1973 - 2024
Celebrating 51 Years
Of Osteopathic Study, Practice, Writing, Teaching & Evolving Dr. Sutherland's Impulse
Dr. Sutherland introduced biodynamics
75 years ago and it has evolved
into a journey of love
Sutherland's Biodynamic Journey
Stillness, my first book, presents the official osteopathic definitions of all three of Dr. Sutherland's cranial practices:
1) Biomechanical (pre-biodynamic).
2) Functional methods (pre-biodynamic).
3) Biodynamic cranial practice for the evolution of consciousness, which was Sutherland's parting gift.
In Stillness, I provided the references and page numbers in all the relevant osteopathic literature for your research so you can discover for yourself how Sutherland precisely defined his three types of cranial practice. As a parting gift on how to practice his osteopathic biodynamics, Dr. Sutherland left instructions on his headstone!
BE STILL AND KNOW
His wife, Adah Sutherland, completed his instructions on her headstone 20 years later:
I AM
Here is the Sutherland's summary of the entire biodynamic journey for the evolution of consciousness:
BE STILL AND KNOW I AM
Sutherland dedicated his life to the continuous evolution of cranial work, he even went as far as saying that his cranial work "is not mine."
Read Dr. Sutherland final written instructions 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
For a more in-depth perspective, read this interview: Unerring Potency
Post Biodynamics:
A Non-tidal Enfoldment That Emerges After I AM Enfleshes Your Cells
Stillness Chapter 9, introduces a post-biodynamic non-tidal enfoldment of consciousness that I now call Pure Breath of Love. This non-tidal Sacred Pulse emerges when we realize I AM after we choose to let I AM descend to let consciousness implode into our cells and emanate the pulse of Pure Breath of Love.
Pure Breath of Love is a post-biodynamic non-tidal domain of consciousness.
Stillness Touch Union of Body & Love
My new book Stillness Touch details a post-biodynamic path that begins completion during your Grail Journey
as a descent of your Soul into the body's cells under the guidance of Pure Breath of Love
Osteopathic Biodynamic History
Stillness Touch introduces the philosopher-mystics who deeply influenced and formed Dr. Sutherland and Becker's biodynamic principles, particularly Swedenborg and Russell. It also outlines the way that Dr. Sutherland taught biodynamic to his inner circle of osteopaths, who as Legacy Practitioners, evolved Sutherland's biodynamics before he introduced it publicly in 1948. Dr. Rollin Becker coined Sutherland's work as biodynamic, and further developed Dr. Sutherland's impulse by characterizing a biodynamic tidal map that ended in Dynamic Stillness. Becker's biodynamic map got refined, elaborated, and more precisely defined by the New England Study Group that was founded by Sutherland's inner circle student Anne Wells and Becker's student James Jealous.
Stillness Touch then explicitly articulates a post-biodynamic journey into the non-tidal descending domains that lead to the enfleshment of love.
It is called 'post-biodynamic' because the biodynamic tides disappear after you realize the cellular implosion of I AM.
As a reminder, realizing I AM is the end of the osteopathic biodynamic journey for the evolution of consciousness: Osteopathic Biodynamic Map
After you realize Dynamic Stillness it utterly engulfs your consciousness,
which expands to infinity until you realize I AM.
NOTE: Perhaps you recall that in 1973 a single biomechanical cranial sutural session granted me the gift of infinite consciousness for thirty days!
Then, as mentioned, - IF YOU CHOOSE IT - by waiting for nothing, I AM will descend and implode into your cells. This event creates a cellular inner-infinity of consciousness that unites the body and consciousness with the sacred pulse of love.
To know if you have realized enfleshment, here are some of the inner-body indicators:
1) Pure Consciousness has feelingly descended your midline and imploded cellularly.
2) The midline has absorbed the tides.
3) The tides have dissolved and perceptually disappear.
4) Your biodynamic tidal journey to I AM ends.
5) After the cellular descent and cellular implosion of I AM, the Sacred Pulse of Love begins to emerge.
6) Every heart-beat pulses a love that create all things, which is stronger than death.
7) You feel bodily connected with everything.
For insight into the spiritual literature that verifies the above, see my newest e-Book Stillness Touch Path of Union: Click Here
It is by utterly abiding in Dr. Sutherland's non-doing practice of BE STILL that you realize I AM.
The realization of Be Still And Know I AM is the fruit you harvest when practicing Sutherland's living, authentic biodynamic cranial osteopathy.
If we wish to follow his example, we ardently continue to evolve his cranial impulse, just as Sutherland did.
I can verify this personally: when you choose to practice as Sutherland taught us, your cranial work self-evolves.
Here, we are presented with a free-will choice to make:
At I AM You Choose To Wait
... For Nothing ...
... In Dynamic Stillness ...
Eventually ... waiting becomes a state of Sacred Repose where your consciousness implodes inside your cells and unites with Pure Breath of Love.
Every cell then vibrates the sacred pulse of love, which emanates from your SA Node.
From then on, your every heart beat emanates Love.
When a non-tidal pulse
emanates from all cells
in tandem with the SA Node
- that marks your second birth -
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
Why do they disappear? Because we have integrated the tides!
What emerges after the cellular implosion of Dynamic Stillness is a post-biodynamic non-tidal domain of consciousness:
The Osteopathic Biodynamic Tidal Journey
Ascends 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
↓
If - We Choose It - And We Wait ... For Nothing ... In Sacred Repose
↓
I AM Descends, Implodes In Our Cells And Pulses Love
↓
All Cells Emanate The Sacred Pulse Of Pure Breath Of Love
↓
BE STILL AND KNOW I AM LOVE
↓
This Is A Descending, Non-Tidal
Post-Biodynamic Grail Journey
That Is Guided By The Sacred Pulse
That Unites Body, Consciousness, & Love
↓
We Call This Enfleshment
Desire
The most glaring flaw that prevents enfleshment is desire, which is taught by the Biodynamic Cranial Approach (BCA).
BCA students are subtly taught:
1) Depend on the teacher by following them as the guru - 'I am always here for you in all ways.'
2) Enquire into the tides, ... which leads to clinging to the tides.
3) Use stillness as a bypass to keep consciousness held hostage in the ascending tidal planes.
4) Remain addicted to the bliss of the tides and stillness.
The BCA uses the language of DESIRE that is drenched in ecstatic, radiant, bliss-filled words to manipulate, and thus lure naive students who feel that they are missing out (Read the BCA website and newsletters).
However, it is true, with a BCA training you do miss out on enfleshment.
If you join the BCA training, you will not descend into the body because you will remain stuck in ascent, so enfleshment is not possible. How do I know this? Because for 10 years I have observed BCA practitioners who were utterly and unknowingly stuck in bypass, which I later learned were BCA graduates.
Fear
On the opposite end of the bypass spectrum - FEAR - is the primary teaching in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST). BCST developed outside of osteopathy, it was derived from Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy, a lay training for non-osteopaths, and Stone's Polarity Therapy.
Here are the principle fear-based practices taught in the BCST curriculum:
BCST is an International institution that has perpetrated a core marketing misrepresentation that has desecrated the biodynamics brought to us by Dr. Sutherland, Becker, and Jealous. For more on the indignant rage that Biodynamic trained DO's feel about this breach of integrity, read below.
The ignorance and denial of post-biodynamics drenches BCST because it teaches fear-based efferent practices that bypass and recoil you from the potency!
Practitioner efference bypasses
our embodied realization of Dynamic Stillness,
which requires the descent of consciousness.
Remaining in ascent
or stuck in an empty void of stillness
projects a shadow biodynamics
that is created by the ego
which aborts our second birth into the enfleshment of love
Warning: This is not a criticism; it is an accurate reporting of the historical facts that are based on my having been trained by an Osteopath student of Dr. Sutherland. However, it may infuriate readers who believe the post-truth dogma and they will parrot that "Charles puts down other biodynamic cranial approaches so he can assert that Stillness Touch is better than other biodynamic approaches." That is not correct, my perspective is clear: all cranial approaches have their place.
Even so, I am reporting that the "biodynamics" taught in non-osteopathic schools is not the biodynamics that osteopaths learn during their 9-year training, that's all.
If you study the osteopathic literature and do the required in-depth research, you will see for yourself that nowhere in my writings do I assert that the biodynamics Dr. Sutherland created, Becker developed, Jealous disseminated, and that I have evolved into a post-biodynamic path, is better than the medical model biodynamic cranial approaches. No approach is better than any other; however, they are in fact different.
Not only do I revere the pre-biodynamic biomechanical and functional practices, I enjoyed them for 23 years until biodynamics spontaneously emerged in me in 1995. After biodynamics dawned, I followed Dr. Sutherland's example and stopped all pre-biodynamic medical practices.
In 1948 Dr. Sutherland said, in essence, that after biodynamics emerged in him, any efferent practice became an 'outside force' that hinders and prevents the further evolution of his newly discovered biodynamic impulse.
Sutherland said he stopped using his hands to feel because they are 'erring' physical senses.
Pre-biodynamic and biodynamic practices are very different. I assert this after having studied with one of Sutherland's students for over a decade, so I have thoroughly walked Dr. Sutherland's entire cranial journey by practicing all three types of his cranial for five decades.
I also distinguish between all the different biodynamic cranial approaches, again these distinctions are detailed in my two books Stillness and Stillness Touch.
Just because a school markets their work as 'biodynamic' does not make it so
If you want to know what you are getting into before you sign up for a training
digest the original source osteopathic cranial definitions of the three types of cranial
and see for yourself what type of cranial a school is offering.
If you do not pay attention to exactly what is in their curriculum,
and if, instead, you believe and blindly follow their slick deceptive marketing strategies, you will be deceived
Who does Charles think he is?
51 years of study and practice of Dr. Sutherland's impulse qualifies me to present an accurate historical perspective of Dr. Sutherland's cranial work. By grace, I learned cranial osteopathy directly from Sutherland's student, osteopath Dr. DeJarnette beginning in 1974. Remember that Sutherland introduced his original biodynamic principles of non-doing in the 1945!
Even though Sutherland's final private teachings were not coined as 'biodynamic' until Becker published his books. Yet, Sutherland made his biodynamic principles and practices public 45 years before Franklyn Sills introduced his Craniosacral Biodynamics or Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST).
I had been in practice for 20 years prior to Sills' introduction of "Craniosacral Biodynamics" in the 1990's. Having been trained in cranial osteopathy, it was impossible for me to see how Sills' offering could be remotely construed as "biodynamic." Why do I say that? Because first, his biodynamics was not sourced from Dr. Sutherland. Sills was trained in Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST). CST began as a lay training for parents to treat their children, which then, due to demand, became a training for bodyworkers.
Since I had been a student and devout practitioner of Sutherland's three types of cranial practice since 1973, I witnessed first-hand the emergence of Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST). I witnessed the slick marketing by Upledger who, in the 1980's, billed himself as the "founder of cranial work." Then, his student, Franklin Sills, similarly marketed that he was the "founder of biodynamics," which he called Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB) in the 1990's. His biodynamics was based on his training in Upledger's CST combined with Stone's Polarity Therapy. Later, the institutions adopted Shea's name, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST).
The sleight of hand marketing to promote CST/CSB/BCST as the 'source' of biodynamics distort the facts:
Dr. Sutherland founded all cranial approaches
Sutherland introduced his pre-biodynamic biomechanical cranial in the 1900's, that then evolved into functional cranial work that he taught up to the 1940's. Then, he introduced biodynamic cranial (even though biodynamic was not yet a term until Becker coined it). Sutherland ceased his functional cranial practice in 1948. Sutherland's precise cranial definitions were refined and evolved by numerous osteopathic cranial practitioners over the decades. You can read these exacting osteopathic definitions because I gathered and reproduced them in my book Stillness Chapter 3 by scouring the osteopathic literature (references are included).
If you are not interested in the biodynamics that Dr Sutherland taught osteopaths
skip what I offer.
Stillness Touch revives the ancient art of laying on of hands, which Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathy practiced.
I have shared in my writings and teachings what Sutherland assured as biodynamic cranial work, and I have accurately documented the osteopathic history and definitions. If that is considered as being critical, a put down, or 'better than' BCST, then so be it.
This blog exposes the damage that false, misleading marketing has done to Biodynamics
and shows how it created a shadow biodynamic curriculum
that desecrates Dr. Sutherland's non-doing impulse of BE STILL
What Is Shadow Biodynamics?
My book Stillness points out a fundamental principle that "life manifests in the white-hot polarity between the dynamic tension of opposites." Therefore, inevitably, a shadow biodynamics emerged as a counter-force to Dr. Sutherland's non-doing impulse. Here is the essence of Sutherland's biodynamic teaching:
BE STILL AND KNOW I AM
Get Away As Far As You Can From Your Physical Senses
Do Not Use The Hands As An Erring Unreliable Physical Sense
The Practitioner Is Not The Doer
The Unerring Potency Heals
Do we dare to recognize and look straight in the eye a shadow biodynamics that compels a practitioner to be the doer, to feel tides with the hands, and implores us enquire into tides to gain meanings from them?
Given that the shadow of the Beast is the prevailing principle today in our post-truth times, according to Steiner, it is tragic to observe hundreds of innocent unwitting cranial practitioners who are unconsciously trapped in bypass with no contact with the unerring potency, the tides, or Dynamic Stillness. The sad part is, as long as these souls are stuck in bypass, they will not realize Dynamic Stillness or Pure Breath of Love.
Bypass occurs when we are efferent, we feel with the hands, and we treat recipients to relieve symptoms ...
in the name of biodynamics.
This blog is not about biomechanical or functional methods, which are excellent medical treatment methods
However, calling biomechanical, functional, and ascending efferent methods of touch a "biodynamic cranial approach" or "biodynamic craniosacral therapy" is dishonest and unethical. Why?
Because Dr. Sutherland defines his biodynamic cranial touch as a non-doing practice of 'BE STILL.'
BE STILL is not possible when we are taught to enquire into the tides because the cranial teachers are terrified of potency! Instead, they teach us how to bypass the neutral and thus avoid any inner contact with the unerring potency, the tides, Dynamic Stillness, and Pure Breath of Love.
Bypass occurs the moment a practitioner uses any efference or gets stuck in ascent
It is practitioner efference that recoils our awareness up and out of our inner-body sanctum, projecting consciousness into the ascending planes, and then, the ego projects our consciousness outward into our hands to feel motions, so we can 'read' the nervous system, the anatomy, the cranial motions, or feel the tides, ... all this to evaluate the craniosacral lesion patterns that dwell inside the client's subtle body (!) to treat symptoms.
That is not a biodynamic practice according to Dr. Sutherland, who only taught his inner circle of osteopaths to Be Still. Rather, based on Sutherland's definition of touch, the above characterization is a perfectly acceptable functional cranial method.
This fact is indisputable amid professionally licensed osteopathic biodynamic cranial practitioners.
The osteopathic biodynamic cranial taught by Drs. Sutherland and Becker require that we realize a living inner contact with the unerring potency of the tides.
Potency is only realized in neutral.
We contact the tides only when we realize the biodynamic neutral - as a whole-body inner 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, BCA teaches practitioners 1) to be efferent by enquiring into the tides, 2) to misuse stillness to bypass contact with the potency, and 3) to engage in a co-dependent guru-disciple relationship. On the other hand, BCST teaches us to 1) visualize long tide as an outside force, 2) to feel it with the hands, 3) to orient to anatomy, particularly to the nervous system to evaluate its functioning, and 4) to apply treatment protocols - intentions or suggestions to relieve symptoms.
The above practices are the opposite of what Dr. Sutherland taught as biodynamics
When practitioners are unwittingly taught medical-model biodynamic cranial practices
that's fine, but that is functional work - it is not non-doing biodynamics. That's all.
Anyone can falsely assert the post-truth claim that efferent practices and treating symptoms are biodynamic
However, empty phrases that arise out of a wounded ego exposes a core terror of the unerring potency.
As any biodynamic trained cranial osteopath knows, a Dr. Sutherland-inspired biodynamic session begins in neutral, which is the moment that stillness pervades your whole inner-body space, and then, from this whole-body stillness there emanates primary respiration from within the midline that suffuses throughout every cell of the whole body.
Stillness emanates unerring potency from the midline to within the cells
this is the same potency that creates the forces of life that make the body
Dynamic Stillness Emanates A Template Of Wholeness
That Makes The Body
Feeling Anatomy With The Hands Bypasses The Unerring Potency Of Dynamic Stillness
Practitioner Efference Projects A Field of Inertia
That Recoils The Potency
And Alters Function
Do You See the Point?
It may seem radical to suggest to a biodynamic cranial practitioner "do not enquire into the biodynamic tides, do not feel with your hands, do not orient to anatomy, do not evaluate the nervous system, and do not adore your teacher like a guru." However, Drs. Sutherland and Becker taught a biodynamics that thrives in mutuality.
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 the nervous system, we contact the unerring potency that dwells within our own body. The unerring potency exists prior to the anatomy because when the potency emanates, it creates the entire body! 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 it thrusts our consciousness away from any contact with the neutral, the tides, the potency, or Dynamic Stillness that dwell within.
How Does Feeling With the Hands the Nervous System & Anatomy Bypass Potency?
As its final product, anatomy is many steps removed from source potency.
We can only sense potency in neutral, amid an inner whole-body contact with the presence of stillness.
To practice Dr. Sutherland's non-doing we use no practitioner efference.
Instead, inwardly connect to the potency - the wisdom of the body - that emanates the embryological blueprint of the whole body 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 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, consciousness is projected out of our midline and our inner-body sanctum 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, then we bypass the potency, which are the indwelling formative forces that make the body. Sure, this force exists outside, but our source potency is inside the body (review the study of the heart's SA Node in the book Stillness).
The end result is we lose all 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 is Dr. Sutherland's essential biodynamic practice.
Whereas, if we use efference to orient awareness outward to treat, that is a wonderful biomechanical or functional cranial method. Biomechanical and functional cranial are excellent medical approaches for symptom relief.
It is the unconscious mixing of the two polar principles of
outer ascending with inner descending
that causes all the confusion and lack of understanding
that is rampant in the cranial field
that is outside of osteopathic cranial circles.
Again, whenever we use efference, we bypass the potency. However, this is an unconscious habit due to the ego's terror of crossing the threshold that leads to a journeying beyond 'the known' - over the horizon. The journey to freedom requires letting consciousness die to the known, and spill over the horizon into the unknown black infinite Dynamic Stillness of I AM.
In esoteric circles, crossing the threshold of the abyss means our consciousness expands beyond infinity to reach the portal (fulcrum) that frees the spirit from the grips of the ego and Superego, which liberates us 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 are designed to avoid any contact with the potency; it prevents a direct contact with the tides, and 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, which separates them from us. Then, we treat a recipient based on clinical treatment skills that we learned in our 'biodynamic' 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 essence. 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. Such practitioners possess an intellectual understanding based on made-up theories and definitions, and the misuse of biodynamic terms. Students are subtly misguided by their cranial teachers to misuse 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 to contact the 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 the midline stillness within is where the unerring potency dwells. By waiting ... in stillness ... for nothing, a mutual conversation without words emerges in mutuality with our recipient.
In this stillness-to-stillness silent conversation without words, the unerring potency emerges to guide our sessions.
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 make the anatomy to serve the functions. Blechschmidt upended the structure-function medical model. There was also an association between Steiner and Blechschmidt because the Anthroposophical Press published a Blechschmidt book. Therefore, it is unclear whether the term 'biodynamic' was sourced from Steiners' biodynamic gardening or it came from Blechschmidt.
Blechschmidt Discovered That Function Creates Form
Dr. Blechschmidt's findings validate why we do not orient to anatomy. He observed tens of thousands of stages of embryonic development, which refuted the medical dogma that structure creates function. He saw for himself the opposite: it is a biodynamic activity that creates developmental motions in the metabolic fields that become forming functions that then creates specific anatomy. For example, channels that are created within the embryonic protoplasm become blood vessels that are carved by the peripheral emanation of the SA Node pulse. Then, the vessels are filled with blood cells, and finally, the heart forms (See Stillness p 206: SA Node Pacemaker of the Heart).
Blechschmidt's discovery that function creates form, upended the medical structure-function dogma. 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 column of stillness for ourselves? 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 visible 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: A Grail Journey For An Embodied Evolution of Consciousness
Now let's go on a brief journey that begins in the biodynamic and ends in a post-biodynamic approach to touch.
A living biodynamic session ignites a profound evolutionary journey for both practitioner and client. 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 emanates to whole body. If the primary respiration is fluidic, body-wide, and extends into the aura, it is known as the fluid tide.
Subsequently, fluid tide gradually expands 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 leads to a primary respiration called the long tide: here your consciousness expands as stillness from the body and your aura into a vast global luminescent consciousness.
If your consciousness continues evolving, it expands across the threshold of you're known to infinity, and then it implodes inside your cells. Meanwhile, your awareness spills over the edge of your 'known' and disappears into an infinite black Dynamic Stillness. Inside I AM as Dynamic Stillness, your consciousness is freed from the tyranny of the ego; the false sense of being a separate self disappears along with the tides, which are absorbed in your midline.
Sutherland characterized this stage of evolution as BE STILL AND KNOW I AM
Realizing I AM is an essential state of consciousness. It is the ascending current that free us from the grip of the ego. By crossing the threshold of 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." (See Appendix 3 Stillness Touch).
After Dynamic Stillness implodes inside your cells, your Radiantly Awake Self unites with Pure Breath of Love - we sense a primordial pulse in every cell that emanates Divine Feminine Will, which 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, 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 anatomy into parts. When our presence is efferent, it has a gross digital quality that collapses the potency that emanates a delicate 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 enjoyed biomechanical and functional cranial for 23 years.
However, by definition, medical model 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.
History of Biodynamics
Once biodynamics awakened in Dr. Sutherland in the 40's, he ceased all doing. From then on, he implored his inner circle of 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 Osteopathic Cranial Practices 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 emphasized non-doing because 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 biodynamics. Furthermore, there is zero expectation of motions, and that includes the tides!
However, that will not be obvious 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 can 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 their 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 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 51 years and I will continue to do so. Hopefully, the Stillness Touch Legacy Practitioners will do the same.
That same direct emanation I received from Dr. Sutherland has 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 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 an observable 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.
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 and 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, you do not feel with your hands for motions or tides, evaluate the nervous system or the anatomy, you do not enter your recipient's subtle body and listen to the cranial wave, or seek contact with tidal motions, and you do not intend techniques or project your attention outward toward the horizon to visualize and connect with primary respiration 'out there.' Sutherland said that we realize primary respiration as an expression of indwelling potency (within the body). Michael Shea beautifully demonstrates the practice of visualization of Primary Respiration as an outside force: BCST Contact Demonstratio
How is Stillness Touch Different from BCST Practically?
During a Stillness Touch session, a practitioner reposes inwardly in non-doing and not-knowing and waits for nothing. The neutral, as whole body stillness, is the essential prerequisite for realizing a living embodied contact with the potency that emanates the whole-body primary respiration, be it expressed as the fluid tide or as long tide. The tides emanate from Dynamic Stillness, which eventually puts you into direct contact with the post-biodynamic non-tidal domain that we call Pure Breath of Love.
Again, if you want to practice biodynamics the way that Dr. Sutherland instructed, do not use your hands to feel anatomy or the nervous system, and do not visualize primary respiration or look for tides 'out there.' Do not create space, engage in conversation skills, establish a relational field, etc. In other words, do not add any outside force even by intention to heal when touching your recipient. Here is a chart that depicts the Practitioner neutral:
Taylor's Chart: Practitioner Neutral
Furthermore, do not treat symptoms, or attempt to relieve the endless array of the neurological effects of trauma. Also, you do not use a treatment protocol, nor harbor an agenda, or goal. Instead, the essence of Dr. Sutherland's biodynamic cranial practice is:
"Trust the tide in its unerring potency" inside 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 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 they permanently etched on their two headstones in a graveyard in Point Pinos by the lighthouse in Pacific Grove, California.
When you practice what the Sutherland's taught to his legacy osteopaths 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 ...
Here’s what a BCST certified teacher and owner of a Biodynamic Craniosacral school 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 have witnessed in my Stillness Touch post-biodynamic Master Classes: there are 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, the international BCST School's International Curriculum teaches a virtual biodynamics: 'contact' with the Breath of Life is in their minds, which is virtual, a conceptual, shadow biodynamics that lacks any understanding or experience of Sutherland's non-doing biodynamic teachings.
Sutherland warned us about possessing shadow knowledge in place of knowledge based on experience, an insight that unveils a tragic secret:
Efferent, doing-to practices taught in the BCST curriculum
fostered the death of biodynamics
In this shadow biodynamics, neither the BCST practitioner nor the client realizes a living inner-body contact with the forces of life that make the body. All the BCST practitioners I have met in my classes are sincere in their desire to practice biodynamics as taught by Dr. Sutherland. Many are hungry to learn the practice of biodynamics from Sutherland's disposition of “Be Still And Know I AM.”
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 lack of understanding of Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamics by saying
“Charles just hangs out in Dynamic Stillness, why can’t he help the Breath of Life out?”
Here is his unconscious confession:
Helping the Breath of Life means my ego thinks it is 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 in non-doing. 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 now the Breath of Life that made the body is present in the recipient, so he leaves her 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 the Breath of Life doing all the healing in his patients. In a subsequent follow-up sessions, Becker witnessed the patient's progress and appreciated 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 this? '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, and he did not orient to their nervous system, nor work with trauma and the cranial wave. Becker did not mix the three types of cranial together. Instead, he instructed us to dwell inwardly in stillness in a non-doing neutral that naturally synchronizes our 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 resolving trauma
is not an osteopathic biodynamic practice
Do Not Use Any Efference
In one of my Stillness Touch post-biodynamic classes, a seasoned BCST graduate practitioner asked me “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 essence that made the body, which characterizes Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamics. Do you want to enjoy living contact with the whole-body expressions of the Breath of Life? Then cease all efferent practices that by-pass and block your contact with the potency and the Breath of Life inside you. And, do not mix the types of cranial practices. Why? Because mixing contaminates the potency and weakens it, which also opposes Sutherland's non-doing, non-efferent, biodynamic principles.
Prior to an actual embodied, 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, click here: 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.” After he moved to Pacific Grove, California, Sutherland became emphatic about practicing biodynamics in an utterly non-doing manner: no testing of the sphenobasilar joint for lesion patterns and do not add any outside force.
The practice of non-doing touch was so unconventional that 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 (See Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, p.166 the original Rudra Press edition).
Franklyn Sills, who was trained in Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy and Stone's Polarity 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 is the source of all cranial practices that exist. So Sutherland knows what he is talking about. Cranial osteopathy has 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 osteopathic definitions of biodynamics
that Dr. Sutherland taught only to his inner circle of osteopaths
it is because your BCST training did not teach his principles
that have existed for seven decades in the professional licensed osteopathic cranial field
The BCST national organizations do pay lip service to Dr. Sutherland’s non-doing, non-efferent principles by the misuse of his biodynamic terms. You can review the official international 2-year BCST curriculum at the end of this piece to see how obvious it is that students are taught "biodynamics" in the exact opposite way that Dr. Sutherland taught biodynamics to his inner circle of osteopaths.
Here is a letter I received that illuminates the confusion that the BCST curriculum creates when a medical approach is called biodynamics:
“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 a BCST sanctioned 2-year 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 thing seems resonant with Sills' books, which are useful resources. However, I honestly have a hard time reading them and most other BCST texts and 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:
BCST sanctioned trainings 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 can we tell if we are in a virtual biodynamic practice?
You are unable to clearly characterize you sensual tidal experiences without using jargon biodynamic terms.
An example of this occurred in Italy in 2013 when I taught a Stillness Touch post-biodynamic class. All 64 students were BCST graduate practitioners. It was shocking that all these "biodynamic" practitioners confessed in the class circles that they had never experienced a living embodied contact with primary respiration!
The problem was their Italian teacher taught them to employ 12 efferent steps that were part of his virtual biodynamic training. He compiled these steps and made a chart that you put on your wall to use while treating! The teacher was very proud of this chart. His practitioners were taught to orient to the nervous system, feel the anatomy, feel for tides, and on it goes. Whereas by contrast, Sutherland's biodynamics does not in any way involve working efferently 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, be it emotional, physical, chemical, environmental, etc. The CW rate changes based on the amount of stress that is present. CW expresses digital, electro-charged, automatic 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 fossilized record of your biography (history) that is frozen in time inside an inertial empty void and locked in your tissues.
By contrast, the living fluid and long tide is sensed as a whole-body breathing of potent 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 called 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 digital reaction to stress that etches a holographic digital signature recording of the event into the tissues. The breathing fractals of life are modified by the nervous system’s reaction to stress - this is 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 system.
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 of gel is as 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, as the neutral deepens, 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, that is an efferent activity that lays down inertial tracks of false fulcra inside the client. 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 record of the past that dwells in an inertial empty void
as the motion of the past; it is not the motion present
To contact primary respiration, be still and wait within ... without expecting any motions, which 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. The first expression in the biodynamic field is called fluid tide, and the next expression is the vast luminous global breathing of the long tide.
"Mid-tide" Is A Misleading Made-up Term
The term is 'mid-tide" is non-sensical. Inexplicably, BCST changed Dr. Sutherland's term fluid tide to mid-tide?!
Fluid tide is the first biodynamic tidal expression of primary respiration. "Mid-tide” (middle) implies that there is a tide before mid tide. The implication is that there is a beginning-tide, a mid-tide, and an end-tide, right? However, that would mean the cranial wave is the beginning-tide however, the cranial wave is not a tidal expression! Rather, cranial wave is a local, pre-biodynamic digital expression of the nervous system. Can you appreciate how the term 'mid-tide' confuses things? Why would anyone change Sutherland's original term by making up a new non-sensical term?
Expectation Is Efferent
When you expect any motions - cranial wave, tides, or Dynamic Stillness - it is efferent, which creates false fulcra. Inertia is an anti-life force, or a death force that turns the ground substance from a liquid to a gel. When gelled, the ground substance emits digital, electro-charged cranial wave patterns that cannot transmit the Template of the Whole, fractal tidal instructions from the Breath of Life to the cells. Only a liquid protoplasm ground substance accurately conveys healthy fractal tidal functions that emanate from the whole body as primary respiration to all the cells. ANY expectation of motion is efferent, and efference depletes the potency, which in turn, diminishes cellular vitality and leads to symptoms, that become disease ... death draws toward us that much closer. 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 are 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. 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 cranial work, yet how about being honest by not telling your clients that you offer biodynamic sessions when they are functional? If you deceive your clients, it perpetuates the post-truth cultural movement that we are mired in today. Haven't we had enough of that?
Just because the BCST international organization misuses the word biodynamic to characterize its efferent principles and functional practices does not mean it is teaching a biodynamic, non-doing practice in the way that Dr. Sutherland defined it.
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.
To practice Sutherland's biodynamics requires an embodied contact with the potency and the tides, which means you have to give up every form of efferent by-pass that impedes contact with the potency.
If you want to offer an authentic biodynamic cranial in the way that Dr. Sutherland taught his Legacy Practitioners, you must give up efference.
The following impediments are taught in the curriculum of Biodynamic schools - outside of osteopathy - and all of the methods are 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 the nervous system or the anatomy as 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 that is outside a practitioner's inner body space during a session, such as Primary Respiration.
* Feeling for and visualizing tides, primary respiration, midlines, fulcra.
* Shifting into a tide at will.
* 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, 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 and controlled by the central nervous system in the brain stem, limbic system, hormonal system, and 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 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 to mention that it has no place in biodynamics. The same with unwinding, the DO's only know what it is because it is mentioned in the biodynamic course as a neurological recoil to the potency
In my 1922 Master Class in Prague, I witnessed the following in 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 "post-biodynamic" practitioners this: Four practitioners unwind one practitioner on the table to navigate them through their birth canal to realize their second birth!!!
* Engaging in a Guru-disciple co-dependent dynamic with their cranial teacher.
* Diminishment of the importance of shadow work and exalting of a virtual "bliss, light and love."
*Disdain for Pure Breath of Love.
Swiss Biodynamic School:
A student taking a BCST training from a Swiss teacher told me what they learned:
*During a "biodynamic" session, make three different contacts on the feet while you ask the client which feels better to them.
*The same teacher went ballistic when a different student mentioned post-biodynamics.
All functions that protect us from trauma are from the ego, the nervous system, and the cranial wave
Here is Another 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 trained practitioner who is also a BCST teacher who clearly articulates what I have been 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 my answer:
“Dear _______,
Thank you for writing so candidly. I wish I could say that your situation is unique. 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. Reality may feel too brutal to bear if your ego is incapable of letting you feel discomfort. Yet, maybe you have an open mind and you realize that I am not putting down other cranial methods, 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 heartbroken that you do not feel the Breath of Life after all that training, tons of money, and the years of time you spent to learn biodynamics, yes?
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 45 or more sanctioned teachers of Craniosacral Biodynamics and Biodynamic Cranial Sacral Therapy (BCST) all teach the same thing. Their international BCST curriculum has diminished and desecrated 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 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 since I teach classes that are exclusively for biodynamic DO's. However, biodynamic osteopaths grimace whenever they even hear that the BCST training is called "biodynamic."
The grimace because in truth, a BCST sanctioned practice grossly misrepresents and desecrates Dr. Sutherland’s non-doing biodynamics.
BCST teaches the opposite principles - efference - when compared with 'Be Still' which is 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 ahead of time 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 definition of biodynamics, as I quote it directly from their website, which was removed from their site after I published this blog:
"Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is a gentle profound non-invasive, hands-on treatment for the whole body. Performed on a massage table, the client is fully clothed and the touch is generally light and still. The treatment is focused on supporting the health of the whole being, especially the nervous system. This is the system that dictates all of the body’s functioning, constantly sending and receiving information. Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapists understand how an optimally functioning healthy nervous system performs. We are trained for years on how to use acute perception skills to perceive subtle physiological changes. We also are aware of the energetic map that underlies one‘s basic health and symptomology. We believe that health is never lost no matter what the ailment. We use our ability to identify the parts of the nervous system that are not functioning optimally and our awareness of the “always available health” in the body to assist the system in bringing itself back into balance. This supports greater ease and helps the body decrease symptoms."
Do you really want to practice Dr. Sutherland's biodynamics?
The first step is study Dr. Sutherland's Osteopathic definitions of the three types of cranial in Chapter 3 of STILLNESS, or read the original Osteopathic definitions in the references for yourself: 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, so ask your client to promise to tell you the absolute truth when you ask your question. 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 the question from neutral.
Also, watch that your body language is neutral too, because sincere clients are desperate to please you, their beloved and trusted practitioner, and they will hold back if there’s even a whiff of a bodily 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.
Again, I want to reemphasize that this is not your fault as a BCST practitioner: you were trained by BCST certified teachers.
Inside their powerful consensual group field of collusion, you were misled to ‘believe’ that tides exist 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 virtual experiences of tides in the mind. BCST certified 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 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 it, by using mantric words like the 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 stillness inside your whole body is clear.
* Stillness can expands from the whole body, to global, to infinite, to all of these 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 as a state of consciousness. Tides co-breathe or suffuse the cells of whole body, and everything in it, 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 rate of the SA Node that emanates the Sacred Pulse.
* The presence of parts and the whole are simultaneous - both/and.
* Your awareness expands from the whole body into the infinite and then beyond yet, you are still embodied and referenced to your midline of stillness within.
* You realize ever-expanding and 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, including all of them 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 being 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 Chart.
The above is what minimally must be present - at the same time - before we can assume that a tide may be present. Again, living tides are extremely complex; they do not appear in one dimension, or by using a 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, 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 was immune to the Psychotic Core 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 yearly Kripalu Stillness Touch Lay Class. After the class, she wrote me to say that her body is trembling with ecstasy. She feels a whole body erotic pulse of love and deep peace all at the same time. She mentioned this new realization to a woman who markets 'delta brainwave workshops.' The workshop promoter told the student (who was a BCST practitioner) that she was experiencing delta brain waves and convinced her to sign up for a training on delta brain waves, and off the BCST practitioner went into the digital virtual world of the nervous system to study delta waves.
The next example occurred during a special class for doulas, gynecologists, and midwives in Mexico. During a session exchange, a midwife's consciousness expanded into black infinity (Dynamic Stillness). After she reported the details of her realization to the group circle, an Italian male osteopath doula, 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, perhaps the most pathetic one, comes from the previously mentioned Italian BCST teacher who had graduated 64 students, yet none of them had experienced the tides. After my Stillness Touch class class he wrote me "How dare you embarrass me in front of all my students!" Also, as a classic demonstration that he is under control of the Beast, he did not pay me for the class.
The above examples exemplify how the ego and Superego, due to fear of the potency, can co-opt another's realized expanded state in an attempt to diminish the experience and reduce it to a physical explanation. This shadow also 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 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 above, here is an exact copy of the curriculum that I downloaded from a BCST sanctioned school's website:
After reading this Official Internationally Approved Biodynamic Cranial Sacral Therapy 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
Inquiry:
After reading the above BCST approved international curriculum ask yourself:
Is this a tissue-based functional medical treatment approach, or is BCST a non-doing biodynamics that Dr. Sutherland left us?
Note: These links are a supplement to the points in this blog: Podcast and Video
Perhaps the above BCST curriculum is exactly what you are looking for. If so, please, by all means, go for it.
Recall in his letter quoted above, 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' ... and functional cranial work is what that curriculum is through and through.
We can deny the facts, but if we do, we are post-truthers who promulgate the biodynamic equivalent of the big lie.
As Dr. Sutherland said "Do you see the point?"
BE STILL AND KNOW I AM
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