Jenna Milner

A reader asked about the terms Cranial Wave, Fluid Tide, and Long Tide. Biodynamic Craniosacral Work typically uses these terms to describe three subtle motions, which we feel in or around the body. I use them in a more wide-ranging context. Yes, they are the foundation of Biodynamic practice. But I actually understand them as the building blocks of reality itself.

Let’s start by reviewing how the terms are typically used: to describe a rhythmic fluctuation.

• We feel the CRANIAL WAVE (8 to 14 cycles per minute) only in parts of the body, say, within a temporal bone or within the cerebrospinal fluid.

• We feel the FLUID TIDE (2 to 3 cpm) in the whole fluid body at once. We may feel the current of the Fluid Tide traveling along a fluid compartment at the body’s vertical core. (That’s the longitudinal fluctuation of the Fluid Tide along the Midline.) We are as likely to feel the whole body expanding three-dimensionally, like bread dough expanding out from the Midline for 12 seconds, and then ebbing back for 12 seconds. (That cycle is the transverse fluctuation of the Fluid Tide.) The expansion phase palpably radiates beyond the boundary of the skin.

• We feel the LONG TIDE (6 cycles in 10 minutes) as the movement of a vast, delicate, radiant cloud. Delicate describes its ephemerality; radiant means it’s suffused with light. The Long Tide approaches the Midline from so far away that its activity is uncontained by any boundary. It moves at a jaw-droppingly slow pace. It takes 50 seconds to diffuse into the Midline. Then it recedes back toward the horizon for 50 seconds.

These are the tidal forces addressed by Biodynamics. But the subtle motions are not simply three different speeds. Their differences aren’t incremental. Their differences are qualitative.

Each pattern — Cranial Wave, Fluid Tide, and Long Tide — participates in an utterly different atmosphere. Each one takes place in a different spatial dimension. Each is composed of its own substance, which we call tissue (Cranial Wave), fluid (Fluid Tide), and potency (Long Tide).

I think of each one as being its own universe. In addition to a specific rhythm and substance, each universe has its own laws of healing and other attributes. And each represents a fundamentally unique state of consciousness.

So when I say Cranial Wave, Fluid Tide, or Long Tide, I refer not only to the rhythm, but also to a universe.

I sum up these three universes as follows:

• Cranial Wave = Nervous system and adaptive fragmentation.

• Fluid Tide = Healthy organism and original blueprint.

• Long Tide = Animating essence and archetypal template.

The CRANIAL WAVE is aligned with our nervous system and our everyday bodymind. It must adapt to stresses, so its tempo is highly variable. It carries the brilliance and the burden of our history, because our nervous system is a record of our conditioned responses.

Because the Cranial Wave only appears in parts, we only experience it when we are splintered into parts, which is a common adaptation in our high-paced contemporary life. But anyone who does Cranial Wave healing work can attest to the relief of harmonizing the parts.

When all the parts coalesce into one single, seamless unit of function, Biodynamics calls that an INITIATORY NEUTRAL. I have begun to call it the Gateway Neutral, as it is the threshold for Biodynamic processes. It is evenly textured and still, with an outer boundary around the skin. Although it is a quiet, unassuming phenomenon, the Gateway Neutral is the lynchpin of Biodynamic practice. It has a sense of possibility about it.

The FLUID TIDE enters when a Gateway Neutral is available and the Midline is robust enough to transmit the Fluid Tide. The information and energy carried by the Fluid Tide transmits the original template of health, before we were injured or stressed. The Fluid Tide, in other words, transcends the nervous system and gives us access to our unconditioned well-being. We feel it travel along the Midline, radiate through our body, and palpably do its work in particular places.

The Fluid Tide tends to arise when a client is in need of attention at the level of physiological or emotional healing — when the client is injured, stressed, ungrounded, or dissociated. The Fluid Tide permeates the local body with health, vitality, and awareness. There’s often a quality of saturated emotion and a felt sense that we are being met by something that knows us intimately.

Unlike the Fluid Tide, which is oriented to healing personal wounds, the LONG TIDE operates at the universal level. It is palpably the animating agent that brings life into our body. Some people call it Spirit. But — before we get too woo woo — science shows that even protoplasm, the basic stuff of our bodies, is streaming in cycles of 50 seconds.

When healing happens at the Long Tide level, it’s like a burst of fireflies or shimmering light across an immense landscape. We can’t follow its patterns sequentially, as we do with the Fluid Tide.

A Long Tide session dramatically taps into the client’s capacity for multidimensional reorganization. This allows for a realignment of form at a more fundamental level. It has extraordinary potential for healing, because it operates beyond ordinary physical limitations. The Long Tide uplifts us in a way that tends to evoke awe.

Even in these thumbnail sketches, I hope you can see that the textures, feeling tones, and spatial dimensions of the Cranial Wave, the Neutral, the Fluid Tide, and the Long Tide form living environments, not just motion patterns.

Why does the body show up as these rhythms and substances and spatial dimensions? Are they random? Biodynamics as a field doesn’t offer an explanation. Some practitioners have experienced additional rhythms that are not on our usual map. What is special about the rhythms that are particular to Biodynamics?

My own reasoning is that they are the building blocks, not just of the body, but of reality itself.

Take, for example, the way that physics has laid out 3D reality:

• The Newtonian paradigm said the body is a solid object like a billiard ball, knocking about in space. (That’s the tissue body.)

• Quantum physics suggested we could be, not just a particle, but a flowing wave. (That’s the fluid body.)

• A later iteration of quantum physics has asserted that we are super strings vibrating. (That’s the potency body.)

Biodynamics implicitly suggests that instead of looking at these three qualities of reality as mutually exclusive, we hold them all to be possible, true, and valuable.

This notion of three ways of being a body — and three embodied states of consciousness — is borne out by numerous spiritual traditions, whose divisions of reality precisely parallel the Biodynamic universes. Hinduism, for example, speaks of three fundamental states that it names Waking (Cranial Wave), Dreaming (Fluid Tide), and Deep Sleep (Long Tide).

When these qualities of embodiment appear to us in a session, we are coming very close to the template of reality itself. Perhaps that’s why the healing is so profound in Biodynamics.

In a future blog, I’ll add a fourth fundamental aspect to these building blocks of reality: the Dynamic Stillness.

Please share your perspective, I’d love to hear from you below.