Jenna Milner

The crisp biodynamic map devolves into a mishmash.

There’s a certain amount of grace to the learning process. But given enough time, every student of Biodynamic Craniosacral Work becomes familiar with the journey of consciousness from a Neutral to the Fluid Tide, Long Tide, and Dynamic Stillness. We can call this the Ascending Current of Primary Respiration. It represents a remarkable, shape-shifting evolution. 

In the course of this evolution, local consciousness inhabits wider and more comprehensive arenas — it claims more turf. Meanwhile, the body as a dense local object becomes more dispersed, less boundaried, and less personal. The potential for healing, wisdom, and perception expands. Each biodynamic universe manifests as a different substance with its own associated spatial dimension, rate, and other unique features. Charles Ridley has pointed us to how each universe – which he calls an enfoldment – also represents a different state of consciousness.

On the Ascending Current, when we (or our client) find ourselves in an enfoldment, we are only in that enfoldment. This seems natural. In the Fluid Tide, it would be strange to have elements of the Long Tide show up. The texture of the Fluid Tide is the gooey saturated field of the fluid body. The spatial dimension of the fluid body is necessarily contained within the room. If it were otherwise, it wouldn’t be the fluid body. When the fluids transmute to potency, we must expand to the horizon, because the potency body participates in a vast space, by definition. In other words, we (or our client) may participate in different enfoldments, but only one enfoldment at a time. 

A practitioner wants to experience, recognize, and make available to others the whole spectrum of enfoldments. But even if the practitioner is familiar with the whole spectrum, while on the Ascending Current we inhabit only one embodied universe at a time.

The Ascending Current culminates in the Dynamic Stillness. There is inevitably an extended period in which we become deeply familiar with the Void as a state (or rather, a non-state) that we lose ourselves in. When we are infused by the rich black Stillness, there are no objects; so any sense of me disappears. Any sense of the world disappears. 

The practitioner at this stage is likely to blink out into the Stillness of the Void, and then reemerge from it each time, to discover the reappearance of both the me and the world. The absorption in Stillness might last a few hours during meditation, or a few minutes in the course of a clinical session. Alternating between world and Void may continue for some time, often a few years. They are two sides of the same coin of duality: World (representing our sensory impressions through a bodymind — the same as me) and Void (which is nobody).

Eventually, though, as our evolution continues, we become lucid all the time. By lucid, I mean that although the world and the sense of a self are present, the Dynamic Stillness is also present in awareness. In this implausible scenario, ordinary reality is palpably, visibly, or audibly permeated with emptiness.

On the bright side, this represents a fundamental shift of perception. We recognize with immediacy that the Stillness permeates and underlies all life activity, no matter whether that activity is experienced as pleasant or unpleasant. We observe that objects (the world) and void (Stillness) arise together. We are aware of both sides of the coin: the content of awareness (for example, the physical body or any other objects of perception) and the empty formlessness that suffuses or underlies the content. 

Philosopher Ken Wilber calls this the non-dual level of perception. We are no longer split off into the person who is seeing (on the one hand) and the thing that is seen (on the other). The lack of separation is perceived with utter clarity. This is seeing, without one’s experience being filtered by the me. The non-dual level of perception is not an experience. It is essentially the act of seeing or being, with the personal stance stripped away. Non-dual seeing is seeing without a filter. Have you heard the phrase “thoughts without a thinker”? This is “objects without a seer.”

We can liken the non-dual level of perception to lucid dreaming. On the one hand, the world exists; we recognize that it exists; and we are able to make our way around it and take action within it. At the very same time, like being awake within a dream, we recognize that the world does not exist, and that the formless emptiness suffuses and co-arises with every form.

Which brings us to the more challenging side for the biodynamic practitioner. In the non-dual level of perception, thingness and no-thingness interweave in a way that is utterly baffling. At this stage of perception, the crisp biodynamic map devolves into a mishmash. Every feature of every enfoldment can coexist with every other…or none at all.

Mysteriously, you may be aware of all frequencies at the same time: The Cranial Wave and the boundary around the skin; the Fluid Tide and the plump boundary of the biosphere; the Long Tide and the immense radiance between the Midline and the horizon; and the emptiness and blackness of the Dynamic Stillness. All at the same time. 

On the other hand, you may be aware of none of it. You stop experiencing the tides. There are no subtle motion patterns, no regular rates, and no boundaries. And certainly, very little of the exquisite, liminal experiences that mark the journey of the Ascending Current for so many practitioners.  

This is actually a level of perception that signals a mature practitioner. But for those of us experiencing it, it feels as though we are plagued by ordinariness and confusion. In future posts, I’ll offer some of the phenomena that will help you peg your perception as non-dual. But in the meantime, I hope it eases your mind to learn that the Stillness eventually absorbs all of our tidy Ascending Current perceptions. If at one time you were heady with the intoxication of the Fluid Tide or filled with reverence in the Long Tide, and those phenomena seem to have disappeared, nothing is “wrong.” To the contrary, this might actually mark your deep familiarity with the Stillness that underlies all the phenomena.

Our biodynamic community is brimming with accounts of this strange state of affairs. Please write about your own experiences below, we’d love to hear.