Jenna Milner

Have you lost the perceptual cues that used to guide your way in Biodynamic sessions? This can happen when we get deeply familiar with the Dynamic Stillness.

In Biodynamic Craniosacral we talk about the Dynamic Stillness as the end of our “map.”

When I say map, I’m talking about the territory of clinical Biodynamic work. Usually, our field presents the map as a nested set of healing Tides: Cranial Wave, Fluid Tide, Long Tide, and then the Dynamic Stillness.

The Dynamic Stillness is not a Tide per se, but it’s understood to be the apex of this trajectory. It underlies the whole nested set.

The Dynamic Stillness is the origin from which the Tides emerge. It might make intuitive sense that our territory culminates in the Dynamic Stillness. It’s the void. How could anything lie “beyond” the void?

In this blog I’m going to describe a stage of perception that does lie beyond the void. This involuntary way of perceiving reality gives your clients a boost and offers you well-developed access to Stillness. But it brings with it some oddities and challenges for the practitioner.

Ordinarily, there’s no perception while you’re in the void, because there’s no “you” there who could perceive. If you’ve ever disappeared into the magical emptiness of the Dynamic Stillness, then you didn’t even realize you weren’t there until you “came back.” If you’re reading this now, then you came back.

Of course, it would be strange if you didn’t come back. No matter how long you’re in the void, it’s natural that at some point awareness of the world and your local self would return. It’s like going to sleep each night. You sleep, but you’re not surprised to wake up in the morning.

Like going to sleep at night, when we enter the void, our habitual sense of self blinks out. Then at some point, we find ourself back in the world, along with our habitual sense of self.

That is why initially — often for years — we visit the Void, but only recognize that we did so, when we return to the appearance of the world.

When we return, trying for a glimpse of where we have been, we recall only a sense of blacker-than-black blackness, where we did not exist.

At this stage of perception, we either disappear in the void, or we find ourselves in the world (and aware of body and self). It’s typical that we toggle between them: the Absolute (in states of meditation and biodynamic practice) and the Relative (the ordinary 3D world).

However, it turns out that we can apprehend the Dynamic Stillness without blinking out. We can be in the world; and at the same time, we can perceive the Dynamic Stillness. The way this manifests is confusing, so it’s good to be aware that this is even possible.

My premise is that we all have to build perceptual access to the Fluid Tide, the Long Tide, and the Dynamic Stillness. To acquire this perceptual repertoire, we progressively expand how much life we can embrace; and we let go of our previous, narrower sense of embodied self. Access to the Dynamic Stillness means that consciousness has expanded as much as it can.

After all, the Dynamic Stillness is consciousness itself. From “within” it there’s no sense of separation, no one to be more conscious or more expanded. When we disappear into the void, we are submerged in undifferentiated Stillness.

But after hanging out in the Dynamic Stillness for a good bit (usually, at least a few years), we may start to become aware of it while we are in the world.

In this new stage, it’s as though we are aware of both sides of a coin at once. Previously, we perceptually toggled between the coin’s two sides, perceiving either formlessness or form.

Now, though, we operate from a non-dual level of perception. We find we are aware of both the content of awareness (which can be any object of perception, including our client) and the empty formlessness that suffuses or underlies the content.

Furthermore, when non-dual perception comes online, 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). We perceive this lack of a split with utter clarity. Consciousness (whatever that is!) is everywhere. So awareness isn’t boundaried.

With this developmental stage, there is a sense of experience arising at the local, personal level, because our local self has not “blinked out” into the void (like it probably used to do). Yet at the same time, ordinary reality is palpably, visibly, or audibly permeated with emptiness.

The way you experience thingness (the world) and no-thingness (the void) interweaving will vary, depending on the way you are wired perceptually. For example:

• You might hear it as Silence that continuously underpins ordinary sounds, or as a scintillating sound in your inner ear.
• You might see darkness in your visual field or your own inner body.
• Physical objects may appear visually ephemeral; they lack solidity, or you see all the pixel-like or vibrating units of which they are composed.
• You might feel that you are incredibly grounded within your body and yet at the same time it is obvious you have “no body.”

The Biodynamic practitioner’s non-dual perception is a powerful asset for our clients. It tends to enhance the client’s healing process.

But for the practitioner, there can be significant adverse impact on clinical practice.

In a first phase of experiencing these phenomena, there tends to be a honeymoon period, where we vividly perceive the Stillness. In spiritual terms, this is part of the awakening process. We are learning to stop identifying ourselves as a body and a mind, and we become aware that we are emptiness. It can feel like we are love itself, or we are Stillness.

After a period of acclimating, though, perception can come across as downright mundane. Everything just “is what it is.”

For the Biodynamic practitioner who was familiar with disappearing into the void, a number of surprising things may occur:

• We stop disappearing into the void. We again experience separate objects — including “me” — co-arising with the void. If we are oriented to the things, then we may feel that we have lost access to the rich, fertile realm of the void.
• Experience tends to feel less juicy (which was the Fluid Tide), less awe-inspiring (which was the Long Tide), and more mundane (because the purity of the Dynamic Stillness took us “out,” while now we are “back in the world”).
• We may perceive subtle phenomena, but they can be from any of the Biodynamic domains (tissue, fluid, potency, void) at the same time. Not only is this weird and disconcerting; it keeps us from knowing with confidence where our client is on the Biodynamic map. For example, we might feel our physical hands, but they are in the saturated goo of the Fluid Tide. Or we may experience being in the vastness of the Long Tide; but our eyes can see the pixels of the Dynamic Stillness. So, where are we on the Biodynamic map — and more importantly, how do we gauge where our client is?
• Usually, the Stillness vacuums up most of the perceptual signals that we used to take for granted, including the Tides. The Tides are not usually perceptible.

So the practitioner grapples with an unnerving sense that everything just “is.” We feel bereft of the bliss and rainbows that previously accompanied the work; and our usual perceptual cues are muddied.

For myself, in what I call the “need-to-know basis,” I usually have just enough perception to operate in a session. For example, I may have a strong embodied sense of my client’s spatial dimension. Or I “feel/see” the fractal patterns that represent my their embodied reality. Maybe I know which place in the client’s body is calling for touch.

Sometimes I don’t know anything about the session until the client stands up, and their transformation is obvious.

Clients are most likely to be on the trajectory of consciousness expanding. So they experience the more ecstatic side of Biodynamics, where most of us start out. Clients tend to experience the phenomena that are no longer perceptually available to the practitioner.

How do you relate to this conversation? Many of us going through this feel the rug has been pulled out from under us. It can be a relief to understand that even though this stage of perception feels like we’ve lost our way, it actually represents a deepening of the work.