Dr. Sutherland Discovered Biodynamics
80 Years Ago
And It Evolved Into A Journey Of Love

Our post-truth times call for a full revelation of Sutherland's osteopathic biodynamic principles. It is crucial to counter the misperceptions and false beliefs spread by non-osteopaths about original biodynamics.

To that end, James Jealous published all his biodynamic course notes in 12 volumes for all to see, which will put to rest the false notion of equivalence between osteopathic biodynamics and non-osteopathic. We'll explore Sutherland's biodynamics and compare it with non-osteopathic biodynamics.

Listen to an interview that eas based on this blog HERE or you can read the edited transcript HERE

Differences Between Biodynamic Osteopathy & Non-Osteopathic Biodynamics

Globally, there are only a few hundred biodynamic osteopaths while there are several thousand non-osteopaths who promote an alternative form of biodynamics, outnumbering osteopaths more than tenfold. This disparity created confusion for students who struggle to differentiate between the two approaches, mainly due to limited information that stems from three key issues:

1. Restricted Access To Training: Osteopaths have always excluded non-osteopaths from their biodynamic trainings. This isolation fostered misinformation, which unfortunately led the non-osteopaths to create efferent biodynamic practice boundaries that are opposite to Sutherland's non-efferent, non-doing biodynamic impulse. This occurred because non-osteopaths decided to fill the information void with principles that run counter to osteopathic biodynamics. Jealous was keenly aware of the discrepancy; read what he writes under the topic "Fear" below. His published course notes will hopefully prevent the death of biodynamic osteopathy, which deeply concerned Dr. Jealous, as you will see. Jealous embodied the 'point' of Sutherland's biodynamic impulse, and he connected it with Blechschmidt's embryological findings. Jealous said "I grew up in that moment ... no more compromise." I was critical that Jealous so ferociously guarded osteopathic biodynamics, but now I see that he was correct, as you will see next in number 2.

2. Misleading Marketing: Falsely equating non-osteopathic biodynamics with osteopathic biodynamics attracted massive student enrollments. Read this website ARTICLE and then read its evaluation by CLAUDE AI. 

   The non-osteopathic "biodynamic" curriculum is efferent, which aligns with functional cranial; which is not remotely what osteopaths learn as biodynamics. The non-osteopath biodynamic teachings are distinct from osteopathic biodynamics; osteopaths consider this to be obvious yet, ill-informed non-osteopaths take offense at the osteopath's claims. 

3. Arrogance Based On Ignorance: Some non-osteopath practitioners exude a cultic, god-like arrogance "I am a BCST/CSB practitioner." 

   However, when non-osteopaths assert that they practice biodynamics, it is not based on a shred of osteopathic biodynamic understanding. Dr. Jealous directly addresses this arrogance, which you can read below. Arrogance - based on zero understanding of biodynamics - combined with unethical deceptive advertising on behalf of non-osteopaths deeply concerned Dr. Jealous. He feared that it has led to the death of osteopathy in the cranial field because he was well aware of the ten-fold advantage that the anti-biodynamic army has over Sutherland's precious biodynamic impulse.

   Having trained with Sutherland's student, I followed Sutherland's non-efferent, non-doing principles. In 2002, post-biodynamic Pure Breath of Love spontaneously emerged in a class because I had honored Sutherland's teachings of Be Still.

   NOTE: the practice of Stillness Touch is NOT biodynamic cranial osteopathy. Stillness Touch Legacy Practitioners by choice are conscious guardians of Sutherland's precious biodynamic impulse. 

Exploring The Conflict

To understand the divide between osteopaths and non-osteopaths, let's compare Dr. Sutherland’s osteopathic biodynamics with the non-osteopathic biodynamics that Franklyn Sills invented 50 years after Sutherland's impulse emerged in the 1940's. (See the John Wilks Interview with Charles, Dynamic Stillness).

My book STILLNESS Biodynamic Cranial Practice and the Evolution of Consciousness (2006) presents the osteopathic definitions and it outlines the specific practice boundaries for each of Dr. Sutherland's distinct cranial practices CHART. You'll find references to the osteopathic literature in the book STILLNESS so you can do the research yourself and discover that Sutherland and his inner circle Legacy practitioners precisely defined biomechanical, functional, and biodynamic cranial. 

Sutherland’s Osteopathic Biodynamics

Dr. William Garner Sutherland pioneered cranial osteopathy in the early 1900s and developed three distinct approaches to touch before he died. His protégé Becker's Silent Partner piece lays out the entire biodynamic map and then he said "This is where osteopathy ends, and spiritual healing and the private domain of Faith begin." He pointed to our personal journey, which is post-biodynamic.

1. Biomechanical Cranial Osteopathy (1910): A pre-biodynamic anatomical approach that focuses on pure physical manipulation.
2. Functional Cranial Osteopathy (1930): A pre-biodynamic method that utilizes guidance from the cranial rhythmic impulse (CRI).
3. Biodynamic Cranial Osteopathy (1943): Sutherland’s final contribution was a biodynamic touch that evolves our consciousness to I AM (Silent Partner).
4. Post-biodynamic Cranial Osteopathy (1979): Becker revealed a post-biodynamic journey in his question and answer session about The Silent Partner (see below). French osteopath Andrea Duvall, Becker's protégé, shared Becker's esoteric principles with French osteopaths. Then, Jealous teacher osteopath Francoise Desrosiers D.O. evolved Duvall and Becker's impulse by incorporating the post-biodynamic principles that I discovered in 2002 and outlined in Stillness Ch. 9 and in Stillness Touch Ch. 9. I am not aware of other biodynamic osteopaths who are navigating the post-biodynamic territory. I've yearly met with pioneering French osteopaths since 2012.

How Non-Osteopathic Biodynamics Began

Non-osteopathic biodynamics began in 1995 while Franklyn Sills was teaching an Upledger Craniosacral Therapy Legacy Course - again, this was five decades after Sutherland introduced biodynamics.

The Upledger Legacy Course, created by Franklyn Sills, a non-osteopath, was based on efferent principles derived from his Upledger training. He then peppered his legacy course with biodynamic terms that he gleaned from reading Becker's four articles on diagnostic touch. The efferent principles that he taught as biodynamics diverge from Sutherland’s original biodynamic framework. His teachings align with functional cranial.

It appears to me that the creation of Craniosacral Biodynamics was not based on experience: Sills had no training in osteopathic biodynamics. Rather, he mis-interpreted Becker's biodynamic terms and introduced them into his legacy course - THIS - (the creation of an alternate biodynamics) created the conflict between the osteopathic and non-osteopathic communities. Aspiring students and consumers are caught in the crossfire of misinformation amid extremely successful deceptive marketing practices.

Perhaps it was an unconscious Freudian slip that acknowledged these differences, when a prominent BCST school co-founder said in an interview that 'BCST needs to reevaluate Sutherland's theory that cranial bones move,' and he said BCST needs to disconnect from spirituality.' Contrast that attitude with Dr. Sutherland's final instructions on his headstone:

BE STILL AND KNOW

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

I AM

With their two headstones side by side, the Sutherland's characterize the biodynamic journey that evolves consciousness through touch: 

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

Here is a quote from Dr. Sutherland's Final Lecture that describes 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

Sutherland dedicated his final seven years to a touch that evolves consciousness; since he wanted it to evolve, he declared that cranial work "is not mine."

If You Follow Sutherland's Guidance On Touch 
Your Biodynamic Practice 
Will Naturally Evolve To Post-Biodynamic 
Which Occurs After I AM Implodes Into Your Cells
 And A Non-tidal Enfoldment Emerges
As An All-Cell Sacred Pulse Of Love

This post-biodynamic enfoldment of consciousness is non-tidal and paradoxical, which I call Pure Breath of Love and Kashmir Shaivism calls the Spanda. This all-cell Sacred Pulse emerges after we know I AM and  allow I AM to descend our midline and implode into our cells. When all our cells co-breathe Pure Breath of Love and pulse in tandem with the heart's SA node, that is called enfleshment (Stillness Ch 9 & Stillness Touch Ch 9).

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

Osteopathic Biodynamic History 

Read an interview on Sutherland's view of potency: Unerring Potency

Stillness Touch introduces philosopher-mystics Swedenborg and Russel because they deeply influenced Dr. Sutherland and Becker. Stillness Touch also presents the principles of touch that Dr. Sutherland taught to his inner circle of osteopath legacy practitioners who evolved his biodynamics. Dr. Rollin Becker coined Sutherland's final impulse biodynamic that he derived from embryologist Blechschmidt. Becker also evolved Dr. Sutherland's impulse by sensually characterizing the entire biodynamic tidal map, and then he laid us at the door to post-biodynamics Silent Partner.

"... super-personal surrender to this stillness that’s part of our being.
This is where osteopathy ends, and spiritual healing and the private domain of Faith begin."

Osteopathic biodynamics starts in neutral as stillness in the whole body and auric field, and it ends in Dynamic Stillness (infinite stillness), which Sutherland called I AM. Becker's biodynamic map was refined by the New England Study Group founded by Sutherland's inner circle student Anne Wells and Becker's student James Jealous in 1980. Based on the Study Group's findings, Dr. Jealous created a nine year osteopathic biodynamics course that he taught worldwide. 

As mentioned, if we touch based on Sutherland's final instructions, our touch self evolves. By practicing Be Still And Know I AM while simultaneously allowing our perception to expand and move beyond our physical senses, a post-biodynamic journey emerges that will land us in a non-tidal descending current domain of consciousness that enfleshes love. I call this 'post-biodynamic' because at this stage of realization the biodynamic tides have disappeared in I AM, which marks the end of osteopathic biodynamics Osteopathic Biodynamic Map.

After you realize I AM
(due to a super-personal surrender to stillness)  
 your consciousness expands to infinity
and tides disappear

As mentioned, Sacred Repose means you can inwardly wait in nothing for nothing for as long as it takes. I AM will then descend your midline and implode into your cells. Cellular implosion is a pivotal moment - THE FULCRUM - that lands you in a deep state of neutral called Sacred Repose. This depth of neutral escorts you to enfleshment where you realize a total cellular suffusion of infinite consciousness that unites your body with the Sacred Pulse of love. For a deeper dive into how this descending current journey that I call Stillness Touch coincides with the ancient wisdom, read my newest e-Book Stillness Touch Path of Union Click Here

There are many indicators of enfleshment:

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

2) Your midline descent absorbs the tides and you can no longer sense them.

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

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

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

6) Every heart-beat pulses a love that creates all things.

7) You feel bodily connected with everything.

8) Your breath synchronizes with a universal rhythm; it is as if each inhalation draws in the essence of all existence into your cells and each exhalation releases love into the cosmos.

9) Every cell vibrates a pulsing luminous awareness that emits a subtle glow perceived as inner warmth that connects your body to the fabric of creation.

10) The boundaries between self and other dissolve; your body feels like a seamless extension of the universe with no separation between inner and outer experience.

11) A profound stillness permeates your being, where all internal movements (physical, emotional, or mental) harmonize into a single pulsing presence of stillness.

12) You realize paradoxical consciousness: your physical form feels simultaneously finite and infinite, as if your body contains the vastness of the cosmos while remaining grounded in the present moment aid all the limits created by our biography.

13) Geometric patterns of tone that emanate within your body align your physical structure with the universal principles of creation.

14) The perception of time collapses, your body exists in an eternal now where past, present, and future converge in each heartbeat.

15) You sense that the elements come alive - earth, water, fire, air, ether - and pulse through your body as living beings of consciousness that unite your physical form with the cosmos.

16) Your body enters a state of dynamic neutrality in Sacred Repose: tissues are soft and consciousness expands into a unified field that is synchronized with Pure Breath of Love.

17) The midline is the axis of stillness that emanates a coherent field that organizes all bodily structures and functions without effort.

18) The fluid and long tide have fully integrated into your being, dissolving any sense of separation between your body and the universal pulse of consciousness.

19) The body’s fluids - blood, lymph, cerebrospinal fluid, ground substance - move as a singular, harmonious substance, reflecting the Whole-making intelligence of Pure Breath of Love.

20) An ignition of biodynamic potency emerges at the cellular level, where each cell pulses with the self-organizing Whole-making forces of Pure Breath of Love.

21) The sensory distinction between practitioner, patient, environment, and cosmos vanishes, and is replaced by a mutual, unified perceptual field that is centered in the heart’s SA node.

22) Our continuous presence of stillness creates a dynamic balance throughout your being: all motion arises from and returns to our unchanging center of stillness.

23) Inertial fulcra (points that create patterns of resistance or lesions) transmute into points of radiant vitality that are fully aligned with the original blueprint of health.

24) Your awareness anchors in the heart’s SA node, radiating a neutral presence of stillness that is aligned with the Pure Breath of Love. We are utterly free from engaging efferent directive impulses or tidal inquiry. This depth of neutral fosters a tonal match with the universal field, which dissolves a practitioner’s unconscious recoils.

25) Dynamic Stillness implodes - as infinite consciousness - into every cell, creating a non-tidal pulse of love that resonates with the body’s consciousness. This marks the shift from the perception of biodynamic tides to a post-biodynamic non-tidal state of enfleshed love.

26) The midline, once perceived as your guiding axis, merges into the body’s entirety, where the central channel becomes your whole felt-body sense that is united with Pure Breath of Love as a seamless pulse of presence.

27) Through non-invasive touch, your body entrains with another’s, by emanating love flesh-to-flesh without intention or “doing” while Pure Breath of Love guides the interaction beyond mechanical or tidal frameworks.

28) Hidden blocks due to core wounds surface and dissolve while consciousness descends the central channel. Guided by the heart’s pulse of love into the body's cells, the heart transforms inertial patterns into expressions of wholeness.

29) The body ceases to be perceived as separate from consciousness and love: you experience the body as consciousness and love itself, where every sensation reflects the unity of the Pure Breath of Love and the universal pulsing field that creates all things.

30) Beyond the biodynamic map, each heartbeat emanates a non-tidal sacred pulse that carries the Intelligence of love, which aligns the body’s rhythms with the cosmic pulse of creation,.

31) The body becomes a Sacred Vessel for a descending “Grail Journey.” Here, your infinite consciousness fully inhabits your flesh, uniting body and love in a palpable, lived experience of imploded Dynamic Stillness.

---

Dr. Sutherland's essential practice for offering non-doing touch is Be Still And Know I AM while you let your perception inwardly dwell beyond the physical senses. Once you realize I AM as infinite consciousness, you enjoy the fruit of Sutherland's biodynamics: Be Still And Know I AM

By following Sutherland's final instructions, your cranial practice will self-evolve - just as Sutherland's practice did. I can verify that personally: I practiced the way Sutherland taught until my cranial touch became a living force that self-evolved beyond the biodynamic map. After realizing I AM, I was presented with a conscious free-will choice:

At I AM, I Chose To Wait 
 In Nothing For Nothing
For As Long As It Takes 

Waiting for nothing (Be Still) cultivates a deep inner state of neutral called Sacred Repose. In Sacred Repose, your infinite consciousness turns inward, invaginates, and implodes into your cells. Here, every cell tremors with pure breath of love (Spanda) that pulses from your SA Node. Here, every heart beat emanates a love that is stronger than death and creates all that is.

When the gentle pulse of love
synchronizes with your heartbeat,
love pulses through every cell in your body: 
this moment marks your second birth of enfleshment
where Pure Breath of Love takes physical form as you

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

Tides disappear because we integrated them
Integrate means 'we united with'

After the cellular implosion of Dynamic Stillness, a Post-biodynamic non-tidal paradoxical consciousness emerges:

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

CLAUDE AI and Grok correlate Pure Breath of Love with the Spanda CLICK HERE

The key to realizing Sacred Repose is simple:
cease whatever prevents it.
The main impediments are efferent fear and desire.

FEAR & DESIRE
Are The Two Poles Of Efference
That prevent Sacred Repose 

Refer to this Chart

Desire 

Efferent desire that is outer directed prevents enfleshment. Many dozens of graduate practitioners have shared with me that the teaching format in their Biodynamic Cranial Approach (BCA) or Institute of Craniosacral Studies (ICS) are based on desire:

1) Students are taught to obey the cranial teacher as if they are a guru - both founders have gurus.

2) They are taught to enquire into tides to gain meaning and to achieve blissful spiritual states. Clinging to tides means we do not grow beyond them.

3) Practitioners learn to use stillness as a bypass to avoid discomfort by holding consciousness hostage in the innate bliss of the ascending tidal planes.

4) Bypass can cultivate an addiction to the innate bliss in the tides and Dynamic Stillness.

5) ICS teaches Upledger's unwinding: four students unwind a receiver while they visualize themselves going through their birth canal to realize the second birth.

BCA and ICS graduate practitioners alike, have expressed frustration because they feel deceived. The BCA/ICS schools' advertising lured them into their trainings by mis-using the language of desire. The language of desire has a 'smell' and a 'taste' that is drenched with ecstatic, radiant, bliss-filled, over the top seductive language that misuses manipulative buzz-words based on projection.

Students are mis-led to believe that they will "miss out" if they do not join their courses (Read the BCA and ICS websites, social media, and their newsletters).

Ironically, if you join their trainings, most likely you will miss out: you will not descend into your body.

Chances are, you will remain stuck in ascent and cling to the tidal map, which makes enfleshment impossible. How do I know this? As mentioned, I've received many dozens of direct reports from BCA/ICS graduates over the years. Plus, I observed these BCA and ICS practitioners because they stand out in my classes for all to see:

BCT/ICS practitioners are utterly and unknowingly stuck in Spiritual Bypass and lost in dissociation. Also, again, since both founders of these schools have gurus, inevitably their teaching methods are modeled on the guru-disciple, mentor dynamic.

Also, both founders trained in my work and teach it verbatim as if it is their own without my permission and without giving me credit.

However, based on what I have observed, and what graduates tell me, what these two schools offer to students is an extremely distorted version of my life's work. This unethical conduct is easily recognizable if you read my books, e-Books, articles, blogs, and interviews. You will recognize are my terms, stories, and words in their curriculum, class lectures, and websites.

In addition, these schools have desecrated my post-biodynamic impulse. One of the teachers trains students to unwind to realize their second birth, and teaches shaking during sessions as if it is the sacred tremor or spanda. On the other hand, the BCA teacher does not believe that post-biodynamic exists, and their students remain stuck in the biodynamic tides.

Fear

At the other end of the practitioner bypass spectrum is fear. According to hundreds of student testimonials who have reported to me, and after an analysis of their curriculum, it is obvious that fear is the primary teaching method in Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB) and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST). As noted, the CSB/BCST training began independently separate from cranial osteopathy by building upon Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST) efferent principles. Upledger's CST started a lay training for parents to treat their children. Subsequently, CST gained tremendous popularity among non-osteopathic practitioners and CST exploded into the cranial field to the utter horror of the licensed cranial practitioners (I was one of them). 

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

The BCST/CSB international institutions claim that its approach is connected with and equivalent to biodynamic cranial osteopathy. Again, read this one example: ARTICLE and read an evaluation of that article by CLAUDE AI.

Osteopaths vehemently disagree with the author of the above article. The BCST curriculum, shown at the end of this blog, desecrates the biodynamic principles taught by Dr. Sutherland, Becker, Jealous, Duvall, and Desrosiers, ... But particularly, the biodynamic DO's in the USA vehemently resent BCST's deceptive marketing, why? Because it is a blatant ethical breach of integrity. Let's read what Dr. Jealous writes:

Be careful of experts who believe they understand Osteopathy. Why should they anyway? They have never practiced Osteopathy or studied with Sutherland or his students. To practice Osteopathy is not anything like what I have been told by craniosacral therapists that they do. I have witnessed this deception: non-Osteopathic persons taking Osteopathic ideas and presenting themselves as teachers of this work. I have met some of these people and they do not understand Osteopathy in any form but their own imaginings. They often believe that they understand what the great ones have said. The great ones were great because of their teachers and the authority given them by a legacy that is strenuous. We need to reclaim our community or accept the death of Osteopathy.  

           ~ An Osteopathic Odyssey p 123-124

---

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

Remaining in ascent
we are stuck in the empty void of stillness, 
and project a shadow biodynamics
created by the ego & Superego
that aborts our second birth into love.

Warning: Contrary to what my haters assert, I am not criticizing non-osteopathic schools: they offer functional work, which is fine with me if they simply call it functional. However, I feel compelled to report the facts. For example, CSB/BCST developed outside of and separate from osteopathic biodynamic cranial. Whereas the BCA/ICS schools appropriated my work and distorted it, which I need to reclaim.

---

It is non-osteopath school's deceptive marketing and arrogance that is based on zero understanding of osteopathic biodynamics that moves me to present the facts. What qualifies me? I trained for eighteen years with an osteopath student of Dr. Sutherland.

However, I fully realize that my blog infuriate readers who believe the BCST/CSB/BCA/ICS dogma:

"Charles puts down other biodynamic cranial approaches so he can assert that Stillness Touch is better than the other biodynamic approaches."

However, each of Sutherland's cranial three approaches are wonderful in their own right, and they have their rightful place: I practiced and taught all of them for many decades. 

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

Here is a fact: 

Non-osteopath biodynamics is not the biodynamics
that osteopaths learn during their nine-year training

If you do not believe me, spend $600 USD and read Jealous' class handouts that are now published.

If you are interested in Sutherland's biodynamics, it behooves you do the in-depth research in the osteopathic literature. Then, you will see for yourself that the biodynamics Dr. Sutherland created, Becker developed, and Jealous disseminated is not "better than" the functional cranial work that is taught as 'biodynamic' by non-osteopath BCST teachers. However, the two approaches are not the same.

No approach is better than any other; it is the mixing of different approaches, out of utter ignorance, that is the problem. Dr. Still at the end of his life implored osteopaths to "keep it pure".

It is crucial to understand that biomechanical, functional, and biodynamic approaches are vastly different
(Read Stillness Ch. 3-4).

---

I revere Sutherland's pre-biodynamic biomechanical cranial. Recall, that a single sutural session opened my consciousness to infinity for one month. I also enjoyed practicing Sutherland's biomechanical and functional work for 20 years until 1995 when biodynamics spontaneously emerged.

After 1995, I followed Dr. Sutherland's guidance of 'Be Still' and I stopped all efferent pre-biodynamic functional medical practices.

I admit that it was a relief to stop being the doer who 'knows.'

In 1948, Dr. Sutherland said, in essence: that after biodynamics emerged in him, he saw efferent practices as an 'outside force' that prevents the emergence of a biodynamic neutral.

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

Pre-biodynamic biomechanical and functional cranial, and the biodynamic practices operate from different domains of consciousness. Each domain has specific practice boundaries (Read Stillness Ch. 5-9).

I have thoroughly walked Dr. Sutherland's entire cranial journey and I practiced and taught all three types of his cranial work over five decades, circa 1974. I have thoroughly outlines the differences between the pre-biodynamic, biodynamic, and post-biodynamic cranial approaches based on my direct experience.

Again, these distinctions are detailed in Stillness (biodynamic) and Stillness Touch (post-biodynamic). 

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

Do you want to know what you are getting into
before you sign up for a training? 

If yes, then digest the original osteopathic definitions
of the types of cranial so you can see for yourself
what cranial approach each school offers.

If you do not pay attention to what is in a curriculum,
and instead, you blindly believe the marketing,
you will be deceived

Who Does Charles Think He Is?

I get this question from arrogant, ignorant non-osteopathic practitioners regularly. After fifty-two years of study and practice of Dr. Sutherland's cranial work under the guidance of Sutherland's student, I feel qualified to present an accurate historical picture of Sutherland's osteopathic cranial work.

Again, by grace, I learned cranial osteopathy directly from one of Sutherland's students, osteopath Dr. DeJarnette from 1973 - 1991. Recall, Sutherland introduced the original biodynamic principles of non-doing in 1948. This was thirty five (35) years before Upledger introduced Craniosacral Therapy (CST) to parents  so they could treat their children.

Sutherland privately taught biodynamics only to his inner circle legacy osteopaths, but it was not called biodynamic until Becker coined it after Sutherland's death. That means Sutherland's biodynamic principles and practice boundaries were introduced fifty (50) years before Franklyn Sills began his Upledger Legacy Course, which later became Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB), which later morphed into its equivalent, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST).

For context, I had been in practice for 10 years before Upledger introduced Craniosacral Therapy (CST) in 1985. I had been in practice for 20 years before Sills' Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB) entered the non-osteopath cranial field in 1995.

Having trained in Sutherland's non-protocol, non-doing cranial osteopathy, it was impossible to appreciate Upledger's ten-step protocol, why? Because the CST protocol does not in any way resemble non-protocol functional cranial osteopathy. Nor was I able to appreciate how Sills' CSB could be remotely construed as "biodynamic" given his efferent curriculum.

I cannot imagine how betrayed and enraged the USA cranial osteopaths felt, given that Upledger and Sills marketed their trainings as equivalent to cranial osteopathy (Upledger CST) and biodynamic cranial osteopathy (Sills CSB/BCST). More on that later.

My first whiff of collusion among the BCST schools was in 2007 when  a Swiss BCST school founder wrote

"Charles, why did you have to name that Sills' biodynamics is not based on Dr. Sutherland's biodynamics."

First, Sills was trained in Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST). Second, he dropped out osteopathic school without gaining a degree in osteopathy. Upledger's CST is not osteopathic cranial, it is a lay training  developed for parents to treat their children. Why? Because back then, there were only a few hundred cranial osteopaths in the world. After an explosive demand, Upledger began to offer CST to bodyworkers. In 1995, Sills began his Upledger Legacy Course, according to John Wilks:

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

Sills had a conversation with James Jealous about his school, after which Dr. Jealous asked Sills to not call his work biodynamic. Even so, Sills went ahead and called his work Craniosacral Biodynamics (CSB), which later morphed into Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST).   

As mentioned, I not only witnessed the emergence of Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy (CST), I also saw how insulted the cranial osteopaths felt after Upledger marketed himself as the "founder of cranial sacral therapy."

Then, a decade later, Upledger's legacy student, Franklin Sills, similarly marketed himself as the "founder of craniosacral biodynamics."

Both these marketing strategies reek, because they misled consumers to believe falsely, that CST is equivalent to Sutherland's cranial osteopathy, and that BCST/CSB is equivalent to biodynamic cranial osteopathy, which in both cases is totally untrue:

Sutherland founded all cranial approaches

Sutherland's biomechanical cranial started in the 1900's, which evolved in the 1930's into a functional cranial that is guided by the cranial rhythmic impulse (CRI). Sutherland taught functional cranial until the 1940's. Then, he introduced biodynamic cranial (even though biodynamic was not yet a term until Becker coined it) and Sutherland ceased all his efferent functional cranial practices.

Sutherland's precise cranial definitions were refined and evolved by numerous osteopathic cranial practitioners over the decades. You can read the exacting osteopathic definitions in one place because I gathered and reproduced them in my book Stillness Chapter 3. You can also scour the osteopathic literature (the references are included in Stillness) so you can read for yourself the definitions in the literature.

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

However, I do not offer biodynamic osteopathy

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

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

Deceptive marketing by non-osteopaths
damaged the public's perception of osteopathic biodynamics
 they promoted a shadow biodynamics 
that distorts Dr. Sutherland's non-doing practice of BE STILL

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

What Is A Shadow Biodynamics?

My book Stillness points out that "life manifests in the white-hot polarity between the dynamic tension of opposites." Therefore, a polar opposite shadow biodynamics emerged as a counter-force to Dr. Sutherland's living impulse. Again, BE STILL AND KNOW I AM is Sutherland's essential practice for offering non-doing touch, which includes:

Get Away As Far Away As You Can From Your Physical Senses While Touching
Do Not Use Your Hands To Feel
Because They Are Erring Unreliable Physical Senses
The Practitioner Is Not The Doer
In Neutral The Ego Yields Control Over The Body
To The Unerring Potency
The Relational Field Between Practitioner and Client Is Mutual
- Stillness To Stillness -
Not Ego To Ego
The Unerring Potency of Stillness Heals
Touch Is A Path To Know I AM
Trust The Tide
Be Still

Do we dare to recognize and look straight into the eye a shadow biodynamics that compels a practitioner to be the doer and teaches students to relate ego to ego with recipients while applying efferent touch?

A shadow biodynamics teaches students to orient to the neutral, which creates Sutherland's tad-pole functional neutral, feel the tides with our hands, and to enquire into the tides to gain exalted meanings from them to gain spiritual insight, and some schools teach students to use stillness to bypass discomfort.

For example, biodynamic osteopaths are NOT taught to manage trauma.

Trauma Management or Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a method for soothing the nervous system's natural fight, flight, freeze reactions to stress or trauma. Trauma management or SE is an efferent functional neurological practice that creates false-fulcra if we are operating inside a biodynamic neutral, which can lead to dissociation, why?

Because when we are navigating the nervous system's reactivity, that is functional work, it is not biodynamic. That means we are not operating from a biodynamic neutral of whole-body stillness from within our midline. It is impossible to count the number of false fulcra we create in clients when we use trauma management in a biodynamic or post-biodynamic field. 

When Trauma Management (Somatic Experiencing) is offered inside a biodynamic or post-biodynamic field, that is Unethical Conduct.

Practitioners who cross the biodynamic and post-biodynamic practice boundaries do a massive disservice to patients. Clients need to report these unethical practitioners to the appropriate licensing boards if they offer SE in a biodynamic or post-biodynamic field.

SE is excellent if you offer in a functional field amid your tad-pole neutral.

The collective shadow of the Beast firmly drives the masses to operate from a post-truth disposition, according to Steiner.

It feels tragic to observe thousands of innocent unwitting cranial practitioners who, without their knowing it, got trapped in bypass due to their 'biodynamic' training. Many have zero contact with the osteopathic biodynamic neutral, the unerring potency, the tides, Dynamic Stillness, or post-biodynamic Pure Breath of Love. The sad part is, as long as they are caught up in efference and bypass, they will never realize Dynamic Stillness or Pure Breath of Love.

We bypass whenever efferent fear & desire guide us:
we feel with our hands, look for tides and midlines, and treat recipients,
relieve symptoms, and apply trauma management 
in the name of biodynamics.

This blog is not about functional cranial,
which is an excellent medical treatment model
that requires efference!

If BCST/BCS stopped falsely asserting
that it is biodynamic,
and instead, told the truth
that it is functional cranial
the war would end.

---

Calling functional cranial work "biodynamic" amounts to ethical misconduct.
Why?
Because Dr. Sutherland taught biodynamic cranial touch
as a non-doing, non-efferent practice of BE STILL And Know I AM.

BE STILL is impossible if we enquire into tides.

Enquiry is an efferent practice that bypasses the biodynamic neutral and prevents contact with the unerring potency, the tides, Dynamic Stillness, and Pure Breath of Love. 

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

It is practitioner efference, guided by fear or desire, that recoils our awareness up and out of our inner-body sanctum and projects our consciousness into the ascending planes. Then, from our ascended disposition, the ego projects consciousness into our hands so we can feel motions in a client and 'read' their nervous system, feel the presence of trauma, evaluate their anatomy, discern the status of the cranial motions, feel tides, see midlines, and look for primary respiration coming form the outside, etc. ... all this we use to diagnose the craniosacral system looking for lesion patterns that dwell inside the client's subtle body. 

Efferent methods are not an aspect of a biodynamic practice, according to Dr. Sutherland.

Again, the osteopathic biodynamics that he taught to his inner circle of osteopaths is: touch while practicing Be Still. The osteopathic biodynamic cranial practices taught by Drs. Sutherland, Becker, and Jealous require that we realize a body-felt inner contact with the unerring potency and then, we synchronize with it.

Potency is only realized in a biodynamic neutral.

We contact this 'unerring' potency and its expressed tides after we realize the biodynamic neutral, which is defined as a whole-body stillness. The ascending current tides then guide us to the realization of Dynamic Stillness or I AM. This source potency creates the body. However, the BCA and ICS schools teach desire-driven methods that are based on desire. Here are some of the desire driven practices (BCA):

1) To efferently enquire into the tides.
2) To misuse stillness to bypass contact with the potency.
3) To engage in a co-dependent guru-disciple relationship.
4) Classes lack depth: they are filled with intellectually shallow information that is inessential, and does not contribute to the experiential realization of biodynamics. The focus is on trivial details and superficial facts that entertain, rather than dropping deep into meaningful content based on direct inner experience.
5) Unwinding is used realize our second birth.
6) Shaking on the table is called the sacred tremor, spanda.

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

1) To feel and evaluate with our hands.
2) To orient to neutral, feel the anatomy and the nervous system to evaluate trauma so we can manage it.
3) To apply treatment protocols as intentions or suggestions to relieve symptoms.
4) To visualize the long tide as an outside force.

All the above efferent practices are opposite
to the biodynamics that Sutherland taught
his inner circle Legacy Practitioners

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

Anyone can falsely assert 
that an efferent functional practice is biodynamic

Any US biodynamic osteopath who has taken the nine-year training will tell you that a Sutherland-inspired biodynamic session begins in neutral, which is the moment that stillness pervades your whole inner-body space and auric field. Whole-body stillness (neutral) emanates primary respiration from within the midline, which suffuses unerring potency throughout every cell of your whole body.

Stillness emanates unerring potency
from the midline to within the cells
this is same potency that creates the forces of life
that make your 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 The Function In Your Recipient

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

It may seem radical to non-osteopath biodynamic practitioners that osteopaths do not enquire into the biodynamic tides, do not feel for motions with their hands, do not orient to neutral, anatomy, or the nervous system, do not evaluate the nervous system for signs of trauma, do not apply trauma management, and do not adore their cranial teacher like a guru.

Drs. Sutherland, Becker, and Jealous all taught that osteopathic biodynamics thrives in mutuality amid an oral transmission, which is a communal sharing among equals. Let's read again what Sutherland wrote in 1948:

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

Instead of using our hands to feel the anatomy and evaluate the nervous system for trauma (functional work), Sutherland teaches us to contact the unerring potency that dwells within our body and to synchronize with it by being still.

The unerring potency exists prior to anatomy as an emanation from the SA node cells that create an entire body over nine months. In other words, as Dr. Sutherland says, the power that makes the body is the unerring potency that dwells within. 

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

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

The final expression, and end product of the potency is anatomy,
which is many steps removed from Source.
We can only sense potency in neutral, as a whole-body contact with the 
presence of stillness.

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

 Potency Makes The Whole Body - It Exists Prior To Anatomy

To let the potency be in charge of our sessions, we withdraw our awareness inside and contact the indwelling potency and Be Still - that practice naturally synchronizes us with the potency.

Again, the indwelling presence of stillness carries the template of wholeness that makes the body. If our awareness goes out of the body, we are in the opposite efferent direction of neutral: our consciousness gets projected out of our midline and we dissociate. When leave our inner-body sanctum, and efferently send attention into our hands to feel anatomy and the nervous system trauma inside the client's subtle body (craniosacral system) - THAT is efferent.

Similarly, if we visualize primary respiration - as though it is an outside force - we bypass the indwelling potency, which is the formative force that makes the body.

Certainly, the life force exists outside, but the source potency that made the body over nine months is inside our body. If that is NOT obvious review the study of the heart's SA Node in my book Stillness.

The end result of using efference while touching is we nave NO contact with neutral, our presence of stillness, the unerring potency, the tides, Dynamic Stillness, and Pure Breath of Love.

The inner or outer direction of our awareness
during a session
is a choice point of freedom for each practitioner:
outer direction is functional
and inner direction leads us
to a biodynamic neutral

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

Whereas, using efference recoils our awareness outward to treat.
That is a wonderful functional cranial method.
Functional cranial is an excellent approach for symptom relief.

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

Chart

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

In the esoteric spiritual circles, crossing the threshold of the abyss of the unknown means that we allow our consciousness to expand beyond infinity until we reach a portal - fulcrum - that frees our spirit from the grips of the ego and Superego control, which liberates our Soul from the prison of the narcissist.

Again, the Sutherland's etched the total biodynamic journey of the ascent of consciousness on their headstones:

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

Click Here for Osteo Biodynamic Map

The Ego And Superego Are Terrified
Of Divine Feminine Power

The ego and Superego harbor a subtle core terror that goes something like "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 other ego stories of terror prevent contact with the potency. Terror also prevents our direct contact with the tides and it recoils us from the Divine Feminine power of love.

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

The use of efference creates in us an unconscious cycle of chronic bypass that, over time, can so alienate us from our source potency that we cannot find our way back home inside our inner-body sanctum, which contains our indwelling midline potency. Instead, we live in a dissociated virtual biodynamic shadow domain that is bereft of any direct inner experience of the potency or the tides. Shadow biodynamic practitioners possess an intellectual understanding that is based on theories and definitions. Students are subtly encouraged by cranial teacher guru's to use biodynamic terms in place of a direct experience of the potency and the tides. 

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

---

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

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

I mentioned that Becker coined the word 'biodynamic' in cranial osteopathy; most likely, the term was taken from German Embryologist Erich Blechschmidt who also used the word biodynamic. He directly observed a 'biodynamic activity' that creates the forming fields of function, which then makes the anatomy to serve the already-existing functions. Blechschmidt upended the structure-function medical dogma. Even though there was a loose association between Steiner and Blechschmidt because the Anthroposophical Press published Blechschmidt's first book, it is unclear whether the term 'biodynamic' was sourced by Blechschmidt from Steiner's biodynamic gardening that he coined in 1924.

Function Creates Form

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

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

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

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

Cranial bones, spine, nervous system, organs, tissues, fascia, muscles, ground substance, the cell membrane and cells, and all other structures of the human body are created by the potency - an invisible power that arises from an unknowable Divine Feminine Intelligence that overflows with love. This Intelligence holds the template of wholeness that creates the body as one unit. Dr. Sutherland called this Intelligence the unerring potency of the Breath of Life Unerring Potency.

Practicing Stillness Touch Supports Your Grail Journey That Embodies The Evolution of Consciousness

Now let's segue from a biodynamic to a post-biodynamic approach to touch that I've coined Stillness Touch.

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

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

I AM is an end-stage realization for an osteopathic biodynamic practitioner. The ascending tidal currents lifts our consciousness to free us from the grip of the ego. Then, by crossing the threshold into the black abyss of Dynamic Stillness, we can realize an infinite, unknowable Pure Consciousness. Sutherland characterized this realization as having a "vision through the small end of the microscope, followed by the view through the big end of a telescope to observe the material elements disappearing into endless space." (Read Appendix 3 Stillness Touch).

After we wait in Dynamic Stillness for as long as it takes, I AM implodes inside our cells, while our Radiantly Awake Self unites with and becomes Pure Breath of Love. Here, we sense a primordial pulse in every cell that emanates Divine Feminine Will, which is the power of love and wisdom that creates all that is and is stronger than death. At this stage of realization, we enter the post-biodynamic domain of paradoxical consciousness (Read Stillness Touch Ch. 9). 

When we enjoy a living union between the body, consciousness, and love
this is our second birth

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

That is why when we use the hands efferently as extensions of our physical senses to feel anatomy, the nervous system, trauma, or to mix all the types of cranial work together is a spiritual bypass and amounts to ethical misconduct. Biomechanical and functional treatment methods require efference to objectify and separate the parts from the whole: the nervous system, organs, all other anatomy into parts. However, when our presence is efferent in a biodynamic field, it transmits gross digital static that collapses the recipient's delicate field of potency that emanates a fractal breathing field as the motion of life, namely, the biodynamic tides. I am not knocking the medical model of touch, it is a fine practice; I practiced biomechanical and functional cranial for 23 years.

However, by definition, medical touch does not evolve consciousness.

Why not? Like the opposing ends of a magnet, the slightest practitioner efference recoils our attention from the potency. Efference creates an empty void within the body that subsequently gets filled with the inertia from the nervous system's digital static. Dr. Sutherland was acutely aware of this, and he articulated his radical approach to touch publicly in 1948 where he referred to not being guided by an 'outside force' as we shall see.

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

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

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

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

If the osteopathic biodynamic path was not part of your training, most likely it was because your BCST teachers were trained in Upledger's CST. Therefore, you may not be aware that the essence of Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamic teachings are based on practitioner non-efference. Again, in Sutherland's words, no outside force is used by the practitioner. Sutherland taught that the practice of non-efference means to Be Still while dwelling inwardly in a state of non-doing. This insight emerged after he witnessed first hand that the power of the unerring potency is the doer that does all the healing. Sutherland considers health to be a state of wholeness, a state when all the fulcra in the body are harmoniously synchronized. When that occurs, all the body's so-called parts operate as one unit of function (See Blechschmidt below).

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

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

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

If you study these osteopathic definitions objectively, you clearly see that BCA is based on efferent desire, and BCST is based on fear, which fulfills Sutherland's definition of functional cranial work.

For a synopsis of Stillness Chapter 3 read  DEFINITIONS OF THE TYPES OF CRANIAL

Again, a functional practitioner, by definition, objectifies a client, uses the hands to efferently enter the client's craniosacral system to evaluate the status of the nervous system to feel for lesion patterns and trauma. 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 telling the truth were important principles when I began my cranial studies in 1973. I trained for nearly two decades with a student of Dr. Sutherland’s. Through stories and anecdotes, my osteopath teacher Dr. DeJarnette emanated the living spirit of Dr. Sutherland. It felt as if Dr. Sutherland was present in our classroom. As a result, I enjoyed a deep body-felt living connection with Dr. Sutherland's spirit. I am sure that many cranial osteopaths feel this same connection with Sutherland.

It is due to the 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 fifty-two years and I will continue to do so. Hopefully, the Stillness Touch Legacy Practitioners will continue to do the same in the future. 

I believe that the direct emanation I received from Dr. Sutherland also 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 carry Dr. Sutherland’s impulse as a precious living being that they keep alive by transmitting his non-doing principles in their own way. These osteopaths know that the practitioner is not the doer, because they directly experience the potency and how it moves the practitioner's attention and hands during a session - this is the essence of Sutherland's osteopathic biodynamics. 

When Offering Non Doing Touch,
Stillness-as-Potency Will Move Your Hands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biodynamic osteopathy states that efferent touch 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 fills that void by accessing the nervous system, anatomy, naming, manipulating, establishing a relational field, creating space, visualizing primary respiration or the midline, applying intentions, managing trauma, shifting into particular tides or zones, and on and on it goes (See Stillness Touch Ch. 3) Also, review this CHART.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

'Be Still' means that we cease all efference.

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

How Is Stillness Touch Different From BCST In An Actual Practice?

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

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

Taylor's Chart: Practitioner Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

'I Have No Contact With The Tides' 

If you are a BCST practitioner, the following revelation may ruffle your feathers. Below, Ryan Halford, the founder of the Craniosacral Podcast and BCST teacher is talking with me about a secret: BCST certified practitioners and teachers confess to him that they do not feel the tides. This occurs despite having graduated a two-year, ten module biodynamic craniosacral therapy training, being certified, and teaching:

You've tapped into phenomena (BCST graduates not feeling tides) that definitely I have noticed, too. I get a lot of emails from listeners all around the world ... A lot about BCST that I hear is being secretly shared with me is that they're not really feeling the tides, and now they're a teaching assistant, they're not confident, they don't know what they're doing, they're working from their   mind, rather than from a true owned experience of a full-body permeation, where you feel every molecule of your matter responding simultaneously to this very large, mysterious unfoldment, you know? I think what you're offering is so valuable, Charles, you know, being positioned as a post-graduate training, it's perfect. I mean, you could take them to the next level.

Here’s what a BCST teacher wrote after participating in one Stillness Touch post-biodynamic Master 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 your Sutherland-inspired Stillness Touch.

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

The efferent, doing-to practices taught in the BCST curriculum 
 is what fostered the death of biodynamics outside of osteopathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I try to be aware of stillness. Not a still point, but a stillness that is that individual. You can only be conscious of stillness; you cannot palpate stillness with your hands. The stillness is that which centers every molecule of being of that living body (Brooks, 2000, p.66-68).

Using your hands to feel the nervous system, evaluate anatomy, sense tidal motions, or to resolve trauma
are not osteopathic biodynamic practices

What does 'Be Still' Mean? Do Not Use Efference

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

Functional cranial work is a beautiful practice

However, what characterizes Dr. Sutherland’s biodynamics is until you can ‘be still’ that you ‘know’ I AM, which is the invisible unerring potency that made the body. Do you want to enjoy a 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 unerring potency of the Breath of Life inside you. And, do not mix the types of cranial practices during a session. Why? Because mixing contaminates the potency and weakens it, which opposes Sutherland's non-doing, non-efferent, biodynamic principles.

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

It angers some BCST practitioners when I suggest that to learn biodynamics the way that Sutherland taught it do not take courses with any teacher who is certified by the BCST organizations. To understand why I make such a radical assertion, let's look at osteopathic cranial history. 

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

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

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

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

The practice of non-doing touch by letting the unerring potency be in charge of the session was so unconventional that even Sutherland called it ‘uncanny.’ Before going public with his non-doing principles of touch, Dr. Sutherland orally transmitted his biodynamic practice 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, biodynamic (Read Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, p.166 in the original Rudra Press edition).

Franklyn Sills was trained in Upledger's Craniosacral Therapy and he founded craniosacral biodynamics (CSB) or biodynamic craniosacral therapy. When he says he discovered craniosacral biodynamics, it misleads the uninformed because in reality it was Dr. Sutherland who discovered, created, and developed all the cranial types beginning at the turn of the century. To this day, Sutherland remains the source of all cranial practices that exist. Cranial osteopathy has precisely defined each type of cranial based on Dr. Sutherland's original work. Again, the 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 do not know the definition of biodynamics 
that Dr. Sutherland taught to his inner circle of osteopaths 
it is because your BCST training did not teach you the principles  
that Sutherland introduced eight decades ago to the professional licensed osteopathic cranial field  

---

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

“Dear Charles,

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

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

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

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

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

Again, recall what Ryan Halford said in his interview with me on the Death of Biodynamics about practitioners who "secretly shared with me that they're not really feeling the tide, and now they're a teaching assistant, they're not confident, they don't know what they're doing, they're coming out of their mind."

I discovered an example of this BCST secret in Italy in 2013 when a teacher invited to offer a Stillness Touch post-biodynamic class. All 64 students were BCST graduate practitioners. Each graduate biodynamic practitioners confessed in the class that they had never experienced a living embodied contact with neutral or primary respiration. The reason for this was because their Italian BCST teacher taught them to employ a sequence of 12 efferent steps as part of his virtual biodynamic training. He compiled his 12-step sequence into a chart that you put on your wall so that while treating clients you can apply his 12-step protocol during a session. The teacher was proud of his chart. His practitioners were taught to orient to the nervous system, feel anatomy, evaluate the nervous system, feel for trauma and lesions, and on it goes. Whereas, by contrast, Sutherland's biodynamics does not involve efferently treating clients. Let us examine why. But first, let's review this Chart again to see some of the 12 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 by definition a compensatory neurological reaction to stress. The CW rate goes up or down based on the amount of stress that is present. CW expresses digital, electro-charged, automatic repeating patterns that create a holographic digital record of your past. This permanent record of your history is etched in the ground substance and your body's tissues, which affects all the cellular functions throughout the body. CW, therefore, is a record of your biography (history) that is frozen in time inside an inertial empty void that is locked in your tissues as digital cranial wave patterns.

By contrast, the fluid and long tide are living fractals and their rates are steady. Tides are sensed as a whole-body to-and-fro breathing that emanates fractal expressions of the Breath of Life that come from 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 if we live in the modern world we have cranial waves, right? If that is true, why can’t I feel for the nervous system lesions and intend techniques to cure them while in the cranial wave?”

Practicing functional cranial work is fine, but it is not biodynamic.

Why do I say that functional cranial is not biodynamic?

First, the cranial wave, that Sutherland coined the cranial rhythmic impulse, is defined as a neurological motion that constantly modulates its rate and quality in response to the degree of stress that are present. The cranial wave is not a whole-body fractal tide: it is a local digital reaction to stress that etches holographic digital patterns that are signature recordings of our biographical events into the tissues. The nervous system’s reaction to stress modifies the breathing fractals of life. But how do the tides get changed by the cranial wave.

The cranial wave radiates gross electro-charged digital signals that are so crude that it recoils the delicate fractal expressions of the breathing tides and the tide shuts down in the affected areas of the body. When cranial wave nervous system activity collapses the whole-body field of primary respiration, it leaves behind an empty void inside the client’s subtle body.

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

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, when the neutral deepens into a whole body stillness, primary respiration breathes the fractal forces of life body-wide.

Therefore, if you are feeling the nervous system and you expect the cranial wave or biodynamic tides to appear, or, if you visualize primary respiration as an outside force, those are efferent activities which lay down inertial tracks of false fulcra inside the client. Practitioner efference adds to the fossilized record of the past, which is already entombed in the gelled ground substance and stored as armored tissues. The result is increased dysfunction, more symptoms, and the potential for disease, all of which accelerates the onset of death. This is why Taylor considers efference to be ethical misconduct.

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

To contact primary respiration in the living present requires that we can be still and wait within ... without expecting any motions. Be still includes not expecting tides or visualizing primary respiration. When neutral arrives as a whole body stillness, a whole-body primary respiration can then emerge. There are two tidal expressions in the biodynamic field: Sutherland called the first expression the fluid tide, and the next expression is a vast luminous global breathing that Becker called the long tide. Fluid tide and long tide are the original terms for the two expressions of primary respiration. 

"Mid-tide" Is A Contrived, Misleading, Made-up Term, Having Zero Connection To Sutherland's Biodynamics

"Dr. Sutherland originally used the term fluid tide to describe the first biodynamic tidal expression of primary respiration that he experienced. However, someone in the Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) community later renamed this phenomenon as 'mid-tide' - a change that creates confusion.

The term 'mid-tide' incorrectly suggests it exists between two other tides, implying a sequence of three tides: a beginning-tide, mid-tide, and end-tide. This raises questions about what would constitute these other tides. If we assumed the cranial wave was the 'beginning-tide,' this would be inaccurate because the cranial wave isn't actually a tide at all - it's a localized, pre-biodynamic response reflecting the nervous system's reaction to stress.

This terminology shift from Sutherland's clear 'fluid tide' to the ambiguous 'mid-tide' introduces unnecessary confusion into the field. There was no logical reason to abandon Sutherland's original, accurately descriptive term in favor of a misleading substitute."

Expectation Is Efferent

When you expect any motions - be it the cranial wave, the tides, or the cessation of motion as Dynamic Stillness - that is an efferent practice, which creates false fulcra. Inertia is by definition an anti-life force - a death force - that turns the ground substance from a liquid to a gel. When gelled, the ground substance emits digital static, as electro-charged cranial wave patterns, that do not transmit the Template of the Whole that emanates from long tide as fractal instructions from the potency of the Breath of Life to the cells. Only a liquid 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, or anticipation of stillness, is efferent, which depletes the potency that, in turn, diminishes cellular vitality and leads to symptoms, which become disease ... death draws that much closer toward us. This is why Sutherland told us to trust the unerring potency of the tide.

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

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

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

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

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

You have to give up every form of efferent by-pass that impedes contact with the potency to enjoy an embodied contact with the unerring potency and the tides.

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

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

Efferent Ways That Practitioners Learn To Bypass Direct Embodied Contact with the Potency

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

*Practitioners establish a relational field on the level of ego to ego.

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

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

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

* Treating symptoms by using intention to heal.

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

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

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

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

* Entering the client’s inner subtle body - 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 a stillpoint to a client either internally and silently or verbally.

* Intending cranial techniques to balance inertial patterns.

* Negotiating space or creating a 'zone.'

* Relating to the recipient on the level of ego, rather than letting the unerring potency be in charge.

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

* Using any type of treatment sequence or protocol during a session.

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

Here is what I observed in my 2022 Master Class in Prague in the students of a "biodynamic" cranial teacher:

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

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

* Diminishing the importance of shadow work and exalting virtual "bliss, light and love." 

*Displaying disdain for Pure Breath of Love.

A graduate from from a Swiss BCST teacher told me what they learn:

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

*My Swiss teacher goes ballistic whenever students mention post-biodynamics.

The fundamental flaw of the BCST trainings is its emphasis on an ego to ego relationship with the client. BCST practitioners spend tremendous amounts of their energy ensuring that the client's ego feels safe, warm, comfortable, in control, informed, and that each contact feels good, etc,. Here is what Becker says about the doctor-patient relational field:

The relationship with the patient is a One to One relationship; not a One to one relationship. 

The doctor-patient relationship is not based on hierarchy. The practitioner is not in any way superior to the patient (One to one); rather, both the practitioner and client are in a mutual communion with Source (One to One). 

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

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

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

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

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

Review Of Advanced Biodynamics: Following Parts Without Sensing The Whole

Let's back up and review a biodynamic practice: suppose you practice biodynamics the way that Sutherland taught. In practice that means you do not expect cranial wave, you are not orienting to anatomy, nor are you being guided by or intending in the cranial wave. Instead, you can wait within in stillness amid non-doing. Neutral arrives naturally, as a whole body stillness, and the fluid tide emerges. You not that your attention is being moved by the fluid drive and you can sense the motions that are present. So far so good; however, if you are not synchronized with the whole-body fluid flow or the vast luminous global excursions of primary respiration, you can fall into the trap of unconsciously creating inertial motion that leaves false fulcra in the client.

That means even amid an authentic biodynamic cranial session, if you have no contact with the whole-body breathing of primary respiration you are only tracking the parts while leaving out the whole. You are following the footprints of inertial motion, which in and of itself can be misleading because the inertial expressions of the parts do not reveal the whole process. We miss the living unerring potency of the tides - as a presence of stillness - that expresses primary respiration, which is the force of life, health, and wholeness throughout the whole body.

Potency is a subtle omniscient substance, a living ‘fluid within a fluid.' To sense living potency (as opposed to the empty void), you must be still and wait … for nothing ... then, by grace, your attention becomes soft, unfocused, unfixed, open, and free, and then the potency of life may reveal itself to you and become your guide and move your attention and your hands.

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

You can sense primary respiration as living fractal three-dimensional motions that simultaneously well up the vertical midline while breathing horizontally throughout the whole body. Although primary respiration contains and powers the fluid drive, it is distinct. By analogy, if the pond is primary respiration, the fluid drive is a current inside the pond. Primary respiration is the potency of the whole field - the pond - that invisibly shifts as the fluid drive from point to point in the client’s subtle body. When the fluid drive dwells in a particular local area, this is called the motion present. This local motility 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 restores the forces of life by transmuting inertial patterns back to their original ever-changing fractal state. In the body, the neutral ignites the process of transmutation that 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. Imagine the path of a fish as it moves around in an aquarium, this is the fluid drive. The fish’s particular undulating bodily motility when it dwells in a particular area 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, the fluid drive or, only watch its specific bodily gestures, the motion present, as interesting as it may be, without the larger perspective of primary respiration 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 movements - you lose the perspective of the Whole. The influence of primate respiration is why the fish is behaving as it does, why it is heading where it is, and where it dwells—all this is the inherent treatment plan.

We are sincere practitioners who 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 because we are compassionate and we think we know how to help. However, as Becker teaches, if the highest known element that made the body is present, she does not need our help. 

Do we have the courage to 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, which contain the patterns of health, and they 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 cease all efferent methods to practice biodynamic cranial for the evolution of consciousness as Sutherland taught it.

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 biodynamic. Anytime we tell a client they are receiving biodynamics when we are treating them for symptom relief, it is ethical misconduct that betrays our fundamental oath of 'do no harm.'

Practitioners are innocent if they trained to practice BCST this way.

The Proof is in the Pudding

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

“Dear Charles,

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

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

And here's my answer:

“Dear _______,

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

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

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

Tough Love: Know Thyself

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

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

“Am I really connected inside my body to the living potency of the whole-body and global excursions of the Breath of Life, or is this contact 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, an embodied contact with the unerring potency and the whole body breathing and global breathing tides ... with total confidence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Not Neutral We Transmit The Death of Biodynamics To Clients

This blog is not meant to criticize sincere and honest BCST practitioners. You are innocent because you got trained to transmit efference, which created the death of biodynamics outside of osteopathy. How does one transmit the death of biodynamics to clients, you ask?

When, during a session as a BCST practitioner, you may “think” you feel a tide, when you are not actually sensing a tide inside your body. When you ‘think’ you feel a tide without deep conviction, it is because you are not in a living embodied contact with whole-body primary respiration. The lack of conviction 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 practitioners 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 for trauma, or intends cranial wave patterns, or seeks stillness, it forces the client to experience 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
then, by definition, that is not a biodynamic session

Every year, hundreds of BCST practitioners are trained to unwittingly perpetuate the myth by telling 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: practitioners name cranial wave lesion patterns, the tides, midlines, and suggest still points, etc.

The naming of biodynamic terms during a session act 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 when you use your hands to name, 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 due to 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 'untrue' things to make myself look better?

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

Despite being boycotted for decades by all the biodynamic cranial sacral therapy (BCST) 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 who enroll are BCST graduates.

Each year, hundreds BCST graduates who choose to break out of their illusion of collusion that creates a shadow biodynamic practice that is perpetrated by BCST international organizations. These brave Souls take my Stillness Touch Master Classes. One BCST teacher confessed recently that he had to keep it secret from his colleagues that he took my Master Classes - and he refers students! 

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

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

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

If your answer yes, the first step is to study the Dr. Sutherland inspired osteopathic definitions of the three types of cranial in Chapter 3 of  STILLNESS, or you can read the original osteopathic definitions in the provided references for yourself: Here is a synopsis:  CLICK The 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 Or Session Exchange Partner To 'Tell You the Truth'

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

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

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

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

Again, I want to reemphasize to you: this is not your fault as a BCST practitioner: you were trained by BCST teachers. Inside their powerful consensual group field of collusion, you were misled to ‘believe’ so you pretend with everyone else that you are feeling tides without having an actual embodied contact with them.

How is it possible to be so utterly deceived? Because the BCST teachers use biodynamic terms like powerful mantras that invoke virtual experiences of tides in our mind. BCST teachers and practitioners are trained to use words such as settling, flow, shimmering, spraying up the midline, neutral, mid-tide, long tide, Dynamic Stillness, fulcra, primary respiration, 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.” 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. All this is efferent.

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

Let’s contest the above by characterizing 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 wells and recedes 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 realize a shift in your consciousness from personal to transpersonal (Read 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 page 41 where I characterize my experience of a class I took in Maui with Franklyn Sills.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ego & Superego Co-opts Our Realizations

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

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

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

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

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

James Jealous' wife published the hand-outs for his nine year biodynamic training for osteopaths.
You can read his 12-volume book set and directly compare his curriculum with the non-osteopath's.

Here is the BCST curriculum downloaded from a school website:

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

Course 1 – relational touch

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

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

Starting to look at:

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

You will learn how to:

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

Course 2 – the midline

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

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

 Starting to look at:

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 3 – whole body dynamics

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

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 4 – craniopelvic resonance

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

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 5 – birth, ignition and original health

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

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 6 – visceral intelligence

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

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 7 – neural matrix

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

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 8 – the facial complex

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

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

 You will learn how to:

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

 Course 9 – the holistic system ~ neuroendocrine immune response

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

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

 You will learn to:

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

 Course 10 – working with mothers, babies and children

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the above BCST curriculum is exactly what you are seeking; you will learn a wide variety of efferent methods in the non-osteopathic biodynamic schools that recoil awareness from the potency:

Objectification is used to separate the practitioner from the client ↔ relates ego-to-ego rather than operating in mutuality ↔ feels the parts instead of the whole ↔ uses hands to feel tidal motions ↔ feels anatomy and the nervous system for signs of trauma ↔ expects motions - cranial wave tissue motion, tidal motion, primary respiration ↔ seeks midlines, neutral, or stillness ↔ operates with an agenda ↔ uses trauma management to treat symptoms of nervous system's reactivity to stress ↔ negotiates space or zones ↔ shifts into a specific tide or dynamic stillness ↔ uses intention while offering contacts to change structure and function ↔ suggests stillness to recipients ↔ uses conversation skills to verbally negotiate every contact ↔ applies one-sided contacts with no reference to the midline ↔ names events during sessions ↔ visualizes tissues, organs, structures, tides, primary respiration, midlines ↔ acts as a therapist who heals ↔ channels higher wisdom ↔ believes that tides come from outside ↔ clings to tides ↔ dissociates in dynamic stillness ↔ subtle encouragement of a guru-disciple dynamic ↔ supports unwinding ↔ applies doing to a recipient.

As long as you engage in any efferent practice, enfleshment cannot emerge. Efferent methods are appropriate when offering biomechanical or functional cranial to treat symptoms. However, if we apply efference while offering Sutherland's biodynamic touch or post-biodynamic Stillness Touch, it cripples the evolution of consciousness in the practitioner and client. Below are some of the consequences.  

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

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

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

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM LOVE