-body fluid flow or the luminous global excursions of primary respiration, you can fall into the trap of unconsciously creating inertial motion that leaves false fulcra in the client!

So even amid an authentic biodynamic cranial practice, if you have no contact with the whole-body breathing of primary respiration you are only tracking the footprints of inertial motion, which in and of itself does not reveal the living unerring potency of the tides as a presence that expresses the forces of life, health, and wholeness throughout the whole body.

Potency is a subtle omniscient substance, a living ‘fluid within a fluid’ and to sense potency you must be still and wait, … for nothing ... then, by grace, your attention will become soft, unfocused, unfixed, and free, and the potency of life may reveal itself to you and become your guide and move your attention.

Here, in neutral, your free attention is moved by the potency of the Breath of Life, which expresses through the midline and distributes as the whole-body motion of life that brings coherence and healthy function to all systems throughout the client’s entire body.

You sense primary respiration as living fractal three-dimensional motions that simultaneously well up the vertical midline and breathe horizontally. Although primary respiration contains the fluid drive, it is distinct. By analogy, fluid drive moves like a small current inside the pond of primary respiration. Primary respiration is the potency of the whole field that invisibly shifts the fluid drive from point to point in the client’s subtle body. If the fluid drive dwells in particular local area, this is the motion present, that resolves specific inertial motions, or fluid lesions, in the body.

By contrast, an inertial motion is, by definition, an automatically repeating pattern, which drains the life force from the body. The potency of primary respiration can restore the forces of life by transmuting inertial patterns back to their original ever-changing fractal state. In the body, the process of transmutation liquefies the gelled ground substance and returns it to a functioning whole body fluid (See Ground Substance in the Appendix of Stillness).

The following analogy points to this indescribable living fractal process. The path of a fish as it moves around in an aquarium is the fluid drive. The fish’s particular undulating bodily motility is the motion present, and the tidal motion of the entire fish tank is primary respiration. If you only focus on the fish’s journey in the tank (fluid drive) or on its specific bodily gestures (motion present).

As interesting as it may be, without the larger perspective that simultaneously includes all aspects - the effects that the tidal forces have on the entire fish tank, the path of the fish, and its body - you lose the perspective that reveals why the fish is behaving as it does, and why it is heading where it is—the inherent treatment plan.

Have The Courage To BE STILL

We are sincere practitioners and want to help the little fish, to nudge it a bit, to direct it along its path, and we long to fix its bodily lesion patterns that cause it suffering - we are compassionate and we think we know how to help. However, if the highest known element that made the body is present, she does not need our help. 

Do we have the courage and can be still and wait ... for nothing? If we do, we enter what Dr. Jealous calls the mysterious metabolic fields of life, which move in a perpetual fractal flow in synchrony with primary respiration. These fractal motions express life, contain the patterns of health, and are not predictable. Since this motion of life contains the ancient intelligence in all living organisms, certainly you would agree that the Breath of Life is capable of resolving the dilemma of the fish without our generous, yet misguided, assistance?

Again, you must give up objectifying and all efferent methods to practice biodynamic cranial for the evolution of consciousness.

If you offer cranial sessions for symptom relief, fine, tell the client that your work is for the relief of symptoms, no big deal. But do not call that a biodynamic practice. Anytime we tell a client they are receiving biodynamics we are treating them for symptom relief, it betrays our fundamental oath of 'do no harm.'

Practitioners are innocent when trained to practice BCST this way.

The Proof is in the Pudding

This letter was written to me by a BSCT assistant teacher who articulates what I am pointing to:

“Dear Charles,

I will be a participant in your training next week. I have many questions about biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST). I have taken the two-year certification training that is approved by the Biodynamic Association of North America based on the work of Franklin Sills; I also took some training with Michael Shea. I paid a good deal of hard-earned money from teaching and practicing massage and bodywork for the last thirty-five years. I am feeling disenchanted. 

I read your book Stillness and felt a resonance with your approach, so I signed up for the workshop. After two years of biodynamic study, one year of practice, plus presently being the teaching assistant for my original teacher in her newest training, I am not sure if I am feeling a tide, able to observe a fulcrum, or know what to do when I "think" I “see” one.”

And here's my answer:

“Dear _______,

Thank you for writing so candidly. I wish I could say that your situation is unique. However, it is common, given the training you received, that you are not sensing the whole body breathing tides.

I regularly receive letters just like yours that express your exact frustrations. So, unfortunately, it is not surprising.

If you practice a medical-model treatment orientation, which is offered as the BCST approved curriculum, then actually sensing the tidal expressions Breath of Life is impossible. There’s too much interference amid that degree of objectification, efference, doing to, and protocol-based session stages that BCST practitioners are trained to offer clients.”

Tough Love: Know Thou Thyself

Tough love is based on reality, not on post-truth assumptions. Reality may feel too brutal to bear if your ego is incapable of letting you feel discomfort. Perhaps you have an open mind and you realize that I am not putting down other cranial methods and you understand that I am reporting the facts. But culture no longer respects facts, that's a problem.

Perhaps though, you have the courage to answer the following questions with respect to your practice of BCST functional methods? If so, ask yourself:

“Am I really connected inside my body to the living potency of the whole-body and global excursions of the Breath of Life, or is it in my mind?”

“With strong inner conviction - without any doubt - do I actually sense the whole-body expressions of the fluid tide, the luminous global excursions of long tide, or infinite Dynamic Stillness, inside my body, or do I vaguely 'think’ I feel them?”

If, after my 2-year training in BCST, do I feel without any doubt, that I enjoy an embodied contact with the unerring potency and the whole body breathing and global breathing tides ... with total confidence?

In not, you may feel heart-broken that you have not realized the neutral, the tides, or the Breath of Life after all that training, tons of money spent, and the years of time you spent to learn biodynamics.

Be honest, because it is not your fault: The training you received was created by and is the responsibility of the founders of BCST.

And now there are 45 or more sanctioned teachers of Craniosacral Biodynamics and Biodynamic Cranial Sacral Therapy (BCST) who all teach the same thing. Their international BCST curriculum has diminished Sutherland's biodynamics in the cranial field outside of osteopathy.

I say "outside of osteopathy" because cranial osteopaths have ferociously guarded Dr. Sutherland’s living biodynamics. They have fought against the tragic post-truth dilution of the so-called biodynamics that is perpetrated by the BCST international organizations.

It is beyond the scope of this piece to reveal in detail all the expressions of indignant rage that are aimed at the BCST organization on behalf of biodynamic osteopaths that I am privy to given that I have taught classes that are exclusively for biodynamic DO's. However, biodynamic osteopaths grimace whenever they even hear that the BCST training is called "biodynamic." They grimace because in truth, a BCST sanctioned practice grossly misrepresents Dr. Sutherland’s non-doing biodynamics.

BCST teaches the opposite principles - efference - when compared with non-efferent practice of 'Be Still' which characterizes Sutherland's non-doing biodynamic principle.

Some of the more ferocious biodynamic cranial osteopaths will not permit a BCST practitioner to come in and receive a paid session if they learn that they are a BCST practitioner. I know biodynamic DO's that do this.

One BCST practitioner told me that she spoke on the phone with James Jealous, who is a prominent biodynamic osteopath, author, and teacher. When she told him she was trained by Franklyn Sills, he started screaming at her, and then he hung up the phone mid-conversation.

I know a Canadian-trained osteopath who wrote an incredible book on the fulcrum that was prevented from being published by certain biodynamic osteopaths because Sills was quoted in it.

You may know BCST colleagues who have experienced this harsh treatment from the US biodynamic osteopaths.

However, the osteopaths are righteously furious because of the deceptive marketing tactics used by the BCST organization that betray Dr. Sutherland’s original biodynamic principles. Every drop of the biodynamic osteopaths' indignant rage is justified.

Death of Biodynamics Is Transmitted To Clients

This blog is not meant to criticize sincere and honest BCST practitioners.

You are innocent. You were trained to transmit efference that is responsible for the death of biodynamics. How does one transmit the death of biodynamics to clients, you ask?

When, during a session as a BCST practitioner, you “think” you feel a tide, when you are not actually sensing it inside your body. When you ‘think’ you feel a tide without deep conviction, it is because you are not a living embodied contact with whole-body primary respiration. The lack of conviction that leads you to ask 'is a tide really happening right now?' which also leaves you, as a practitioner, confused and full of doubt. Recall that Jung said a patients' subtle body is omniscient, so the client knows when we are full of doubt!

When a BCST practitioner gives a session, and in the slightest way expects a cranial wave or a tide, or feels the nervous system, or intends cranial wave patterns, or stillness, it forces the clients' experience, which create false fulcra. The presence of the cranial wave or a contrived tide, not only deprives your recipient of an actual embodied contact with the living whole-body breathing tides of the Breath of Life, also, the client is deprived of the Breath of Life’s evolutionary power.

When neither the practitioner nor recipient
has actual embodied contact with the living whole-body tidal expressions of the Breath of Life 
by definition that is not a biodynamic session.

Every year, hundreds of BCST practitioners are trained to unwittingly perpetuate the myth and they tell clients that they offer biodynamics.

Such a practitioner unwittingly reinforces this myth by applying ‘conversation skills’ that involve telling the client what is happening during a session: they name cranial wave lesion patterns, the tides, midlines, and suggest still points, etc.

The naming of biodynamic terms during a session are like powerful mantras that can mesmerize a client into believing the practitioner. However, a sensitive client will feel resentment about being told what they feel, especially when they know that the practitioner is making up what they 'think' is happening to the client who is not experiencing the living whole-body tides.

Facing this fact may feel harsh, yet this is the reality if you, as a practitioner, are efferent in a session. Efference is required if you use your hands, or feel anatomy, the nervous system, the cranial wave, or tides. There is no way on earth that a tide can be present amid the gross digital static of nervous system activity.

Be Still is the practice that invites the possibility for a tide to express in neutral

Perhaps you do not believe me?

Maybe you think I have an axe to grind, or because I have such a huge ego, that all I want to do is put-down a "competitor," or, I say these 'unfair' things to make myself look better?

In reality, I side with the osteopaths, I also am enraged when I witness Dr. Sutherland's precious transmission being destroyed.

Despite being boycotted for decades by all the biodynamic cranial sacral therapy schools internationally, the Dynamic Stillness School cannot keep up with all the earnest students who are hungry for a training that is based on Dr. Sutherland's non-doing principles. A good many are BCST graduates.

Each year, I receive with an open heart hundreds BCST graduates who choose to break out of their illusion of a shadow biodynamic practice that is perpetrated by BCST international organizations. These brave Souls take my Stillness Touch Master Classes. One BCST practitioner confessed recently that he kept it secret from his colleagues that he took my course! 

Don't believe me when I say that what BCST teaches promotes the Death of Biodynamics?

Read the BCST North America official definition of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, as I quote it directly from their website, which they removed from their site after I published this blog:

Do you want to practice Dr. Sutherland's biodynamics?

If yes, the first step is study the Dr. Sutherland inspired osteopathic definitions of the three types of cranial in Chapter 3 of  STILLNESS, or you can read the original osteopathic definitions in the provided references for yourself: Here is a synopsis:  CLICK OSTEOPATHIC DEFINITIONS: 3 Types Of Cranial

Next, try this experiment with sincerity and humility. Let your your client know that you are conducting some research.

Ask Your Client to 'Tell You the Truth'

Since you need the client to tell you the unedited truth, ask your client to promise to tell you the truth when you ask your questions. Once he or she agrees, ask your client “Do you experience in yourself what I am telling you is happening during my sessions?”

But you have to possess the courage to hear the truth, which means you ask your recipient the question from neutral. Remember, the client's subtle body is omniscient, so be sincere. Watch that your body language is neutral too, because clients are desperate to please their beloved and trusted practitioner, and they will hold back if there’s even a whiff of a sign that you do not want to hear the truth.

This blog is about the Death of a Biodynamics that Dr. Sutherland gave to us. Offering a living biodynamic session involves an actual embodied contact with the whole-body or global breathing of primary respiration, which is also experienced by the client.

It is impossible for a client to realize living contact with the tides when a practitioner is telling them what they are experiencing during a session, or, a when practitioner orients to the nervous system, expects, orients to, and intends in the cranial wave, and works with the nervous system’s reaction to trauma (functional work).

Again, I want to reemphasize that this is not your fault as a BCST practitioner: you were trained by BCST teachers.

Inside their powerful consensual group field of collusion, you were misled to ‘believe’ that you are feeling tides without having an actual embodied contact with them.

How is it possible to be deceived? Because the BCST teachers use biodynamic terms like mantras to invoke a virtual experiences of tides in the mind. BCST teachers and practitioners are trained to use words such as flow, shimmering, spraying up the midline, settling, stillness, mid-tide, long tide, Dynamic Stillness, fulcra, etc. that "tell" the students in a class or a client on the table what you think is happening to them during a session. For example, a BCST practitioner may tell you as a client “Shimmering light is spraying up your midline.” And perhaps that is supposed to mean that long tide is present. Or, “waves of mid-tide are moving to and fro in you.” This is supposed to indicate fluid tide. “There is a settling in you, would you like to take a pause and shift into stillness?”  BCST practitioners make these types of suggestions to their clients.

The misuse of mantric biodynamic phrases as suggestions to a client can mesmerize them. However, when the tides are a mental belief, that is not an indicator of the living presence of tides, or of Dynamic Stillness. Characterizing an actual body-felt tidal realization of the tides is more complex than naming by the use of mantric words like mid-tide, long tide, Dynamic Stillness, spraying, shimmering, settling, stillness, pause, etc.

Let’s characterize some of the aspects you experience if you are having an actual embodied contact with the tides.

How to verify if you are in a living embodied contact with the potency or the tides?

When a living whole-body breathing tide is actually present in your body, it is so powerful that you are left without any doubt. Why no doubt? Because actual contact with a tide is a potent living presence that alchemically transmutes and expands your consciousness and breathes it to an fro in tandem with the timing of the particular tide.

 Tides are sensed as overlapping expressions of consciousness in the body of the client and practitioner.

The powerful presence of a living tide that well and receed in your body cannot be created in your mind; tides are not delta brain waves, and tides cannot be shifted into at will, nor do tides manifest by naming or visualizing them during a session.

The living presence of fluid tide can only be considered to be present if several aspects arise at the same time. The long tide may be confirmed as a living presence if aspects of fluid tide are present and you also realize a shift in your consciousness from personal to transpersonal (See STILLNESS, Chapters 6-9 that characterize the fluid tide, long tide, Dynamic Stillness, and Pure Breath of Love).

You have to sense all the indicators of a tide simultaneously before assuming that a tide may be present. Otherwise, it is a figment of your imagination concocted by the thinking brain, and this fantasy is often amplified amplified in a consensual group field of collusion, as I noted in STILLNESS on page 41 in the class I took in Maui with Franklyn Sills.

I’ve heard BCST students say, “Oh, so and so (insert a teacher’s name), teaches from the long tide.” That is preposterous! No one can teach from the long tide by willing it into existence; the Breath of Life, the Divine Feminine is not subject to our will. And who told the student that?

Below are factors that must be present simultaneously before you can consider the presence of a living whole-body tidal expression of the Breath of Life.

Conditions to be met before you can verify that a biodynamic tide ‘may’ be present:

* The degree of depth and inclusiveness of the presence of stillness inside your whole body is clear.

* Stillness expands from the whole body, to global, and then, to infinite, to all domains at once as a paradoxical state of both/and.

* A particular tide expresses out of a specific depth of stillness.

* Whole-body primary respiration emanates from within whole-body stillness.

* The excursion of a particular tide originates inside the inner-body space of the midline, which conveys a state of consciousness. Tides co-breathe or suffuse the cells of whole body, and then it can expand beyond the body and approach the horizon of the known. Consciousness can spill over the horizon of the known into infinity (the unknown or the threshold of the abyss), and from infinity consciousness can return renewed to become all prior expressions of consciousness simultaneously. Nothing is left behind, it is all inclusive.

* The ebb and flow tempo (timing) of the breaths match a specific tidal rate that correlates with the fluid and long tide, or no rate at Dynamic Stillness. All rates can emerge at the same time in the paradoxical state of consciousness amid the pulse rate of the SA Node that emanates the Sacred Pulse.

* The presence of parts and the whole emerge simultaneously - both/and.

* Your awareness expands from the whole body into the infinite and then beyond yet, you are still embodied and can reference your midline of stillness within.

* You realize ever-expanding and more inclusive domains of consciousness.

* You inwardly sense the living qualities of consciousness that are inherent to each of the elements - earth water, air, fire, ether, which includes all elements at once.

* Your disposition spontaneously shifts with the expansion of your perceptual field of consciousness.

* Your perceptual field of consciousness evolves from the personal me, to the witness, to being witnessed, to transpersonal, to an infinite consciousness that is in contact with all that is, which includes both/and/and neither.

* Your inner realizations are specific to each enfoldment of consciousness.

* You realize extraordinary sensory, visual, auditory, and tactile experiences that merge within and integrate until your whole body becomes an organ of perception that transmutes and operates as one sacred sense that is known as Spiritual Touch.

* As Unwavering Presence, you can be with increasing degrees of intensity, intimacy, and paradox.

There are many more indicators in Stillness Chapters 6-9, and in the Appendix Charts.  

The above is what minimally must be present - at the same time - before we can assume that we are encountering a tide. Again, living tides are extremely complex; they do not appear in one dimension, or manifest by using a biodynamic term, or by thinking that they are present. You cannot think or imagine tides into existence by naming them like a mantra: a tide is not evoked by talking about it, naming it, and you cannot shift into a tide or any other state of primary respiration by visualization it, nor can you yield to Dynamic Stillness at any time, ... except as a virtual experience amid the empty void inside your mind, as fantasy, by which you create a virtual tide that exists only in a shadow biodynamics. 

Realizing Whole-body breathing tides are beyond the perceptual capacity of your brain
 only your heart perception can sense tides by a synchronized entrainment with them while you are in neutral.

Tides are subtle experiences of an invisible fluid within a fluid, yet at the same time, they are extremely powerful.

Actual embodied contact with the tides are realizations of states of consciousness that are so profound
that they can overtake you, and leave you with an overwhelming conviction and zero doubt of their living presence.

The Ego & Superego Co-opts Our Realizations

In case you think that my Dynamic Stillness School is immune to the Psychotic Core or shadow of the Beast read this: Click Here

As a caveat, the ego at any time during your evolution, can co-opt your realizations by collapsing your expanded state and reducing it to a less coherent one. 

Here is an example: a BCST graduate took my Kripalu Stillness Touch Lay Class. After the class, she wrote me to say "my body is now trembling with ecstasy. I feel a whole body erotic pulse of love and deep peace all at the same time. I mentioned this new realization to a woman who markets 'delta brainwave workshops.' The workshop promoter told me that I was experiencing delta brain waves and she convinced me to sign up for a training on delta brain waves." Off the BCST practitioner went into the digital virtual world of the nervous system to study delta waves. 

The next example occurred during a class for doulas, gynecologists, and midwives in Mexico. During one session exchange, a midwife's consciousness expanded into black infinity of Dynamic Stillness. After she reported the details of her realization to the group circle, an Italian male osteopath, without being invited to share his opinion, told her that her experience was the result of hyperventilation. He was not even in the room where the woman experienced the black stillness. When I asked the doula how that comment felt, she said 'it made me feel crazy and that my experience was not real.' 

The third example, and perhaps the most pathetic one, comes from my experience with the previously mentioned BCST teacher who graduated 64 students, yet none of them had experienced the tides. These students confessed one by one that they experienced for the first time the neutral, the tides, dynamic stillness and pure breath of love in my Stillness Touch class, he wrote me "How dare you embarrass me in front of all my students!" A classic demonstration that the teacher is under control of the Beast; also, he did not pay me for the class. Unfortunately for students, he is still teaching in Italy. 

The above examples exemplify how the ego and Superego, due to fear of the potency, can co-opt another's realized expanded and attempt to diminish their experience by reducing it to a physical explanation. This shadow epitomizes the difference between medical model 'biodynamic' cranial work, posing as biodynamics, that is based on the nervous system, the cranial wave, and materialism, versus an evolutionary biodynamics that is based on an embodied heart-perception of the Breath of Life.

An expanded state is not better than a less expanded one,
but it behooves us to understand that there are differences between them

As mentioned, here is the BCST curriculum downloaded from a school website:

After reading this Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) curriculum, answer for yourself the questions that I suggest at the end:

Course 1 – relational touch

Explores the phenomena of touch, space, perception and Tidal forms. Looks at the craniosacral biodynamic concept in depth.

• The relational field
• Holistic shift
• Unfoldments of the Breath of Life
• Perceptual Fields

Starting to look at:

• Stillness
• Resourcing
• Patterns of Experience
• Inherent treatment plan

You will learn how to:

• Establish a state of balanced awareness and practitioner fulcrums
• Be able to achieve a settled state within your own system
• Negotiate the contact space with your client
• Be able to sit back and listen to how your client’s system is
• Establish a clear relational field
• Notice expressions of primary respiration in your own body and others
• Recognize stillness in yourself and others
• Invite systemic stillness in your client's system
• Offer a wide perceptual field

Course 2 – the midline

Explores the spine as a unit of function and natural fulcrum for the whole body’s health as well as a conductor for the primary energies of the bodymind system. Looks at how natural adjustments take place around this axis.

• Embryological origins
• Original health and blueprint
• Primal midline
• Holistic spine
• The two poles - sacrum and occiput
• Spinal motion dynamics
• Fluid spine
• Key Joints

 Starting to look at:

• Natural states of balance
• Tissues, fluids and potency
• Body learning
• Recognising and treating trauma affects

 You will learn how to:

• Recognize how the health of the spine affects the health of the whole body
• Become familiar with recognizing expressions from the primal midline.
• Listen to the spine as a whole unit of function.
• Relate to the health of the spinal curves and the continuity through the spinal column helping you identify spinal joint patterns.
• Recognize the horizontal relationships of the spine, that is, facilitated segments and irritability in visceral and somatic nervous arcs and how to meet them therapeutically.
• Learning skills of assessing your client’s health.

 Course 3 – whole body dynamics

Explores the phenomenon of holism. When the body communicates and moves as a whole, there is access to greater health. Looks at continuity of tissues, whole body patterns and shapes. Also looks at reciprocal motion through the body.

• Connective tissue
• The Fascial web
• Reciprocal motion in membranes
• Horizontal and transverse structures
• Whole body whole field
• Resolving whole body patterns
• Trauma models
• Hip and Shoulder Joints as key nodes in Fascial Web
• Wide perceptual fields and the Long Tide
• Practice development: skills of assessment, diagnostic baselines, language for touch, recording treatments

 You will learn how to:

• Recognize how the health of the connective tissue matrix can affect the health of the whole system.
• Become familiar with assessing connective tissue health.
• Feel whole body patterns.
• Differentiate between longitudinal and transverse strains in the body - appreciating their convergence and inter-relationships.
• Recognize the qualities of dural membrane, being able to relate to the falx and tentorium as key structures for cranial health.
• Listen to the dural tube, observing dural glide as a way of assessing mobility.

 Course 4 – craniopelvic resonance

Explores primary respiration around cranial and pelvic bones. Looks at how the two poles of the midline mirror each other and create health when there is synchrony.

• Mobility and motility of cranial vault and pelvic bones
• Patterns of experience
• Specific resonances
• Bipolar contact
• Integration and resourcing
• Bony-membranous expressions
• Core-periphery resonance: midline and limbs
• Practice development: structure of a treatment session, treatment processes, safety in practice

 You will learn how to:

• Start to recognize how bones feel and express healthy motion
• Recognize how the health of the Reciprocal Tension Membranes affects the bones of the midline.
• Feel whole body patterns through craniopelvic resonance.
• Recognize how the falx and tentorium are key structures for healthy motion of the vault bones.
• Learn to listen to the dural tube as the core link between the pelvis and cranium.

 Course 5 – birth, ignition and original health

Explores how we develop in utero and the prenatal conditions for health. Craniosacral therapy can form a relationship to these early forces and facilitate a re-ordering of early affects. Looks at the process of birth and how the body shapes itself in response to this unique event.

• Pre-natal experience and the psyche
• Cranial base patterns and their resonance
• Whole body birth shapes and posture
• Understanding entrainment
• Ignition processes
• Attachment and bonding body affects
• Relating to the transpersonal
• Pacing and containment
• Practice development: developing trust in body intelligence, diagnosing health and assessing change

 You will learn how to:

• Work with the vault hold (Sutherland’s hold) and modified vault hold (Becker’s hold) to explore cranial distortions.
• Work with whole body shapes and patterns, exploring links to the cranial base and perinatal events.
• Orient to the cranium as a fluid membrane bag, appreciating the effect of birth stages in distorting the fluid filled bag that is the baby’s cranium
• Start to get a sense of compression, side-bending and torsion patterns.(physiological strain patterns of SBJ)
• Start to get a sense of lateral and vertical shear patterns of the cranial base (non-physiological strain patterns of SBJ)
• Deepen your appreciation of Long Tide through relationship to a ‘horizontal’ perceptual field
• Deepen skills around facilitating resources, presence and understanding pacing and containment

 Course 6 – visceral intelligence

Explores how organs feel and move - their embryological origins and primary health expressions. Looks at how treatment can change their physiology in a profound way.

• Visceral nervous system
• Fight or flight response and the brain stem
• Limbic system and emotions
• Individual organ expressions and clinical considerations
• The gut and umbilical affects
• Physiological affects of stillness
• Practice development: acute and chronic conditions, dealing with serious illness, relationship with short, medium and long term clients

 You will learn how to:

• Work precisely with the pericardium and its connection to other structures, especially the link between the cranial base and the diaphragm.
• Orient to the fluid nature of organs and the physiology of the body.
• Relate to the peritoneum as a visceral reciprocal tension membrane system.
• Sense of the gut tube and its particular, potency and movement expressions.
• Deepen your skills of listening from CRI and mid tide to body structures.
• Appreciate the integrative affect stillpoint has on organ physiology.
• Orient to body cavities as internal spaces.
• Understand the holistic nature of viscera, fluids, nervous system and potency.
• Deepen your skills of differentiation.

 Course 7 – neural matrix

Explores the fluid/electrical phenomenon of the central nervous system right at the heart of us. In particular how the brain feels and responds to light touch. Looks at how to relate to neural patterning to bring about smoother neural flow dynamics.

• The whole brain
• Neural flow
• Ventricles and deep potency reservoirs
• Blood and brain
• Brain states
• Nerve facilitation
• Psycho-neuroimmunoendocrine response
• Stillness in the central nervous system
• Sea of stillness
• Practice development: being a successful fulfilled craniosacral therapist, how to survive as a self employed therapist

 You will learn how to:

• Feel the ventricles of the brain and the deep potency that resides there. Following the potentization in the ventricles during stillpoint.
• Recognise how the health of the third ventricle can affect the health of the whole system.
• Become familiar with nervous tissue expressions of health. Learning to recognise states of balance and work with different parts of the brain, including the eye.
• Relate to venous sinuses. Assessing their freedom of movement and encouraging greater mobility and flow, potency and movement expressions.
• Identify brain stem activation and how to tone down the nervous system.
• Relate to the hypothalamus and pituitary and detect endocrine changes in the body.

 Course 8 – the facial complex

Explores the dynamics of the face and the special senses. Looks at how the face functions in relationship to the neurocranium, the whole body and a plethora of inter-relationships. Particularly looks at the pivotal relationship of the jaw and throat to the whole body and how it is the fulcrum for powerful physiological and psychoemotional expressions and repressions.

• Cranial nerves & special senses
• Motions and emotions of the face
• Hard palette dynamics
• The jaw and TMJ harmonics
• Emotional entrapment and its expressions
• Shock and the jaw
• The pivot of the throat
• Key joints of the lower body
• The empathetic practitioner
• The power of acknowledgement and non-action
• Practice development: framing the physiology of emotion and pain, developing presence and simplicity in the treatment session

 You will learn how to:

• Recognize birth patterns in the facial complex
• Recognize TMJ compression and its affects
• Understand ramifications of chronic jaw tension and its affect on all systems of the body including the in particular the immune response, digestion, posture and emotional repression
• Work with the hyoid as a natural fulcrum for the structural and emotional health of the throat
• Be able to listen to the face as a whole and be in relationship with all the different facial tissues
• Become more precise in your ability to name patterns of expression and their quality and direction
• Define BCST through the spoken and written word

 Course 9 – the holistic system ~ neuroendocrine immune response

Looks at how the body is holistic in its very nature. The nervous system, the endocrine system and immune system are intricately linked and complementary, co-influencing our emotional and psychological states. New biology and new science will be examined as theories to help us understand what lies behind physical and emotional conditioning along with practical ways to bring this knowledge into the treatment room and meet your clients system in a truly holistic way.

• The phenomenon of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis
• Metabolic fields and the thyroid
• Immune system potency and the immune organs
• The hormonal molecular fluid matrix
• Regulation of the neuroendocrine immune system
• Understanding the stress/inflammatory response
• Practice development: building your practice, legal requirements, ongoing development

 You will learn to:

• Feel the HPA axis and be able to assess its level of biodynamic health and stress response 
• Recognise how the potency connection of the third ventricle is pivotal for the health of the whole system.
• Become familiar with the immune response and its expression of health. Learning to work with the immune organs. 
• Relate to the lymphatic ducts. Helping to free them and encouraging greater mobility and flow, potency and movement expressions. 
• Learning to identify the pineal gland as a fulcrum for natural balance and rhythm.
• Relate to the body at a molecular level.

 Course 10 – working with mothers, babies and children

Pregnancy, birth and early life are profound and formative times. These first moments can determine many aspects of our health and nature that condition the rest of our lives. Craniosacral Therapy offers a profound understanding of these events and through a unique and deep contact with the human system can help the expression of the innate life force within each individual. To be able to use these skills effectively can help the development of the embryo, foetus, baby and mother.

• Mother and Baby Resonance
• Treating Mother and Baby for the first time after the Birth
• Health Expressions/Trauma Expressions in Mothers Babies and Children
• Postnatal Period and Changes that Occur
• O-A Birth
• Natural Labour
• Paediatric Conditions
• O-P Birth
• Labour Complications and the Medical Model
• Pain Relief
• C-S Birth
• Antenatal Care Profile – Women’s Choices
• Physiological Changes during Pregnancy
• Treating Pregnant Women & Acknowledging the Baby’s Presence
• Conditions that developed in the Antenatal Period
• Clinical practise
• Case taking of the Woman and Baby on the first visit
• Treating Mobile Infants
  

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Inquiry: After reading the above BCST approved international curriculum ask yourself:

"Is this curriculum tissue-based functional work, or does this represent the non-doing biodynamics that Dr. Sutherland left us?"

Perhaps the above BCST curriculum is exactly what you are seeking. 

Note: These two links supplement the points I make in this blog: Podcast and Video

Recall in his letter quoted above in which the BCST practitioner said 'any professional biodynamic cranial practitioner or teacher worth their weight in salt will call the above officially sanctioned BCST curriculum functional cranial work, which amounts to tissue work in the cranial wave' ... We can deny the facts, but if we do, we risk becoming post-truthers who promulgate the biodynamic equivalent of the big lie. 

As Dr. Sutherland often said "Do you see the point?"  

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