An Osteopath Interviews Charles

Q: Would you describe the practice of mindfulness?

CR: Mindfulness is the ability to orient your attention to be with whatever’s happening, and whatever you’re interfacing with, you simply notice it. Mindfulness is an extremely important preliminary practice that leads to an unwavering presence (be still) that, in turn, allows a connection with anything we encounter. Whether you are in touch with your breath, body, thoughts, mind, or emotions, being mindful means attending to 'what is' which in the osteopathic biodynamic cranial field terminology is the motion present. Being mindful leads us to being present.

Q: Do you practice mindfulness while you’re treating a patient?

CR: Mindfulness is a practice to interface our presence with the manifest expressions of life that are happening now. Yet, in all honesty, I don’t apply mindfulness as an outer practice because I no longer orient my attention outward during Stillness Touch sessions. I ceased mindfulness because it involves a subtle degree of objectification. For example, I need a separate self, a me that chooses to be mindful of an object. Mindfulness brings your attention in the present to attend to whatever is occurring - as it is - when it arises in now. However, we are mindful of some phenomena ‘out there’ that is separate from me. If we turn that around, it is a beneficial practice. 

Mindfulness develops spiritual muscles of presence, so to speak. Spiritual muscles of presence strengthens my attention so I can remain present amid any arising phenomena. For example, if mindfulness is inward, we can remain present to arising intensity, intimacy, and paradox. By shifting attention inward, and remaining mindful of what arises inside the innerness, that connect my presence to the inner essences of whatever I’m interfacing with. Inner mindfulness, in this case, is a beneficial practice whether I’m touching during a session, having lunch, or driving. It's said that to function in the modern world, we need to reserve 10% of our awareness for being mindful of the outer phenomena, and 90% is anchored on the innerness. In the ancient Vedic practices, orienting our presence inward is called pratyahara. In Christian esoteric gnostic circles, the presence of innerness is called Sophia, or the inner body wisdom. This is the Intelligence of the Breath of Life that Sutherland characterizes with capitol "I." CLICK HERE

The Intelligence of the Breath of Life creates our manifest planetary reality. In Stillness Touch, we choose to be guided by the mysterious invisible inner Divine Feminine presence that creates all of manifest reality, or creation itself. When we are in touch with the descending current of presence that emanates from the potency, we access the essences that made the body. Contact with inner essence is an inherent to a post-biodynamic practice of touch. When mindfulness is turned inward, it supports our inner Grail journey that leads to a union with a love that is stronger than death.

If you’ve never meditated, not done inner work, nor applied mindfulness inward, then your efferent attention will be bandied about like a plaything by the chaotic expressions of life that dwell in the periphery.

Sadly, this type of bypass is epidemic outside of cranial osteopathy. Although unconscious due to ignorance of Dr. Sutherland's essential teachings, the Biodynamic Cranial Approaches teach practitioners to dwell in the periphery in a state of spiritual bypass.

As a result, graduate practitioners have no contact with the potency or the biodynamic tides!

That fact - that Biodynamic Cranial Approach graduates do not have contact with the potency or the tides - inspired me to write my Death of Biodynamics blog. The related craniosacral podcast is the second most popular download, which is telling. 

I was recently told that there is a new post-graduate course designed to teach graduate 'biodynamic' practitioners how to contact the tides! The immense popularity of that post-graduate course offering is a direct confession of the utter failure of their 2-year so-called "biodynamic" curriculum. 

I encountered that exact situation in a class I taught in Italy. The 64 graduate practitioners were taught by a biodynamic cranial mindfulness teacher. The result was that none of his graduates, including the teacher, had any contact with the tides until they took my class!

Out of ignorance, the Italian biodynamic mindfulness teacher taught his students to apply mindfulness toward the peripheral, outer phenomena. And he taught graduates to use biodynamic terms in lieu of actual contact with the potency or tides. It is impossible to contact the potency or tides with efferent mindfulness because attention is projected outward and away from the potency. I am transcribing the group sharing of those practitioners' first-time profound encounters with the tides that occurred in my class, and I will publish it. 

When our mindfulness practice turns inward, it becomes the first stage of a practice that inwardly anchors attention, so we can become present to the potency or the tides in now. Unwavering Presence is the fruit of practicing innerness, which is the ancient Vedic practice called pratyahara. With pratyahara, we connect with the Sophia, the innerness, which is the Divine Inner Body Wisdom that is united with the Wisdom of the Whole. 

Q: Yes, after reading your books Stillness and Stillness Touch I’ve discovered many levels to this.

CR: The levels of realizations in the innerness never end because we are inside our body where the Eternal Divine Feminine Wisdom dwells, and from which emanates a love that creates all that is, which is stronger than death.

What I have described above are preliminary stages of neutral. At some point, we arrive at a stage where we become The Neutral. This is a state where nobody is doing anything to any one. Here, we inwardly realize that everything is united as the one substance of love. In other words, there’s no separation. There is no separate “me” and there’s no separate “that” out there in the periphery. At The neutral, the whole gestalt of creation happens inside while I co-participate in all of it as the presence of stillness. I’m in a mutual co-participation with the universal creative force. 

Q: Now you only treat with post-biodynamics, how would you describe the relationship between mindfulness and the way you treat?

CR: This is a good question. Because I have to be mindful of where I’m going to touch, correct?

Q: Yes.

CR: If I land on a random place and think “I’m going to let the nothing touch the nothing” that is non-dual bypass nonsense. Do you know what I mean?

When I offer post-biodynamic Stillness Touch to someone, I’m touching a real, living, mysterious expression that emanates love with their every heart beat, and I am emanating love with my every heart beat. Stillness Touch then is a conscious mutual act of presence that is guided by an invisible wordless, thought-less, process of the inner Divine Wisdom that emanates love in tandem with the SA Node. This defines post-biodynamics, which is not a diagnostic process, not is it a tidal journey.

When love is enfleshed, as characterized above, it has come full circle. Recall that the SA Node emanations create the body in the embryo, which lead to our first birth; and then, at the enfleshment of Love we realize the second birth. Every cell enjoys the SA Node emanation of love. We can sense a whole-body pulse everywhere - inwardly, outwardly, universally, and personally. We no longer experience separation for love

A major pitfall that blocks access to the potency is the clinging to being "the doctor." Sutherland's biodynamics isn’t diagnostic, medical, or treatment based - everything is done by the unerring potency. When I can be still, the inner body of the person on the table communicates with my inner body, and it is this wordless dialogue that guides my inner body's will forces to make specific contacts. In other words unerring potency moves me to action without my knowing how or why. This is non-rational and it is not mental. Even so, it is helpful to know where the sacrum is, right? Mindfulness helps me to know where and how to touch a specific anatomical location that I am inwardly guided to touch.

What I'm about to say isn’t what happens, because the inner process is not mental, but let’s try it out for a second. Let’s say that I’m being instinctually led to contact the sacrum. If I’m not mindful of where the sacrum is located, I might end up on the foot. Mindfulness helps me offer contacts that I'm instinctually guided to make, outside of a diagnostic model. So mindfulness is fundamental to a non-doing practice of Stillness Touch. 

Q: You’ve taught osteopaths before, correct?

CR: Yes, I've taught hundreds of biodynamic osteopaths and teachers. Unlike the non-osteopathic Biodynamic Cranial Approach field, the biodynamic DO's recognize the value of my post-biodynamic offerings.

Q: Do you think mindfulness is a valuable concept to the teaching and practice of osteopathy? In your experience with them?

CR: Absolutely. Mindfulness, when turned inward helps a DO withdraw from being the doer and it frees them from the trap of 'I am a doctor' which is a limitation. Also, mindfulness helps the DO pull back their efferent awareness by ceasing to use the hands to think, feel, sense, or read the structure-function lesions in the patient, which is purely medical model. Last, inner mindfulness helps to wean osteopaths off of an addiction to the tides. If we can remain mindful that Dr. Sutherland continually evolved his cranial approach, we honor him by not clinging to biodynamics when its time is up for us individually. 

I've seen in my post-biodynamic classes that DO's can get caught up in enquiry and enamor of the tides, and they end up practicing in an empty void, which is the same trap that the Biodynamic Cranial Approaches are universally and permanently caught in.

With inner mindfulness, you can access a deeper inner wisdom of the body than what the medical model offers. For example a medical-model DO might say “I learned anatomy, physiology, pathology, and all the dynamics of the ground substance, and so on, and all this knowledge combined creates my treatment plan.” Well that’s fine, but can you access that which creates all things?

If you practice inner mindfulness, it leads to contact with the inner-body wisdom by which all the human-making happens - including the creation of that body you’re working with on the table. It is mindfulness in his own way, that gave birth to Dr. Sutherland's evolutionary cranial journey. He started with an impulse that canal bones moved that became pre-biodynamic structure-function biomechanical work. He cultivated a vast understanding of the architecture of the motion of the cranial bones, the practice is not-yet cranial wave based, right? And then, while experimenting, the cranial rhythmic impulse (CRI) emerged, which led Sutherland on a pre-biodynamic journey into functional work.

Functional work was mind blowing to Sutherland, and he developed numerous cranial and the directing of the potency techniques. Then, in the forties, this deeper oceanic ‘something’ began showing up for Sutherland. It emerged from the beyond, and pervaded the body and the atmosphere, and it evolved his consciousness. He ceased using the cranial rhythmic impulse, stopped motion testing, directing, and treating with the CRI.

Sutherland stopped his pre-biodynamic functional practice. Why? Because the cranial rhythmic impulse disappeared in the whole body stillness, which is a biodynamic neutral. Out of whole body stillness there emerged the biodynamic breathing tides. Dr. Sutherland died before he could completely articulate his profound biodynamic journey. 

Given that his journey continuously evolved, Sutherland modeled an evolutionary path that led him from an impulse that the cranium moves, to a pre-biodynamic biomechanical and functional to a non-doing biodynamics. He left the portal open for the post-biodynamic journey that emerged in 2002. I first characterized post-biodynamics in Stillness Chapter 9, and then I recently fully elaborated it in Stillness Touch Chapter 9.

Dr. Sutherland wasn’t looking for cranial motions or tides, it showed up. He first wrote about his discovery of biodynamics in his preface of his second edition of his book, The Cranial Bowl. This is a pure biomechanical book, but it was the first time in public that he referred to this presence that already knows what to do. He says “You need to trust the unerring potency in the tide, and you just allow that to do all the work.” I’m paraphrasing him. Of course, he had already experienced this potency, this was his public declaration. He had already navigated the principles of biodynamics with his private study group of DO's that he had worked with for years. Finally, he made a statement in the preface of the second edition of The Cranial Bowl in 1948 where he just hinted about this ‘something’ was an unerring potency that does everything - all you have to do is rest back in the disposition of Be Still. Click here for Sutherland's Potency Interview: CLICK HERE

Yet, to rest back inside, you have to develop the muscles of inner mindfulness, or you will not be able to stay inwardly connected or grounded amid the intense fractal process that is evoked by the potency. There’s no way to be with the potency if you don’t have the strength of presence, the muscles of presence. Inner mindfulness gives you those muscles of presence by which you can be with the intense fractal mystery that doesn’t make any sense, which has no logic to it, yet it makes the body.

Q: If you were trying to teach mindfulness to a colleague, what would you say is the most important information to include in that explanation?

CR: To learn how to orient and keep attention inward.

Then, to allow the attention to be with to be present with whatever is happening, without predetermining what motions are going happen, or jumping from that assumption of a motion into a technique. If we are stuck in some kind of motion model - even tidal - and we anticipate motions, it will not match what’s actually happening. The clinging to motions is the entire problem with the non-osteopathic biodynamic cranial schools who have an epidemic on the hands:  graduates do not have contact with the potency of the tides.

Throw out all preconceived motion models, including tidal motions. How a tree moves, the way a person speaks, our relating with some on, those all are expressions that involve some kind of motility, some kind of motion, right? There’s there’s physical motion, cranial motion, emotion, spiritual motion, .... Perceiving motions - as they are - requires the capacity to not preconceive, and to not hold back or force any expression based on some kind of a mental motility model. Holding no preconceived models of what motion should happen, or ought to happen is crucial to perceiving what is actually expressing in now. You let the freedom of the actual living process that’s occurring to express, which means you’re being mindful to let what is express itself as it is. If it’s really here, it’s authentic, and it is the motion present. The motion that is present isn’t some conceptual virtual tidal process or zone.

You can create inertis, a cranial wave, or a tide in a person by expecting those patterns to express in a person’s body. That’s the most important piece about biodynamics that Sutherland taught us: you do not preconceive motion patterns. If you do expect them, those motion patterns will arise from the subtle body of the patient. And that’s what you'll see. No preconceived ideas of motions is my most important suggestion.

Q: Do you have a specific method that you follow to become mindful?

CR: Follow the breath in and out of the inner body space, at first, it’s important. And then, while following the breath, to remain mindful if a subtler breath emerges. There’s physical lung breathing, and then, if you’re mindful to your lung breathing for long enough, a deeper, more subtle breath emerges. You might say “I am being breathed, I’m no longer the one breathing.” When being breathed emerges, you realize “This is what mindfulness produces.” Mindfulness facilitates a contact with the body's inner depths. As you know, there's lung breath of oxygen, and then there’s prana breath, which is what Dr. Sutherland calls the Breath of Life.

Q: Would you explain this any differently to a patient?

CR: I explain to them that if they have difficulty being present, they can find support by being mindful. Many want to know how to contact the potency that made the body. I tell them to orient inwardly with their breath, and repose inside. And then, don’t preconceive what should happen, what ought to happen, simply be with what is happening even if it is nothing.  You can be with what’s happening by inwardly orienting your attention. Let your attention repose inside and attend to whatever is occurring, whether it’s a feeling, thought, emotion, memory, spiritual experience, ... whatever it is. And try not to manipulate it, fix it, change it. The second piece of the mindfulness practice after you don’t try to change anything that is occurring, is you simply let it be whatever is here.

Q: The next few questions will be about centering specifically. So in your own words would you describe what it means to center yourself?

CR: Centering means being in touch in a body-felt way, in the core of stillness within. If you want to use terms, that' the midline. The midline is a vertical column of core stillness, an axial core. This core of stillness is the fulcrum around which all motion happens. And from an embryological perspective, the primitive streak is the first visible core midline structure.Prior to expression, it was an invisible core midline, which created the visible core midline. We can’t really talk about it, because the midline is invisible. If you had to describe it, it is stillness, the prior, the unerring potency. There’s no activity in the midline. In the midline, you feel less bound by gravity, which indicates that you’re centered. When you’ve touched your own midline, you feel more spacious and less heavy. Let's say you weigh a hundred pounds before you touched into your midline, and now you feel like you weigh seventy pounds after you touch in to your midline. You literally feel lighter, and the word for that feeling is buoyancy. In the buoyancy there’s also a feeling of fluidity. Rather than a materialistic structure-function, cranial wave, linear motion, there is fractal motion. The buoyancy has a fractal quality to it. When you start to experience buoyancy you know that you’re in your midline and that you’re centered. 

Centering is very important for practicing mindfulness. If you’re out on the edge of the eye of the hurricane, that’s not being centered because you are in the periphery. You’re going to get swung around. By analogy, you’re going to hit trees and buildings, cars, people, and you’re not going to be able to be present because there’s no reference point within; all our orientation is outward. You’re being slammed around by life. Whereas being centered in the stillness, even though all aspects of the hurricane is still going on, you are inside the eye of the hurricane, and you can very easily remain mindful to whatever’s occurring. Then, you are present to whatever’s occurring between you and whatever you’re interfacing with. So it’s not like you try to manufacture motions to be present too; instead you are mindful and it shows up. When you’re in your center, mindfulness becomes effortless. It’s almost like a physics equation.

Q: Do you practice centering while treating?

CR: When you’ve been doing something for fifty years, practice becomes a funny word. Practice over time becomes nature. So there’s two answers. No I don’t do it, and yes I do.

In other words, after a while, all  practices become your nature. So you no longer practice them, they just are. If you’ve ever played a musical instrument, or developed skills. For example, we learn language right? We don’t think about the alphabet anymore when we talk. So yes I do, and no I don’t practice. If you ask “After you centered when I work?” Yes. Or  "Are you mindful when I work?" Yes.

Q: What kind of impact have you noticed that has on your practice?

CR: People are more receptive - they receive on a deeper level.  Let’s just say the patient comes in and they have a whole array of items that they feel they’re challenged with right? “I can’t sleep well, I have pain, I’m anxious.” …  all those symptoms, or presentations of issues. In biodynamics, they spontaneously disappear without even treating them. You don’t have to go hunting for why is the symptom is happening, you apply mindfulness, based on your centering and the intuitive guidance that you receive from that, and that gives you the capacity to apply the contact to the place where you’re guided. And magic that can happen. People’s symptoms spontaneously disappear, whether I knew about the symptom, or not. And that’s radical relative to the structure-function practice: you note their symptoms, and you look at the body, and you’ look at the fascia, the muscles, the spine, the nervous system, and all the other aspects of the structure-function model. Then you develop a treatment plan. You go about eliminating all the imbalances and then, hopefully, something happens. But in biodynamics all this happens without doing any of the above, including no treatments! That is pretty amazing when you think about the amount of work, and time, and energy that goes into the structure-function treatment model. Everything is handled when you apply centering and mindfulness in a session. Apply is not quite the right word, practice is the right word, like you said. Spontaneous healing happens that has nothing to do with your mind, or your skills.

Q: How would you describe the relationship between centering and osteopathy?

CR: Osteopathy is pretty vast, right?  If you talk about it in terms of the type of osteopaths that do drugs and surgery, I don’t know if you can even talk about centering. You know what I mean? That’s pure mechanical and medical and centering is a joke to these people. Some kind of farce. That’s one level. That’s the “American Osteopathic Physician” level right? You don’t have that in Canada. Only the American osteopaths are medically trained. They have their hospitals, just like any other medical facility, they offer surgical care. But the hands-on osteopaths, the original osteopaths from Dr. Still and then down to Dr. Sutherland, those people were the true healers. They were always involved in the practice of centering and mindfulness, spontaneously and instinctually. And so that kind of osteopathy is founded on intangible principles like the 'unerring potency.' You don’t just stumble into the profound hands-on healing capacity that Dr. Still brought to the world, which Dr. Sutherland elaborated in the cranial context. There is no contact with  the potency for example, you don’t have centering and mindfulness as two sides of one coin that generate contact with the potency, the tides, the Breath of Life, or in other words, you cannot contact the forces that make the body. You contact those forces that make the body, and osteopathy has been founded on that since day one, they might have other words for it. 

Q: Absolutely.

CR: I went to one of those hand-on American osteopaths for a disc problem who worked like Dr. Still. He even looks like Still with his beard and he had a picture of him on his wall… and all he did was sit me on the edge of the table and put his left hand on my shoulder, and the right finger on L5. Without using any pressure, he barely even applied the slightest torque and the chronic pain disappeared. I was astonished: it cured my disc chronic, years-long symptoms. That’s heavy duty if you think about it. He didn’t crack me, he didn’t analyze me ... he was in touch with something that knew how to guide him - with no force - to open my body to bring it back to more balance, and that disc healed. I can pick up huge boulders that I couldn’t before. I couldn’t lift anything because it would hurt my disc and I would be in pain bedridden for weeks. That’s the miracle of combining the mindfulness and the centering with the principles of osteopathy, the hands on osteopathy.

Question #11, Do you think it’s a valuable concept to the teaching of osteopathy?

CR: It should be essential, if you asked me. If I were the professor, I would say “the first thing we’re going to teach you is how to center and be mindful, and then we’re going to teach you osteopathy.” But I don’t think they do that.

Q: No.

CR: That’s what young DO's like you are up to, and you’re going to change osteopathy.  

Q: Hopefully. That would be nice.

CR: You know, you are already going public with this wisdom that is inherent to you because you’re on the shoulders of the masters of hands-on. The medical professors are going to die out, and you are going to replace them. Even if it doesn’t come into the consciousness, hands-on come by replacement. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, because it will happen. It's already happening, you know that.

Q: Absolutely. If you’re teaching centering to a colleague, how would you explain that to them?

CR: First, I would ask the colleague to orient their attention inward and become aware, at first, of areas in the body that have tension. Simply become aware of the tension. Then breathe into the areas of tension. That’s a beginning process of mindfulness, even though I won’t tell them that. After their tissues feel softer, by doing the inner breathing, I ask them to sense inside the tissues that are tight. Based on what they sense, the blocks in the body may reveal, for example, their preconceived 'erring' ideas about healing, at first. The second stage, they breathe with their normal breath and become present, or mindful, of the breathing process. Follow the breath in and out. And then let that practice become anchored, so it is a process that you’re present to in every moment.

Next, orient inward with the attention, with awareness, in addition to the breathing, and attend to the core center of your body. Normally, most folks send their awareness from their core and efferently direct it outward, so attention projects out of the body and heads in a runaway fashion toward periphery. Everything’s going out to the periphery, and there’s nobody left inside.

And then, the outer-directed life forces dictate to us what we do. We give a treatment, we buy a car, or we find a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and everything is directed outward, the choice of what we do is directed outward as though what is in the the outer periphery will fulfill us. The practice of centering takes all that outward directed awareness and turns it inside, to the inner body, towards the center. You don’t look for the center, you just repose inwardly into a place that you sense might be a vertical line in the center of your whole body. You continue the inner breathing, then, whatever comes up in the inner space, you practice being with it, attending to it as it is. It’s hard to put this into words, but if it’s an emotion that arises, you practice being with the emotion as it is, regardless of how uncomfortable it feels. If a thought process emerges, you practice being with the thoughts. If it’s a feeling, your try to be with the feeling. If it’s a sensation you try to be with the sensation, and then the feelings that the sensations evoke. But you don’t hold onto any of them, or make something out of them, some meaning. You don’t make meanings out of anything. You simply be with whatever emerges and you let them be as it is. The expression comes, it expresses, and it goes. Mindfulness is the process of simply attending to that natural process.

And you don’t try to make them something out of the expression that it is not. For example “This must be a divine message from my emotions!” Outside of the osteopathic cranial field, Biodynamic Cranial Approaches, students are trained to name the tides when they are not present! You don’t do that either. Allow whatever is expressing to express itself as it's expressing. Don’t try to change it, manipulate it, make it better, worse or maki it into something it is not. Don’t judge it as spiritual or unspiritual, or I’m a good person or a bad person, or I’m doing this right or wrong. Simply be with it.

The practice is simple. Inner breathing, the inner orientation to the midline, or core, and being with whatever’s coming up into your awareness. That’s basically, in a very brief nutshell, the practice.

Actually, I teach more than that. For example to inner-breathe with the three portals – head, heart and pelvis. These inner breathing portals are more advanced preliminary practices. You have to have mindfulness and centering before you can do the inner-breathing portal work. It’s pointless to do portal work without the mindfulness and the centering. 

Q: Do you explain it any differently to your patients?

CR: I’m more casual, not as serious as with practitioners. They’re on the table and they ask me "what do I do?” They don’t necessarily say “What do I do?” but they imply that they want to know how to get the most out of the session. I say “If you’d like to get the most out of this session would you like to try something?” And they will say yes, no, or maybe. It’s none of my business what they say. If they say no, I say ok. If they say yes then I teach them a simple practice of mindfulness on the innerness. I tell them to stay inside their bodies and breathe, and to be with the movement of each breath, and try to catch themselves when they’re bolting out of their body into a fantasy, or into the next part of the town shopping, or into the plane ticket that they haven’t made yet, and all that. If that happens, come back inside, and remain present to whatever is occurring inside their bodies. Something like that, very simple. And I’ll ask if they have questions, and if they do I’ll answer them, but I keep it really simple.

Q: After talking about both of these concepts, what would you say the relationship is between centering and mindfulness?

CR: Centering, given that is is a repose in the midline, is kind of the juice, the gasoline, the power or potency that grants us the capacity for mindfulness. In other words you need will power to be mindful, correct?

A person who has chronic fatigue, Epstein Barr, Lyme disease, and any other chronic condition, teaching them to be mindful might be, in the beginning, a colossal waste of time. Why?  Because they don’t have access to the potency, the vitality, the forces, the capacity, or the will power to be mindful to something. They’re so drained of their life-force, their chi, their strength of will, and the potency of the Breath of Life, that the first thing you do with such a person who is that debilitated is to build them up. You will use medical model to support them, starting with nutrition, detox, diet, lifestyle shifts, etc. Once vitality is built up, then they may have the capacity for mindfulness. Without the capacity for centering in the core of the stillness that is the potency, then being present or mindful is not possible. In other words, you can be partially mindful and yet, to the degree that you’re not rested in the center, in the midline in stillness, is the degree that we are not mindful. So physical vitality has a distinct relationship to mindfulness.

Q: I want to look at the process versus the result for both of these concepts. So looking at centering versus being centered, like once you get there, so what does it mean to be centered?

CR: When you’re centered, you’re inside the core of the potency that organizes any activity, you’re inside the will forces, the power of doing which manifests all things. Dr. Sutherland talks about letting the 'unerring potency' do the all the healing, right? So, when we are inside the unerring potency we are no longer busy with being the Dr. Osteopath. That’s the structure function fix each thing in a specific sequence process, and obviously, you have to practice the Dr. Osteopath stuff to get good at it, right? You have to build skills, so the potency can utilize your skills through you, but in Sutherland's biodynamics, you’re no longer the doer.

Centering provides contact which the forces of potency, the embryological forces that create the whole body, and which runs the whole body, maintains the whole body, and heals the whole body. However imbalanced, or controlling the person is on the table, if you you are centered, you’ve already landed in the potency that heals.

You know what Dr. Becker called that state? The neutral. He said the neutral is the moment when the ego has surrendered control over to the Breath of Life. That’s another way of saying we are “being centered” in the unerring potency. It’s a distinct moment when you feel that time slows. When time slows and gravity decreases, the details become more available, and then you apply your mindfulness, your presence, and attend to all the nuances of those details the free-float in the a slower tempo. And then, your actions, based on the nuances that are present, are more accurately available to you mindfulness and you can synchronize you attention with them, which guides you instinctively to what is needed. You see the pieces of the puzzle in slow motion amid buoyancy. You have the capacity to relax the mind that wants you to do something, and instead, you can repose in non-doing and allow the unerring potency to do the work through you. And of course, you have a skills that you’ve developed, and the unerring forces use our skills. 

Q: What kind of effect does the state of being centered have on your practice?

CR: I’m less exhausted at the end of the day. I don’t get bored. I’ve done the journey of boredom that is inherent to decades of biomechanical and functional practice. Back then, in pre-biodynamic structure-function work, I got bored. Id say “I'm not sure I’ve got it in me to see another person and do this yet again …” Why? Because I felt like a human mechanic: take the carburetor out, and rub it clean, and put it back in, and the carburetor, and the motor works. After a while, I got tired of that. The mechanics with each long term patient “What would you like today? We have this treatment and that …” The feeling that all I do is rearrange symptoms, and also, the sense of “I’m the doctor, and I’m responsible for everything that needs to happen to this patient.” All that disappeared in biodynamics. The intense pressure disappeared, because I  was surrendered to something that really does know how to heal.

Then the next thing that happens is you give up needing to know. Because you see the benefits of resting in the center and applying mindfulness to whatever arises, and then letting your skills be utilized by the unerring potency, by this Intelligence. And you realize “I don’t have be the one that’s manufacturing all the details, and putting them all together to make a treatment plan. I’ve done all that work for decades, and now I see that all the healing being done without my help, and sometimes in spite of my best efforts to interfere by not having the courage or being able to be still.

And the last, most important piece, is that people’s symptoms disappear in biodynamics. Before in pre-biodynamic work, symptoms resolve very gradually or haphazardly. Yet, later that same patient would returned with a new batch of symptoms. It felt like all I was doing was moving symptoms around, like I was moving furniture in the house, without any fundamental changes in the patient. Forget about the evolution of their consciousness.

Here is a simple example of the power I am speaking of. A woman came who wanted to do some biodynamic work. Now I have a lot of these cases. This is just one, a great example. And she’s a nurse. An RN, and she wanted to do biodynamics in the hopes that the potency would build and she would be able to get pregnant. That’s all I knew about her.  We did sessions for three months, nothing happened. And then she disappeared. Sometime later I started getting referrals from her. And then one day I wrote her  “Thank you for the referrals, I don’t quite understand why you’re referring people to me because you didn’t get pregnant." And she said “I didn’t tell you this, but I had a horrible back surgery, and I've had chronic, low back pain that is aggravated by turning people over in their beds as a nurse, and that back pain went away from your biodynamic sessions!”

I didn’t know she had back pain. I can tell you hundreds of those stories. I don’t even think about how many times that happens, because who cares? In biodynamics, miracles happen every day. It’s so normal that I forgot how miraculous it is. Whereas before, healing a person was like hard labor, like digging a hole with a shovel. You’re sweating, and the hole’s getting deeper far too slowly, and then there’s a big rock in the way, and it’s all very laborious. Biodynamics is not laborious, it’s play. You’re playing in the sandbox of centering and mindfulness, reposed in its unerring potency while you let the session just happen. People get well in ways that they didn’t get well in the pre-biodynamic medical model.

I have a quote by a physical therapist in Stillness. She’s a board examiner for Physical Therapists in Canada. She tests people in physical therapy to get a license. She noted the differences between doing cranial from a biodynamic perspective, the symptoms, and the pre-biodynamic functional cranial. Based on her experience, the treatment process is more fluid, and  easier, and quicker, with more lasting results with the biodynamic approach. That’s very satisfying, as a practitioner. I’ve been doing probably pure biodynamics since  1995. It’s still not boring. And I don’t practice that much now, I’m retired. I retired because I’ve been doing this for fifty years and something inside me told me it’s time to stop. No reason, just stop. I inwardly screamed, and yelled, and ranted, and raved at that inner impulse, and it just got stronger and stronger and stronger. I had to surrender “Ok! I’m gonna retire! I give up.” It’s been great, I mean I’ve been retired from practice for years. I still teach in Europe, and place near Boston at Kripalu, I teach there.

Q: In your own words, would you describe what the state of being centered is like?

CR:  The difference between being home and you know it, and being homeless and lost. There’s a distinct felt-sense that you’re home. You feel no need to look further for home out there, you’re inside home, in your body ... the tender mother love is here. There’s nothing to do at home except let it be. The letting be is possible because you’re fundamentally reposed, and you have relaxed out of the inner war. You’re fundamentally in a state of allowing, which is neutral, right? You’re fundamentally and spontaneously refreshed.

Of course you get tired ... at the end of the day and all that. Fundamentally though, you’re in a state of refreshed newness the whole time that you’re centered. Actually, one of the indications that you’re not centered, is that you start to feel fatigued, or tired, or anxiety creeps in for no reason, and you ask your self “What’s going on? I slept the same amount of hours,” and all that self-inquiry. Well, I probably efferently recoiled out of my center and projected out into the periphery. The periphery is exhausting, yet we have not idea of that until we land in the center. That is why it becomes hard to not be centered because exhaustion is a price that is far too high to pay. Over time, you centering practice becomes nature because you can’t afford the price of the suffering that occurs by not being centered.

Q: The same thing about being mindful versus the practice of mindfulness, what does it mean to be mindful as an osteopath?

CR: You're mindful to whatever is happening in the present, in the now. In other words, what you call attending to the motion present, right? Everything has motion except stillness, and at the paradoxical post-biodynamic stage of consciousness, even stillness has motion, the Dynamic Stillness, right?

You’re present to whatever arrives in your consciousness, in now, in the present. Whether it's thoughts, feelings, emotions, spiritual states, the person in front of you, your work, what you’re about to eat, what you’re going to do around the house, what you’re going to study ... all of that, … you are spontaneously mindful to it.

Even if I say to myself  “I’m too lazy to study.” All to do is be mindful to that. It could be “I’m too tired to do that" or "whatever it was I said I was going to do today, I'm not doing it” ... you’re mindful to whatever’s happening. Even if you do something that’s opposite to what the mind said you were going to do that day, there’s still enrichment. The aliveness remains, and the nourishment comes from being mindful. Just because life didn’t follow "my" plan that I had in the mind, doesn’t mean it is not full of life. All I have to do is be mindful to whatever’s happening in now. I do not try to change what is, ... just because I had an idea that I was going to get seven things done today, and I’m only going to get two things done today. But look how rich it is. A lot less happens, yet it happens more deeply and more richly. It’s like having a great meal versus fast food. Riding on a magic carpet versus slogging around in the mud.

Q: What kind of effects has the state of being mindful had on your practice?

CR: I am not able to catch essential aspects of the client's process, previous to being mindful. Because my mind is moving too fast. I’m in the fast-mind state “Oh I’m a doctor, and I know everything. I’ve got all these skills and I’m going to impress this person because I am a great healer.” That whole ticker-tape mental dialogue ... the power of that ticker tape dialogue to move me is gone when you’re mindful. You actually see what’s really going on behind the curtain of the mental ticker tape.

When we stop making our day happen, reality spontaneously emerges, it presents itself - as it is.

And then, your response to life's unfolding of the Tao is more accurate because you are reposed in an authentic place of being, rather than living based on your preconceived notions of what should be happening. Mindfulness gives you more precision in your capacity to work with people that come in with their issues.

Q: In your words would you describe what the state of being mindful is like? If you can.

CR: I’ll say it two ways.  When I'm not being mindful, life is happening and I don’t have a seat in the stadium. So life is happening to me and I’m a victim to life. Whereas when I’m mindful, I’m a co-participant in life. I’ve got a front row seat called “Charles” who co-participates in a conscious way. You could say I’m co-creating with creation itself and I feel a distinct sense of that. It’s not the 'me' that we’re talking about, this is a larger aspect of my being that emerges because of the centering, right? The centering gives you the juice for  being in contact with life through mindfulness, which opens the door to presence.

Presence is made of the same stuff in me that’s in you, ... that’s in plants and trees and rocks and life, so I get in touch with something greater than myself when I practice mindfulness. The second side is if I do not dare to not be mindful, because by analogy, I may end up in the ditch with a flat tire and probably a broken ankle. I’m going to limp around looking for somebody to fix my tire and it’s going to feel horrible. Contrast that, with the practice of mindfulness: you’re in the flow with the whole of life, and life unfolds literally like a magic carpet ride. You’re on the carpet, hanging out in utter repose, and enjoying it. You’re being mindful to what is. You drink overflowing life force, the whole depth of the potency that life offers in front of you, whether it’s client work, shopping in the market, or whatever it is. Comparing non-mindfulness with mindfulness is like the difference between eating cheap processed cheese versus eating some homemade organic cheese made the farmer right down the road from you. One doesn’t produce very much life force, and the other is life-giving.