Jenna Milner

Perhaps one of the most common questions I hear from students of biodynamics and, surprisingly often, from seasoned practitioners is: I feel something. Is this the Tide?

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that there is actually little consensus about what exactly we mean when we say the Tide.  In biodynamics, we are taught to orient to the mid-tide, the long tide, or even slower rhythms. The mid-tide itself is a particular contribution of Franklyn Sills’ teaching.

So which of these is the Tide?

To answer that,  we first have to distinguish between the Tide itself and the bio-rhythms through which the Tide expresses itself.

If the Tide is seen as the primary organizing force, the potency that underlies and organizes life, then none of these rhythms strictly speaking is the Tide. They are expressions of it.

The subtle movement you perceive through the whole body. The rhythmic pulsing of tissues and fluids. A particular rate, amplitude or quality of motion. These are phenomena arising within the Tide.

These are ways the Tide becomes perceptible. Think of seaweed moving in the ocean. You can watch its movement and know something what the water is doing. But the movement of the seaweed is not the tide itself.

And the same distinction applies in biodynamic perception. If by “the Tide” you mean a particular bio-rhythm that you have learned to recognize by its speed, quality of expression and perceptual qualities, then yes: you can identify it. You can say: This is the mid-tide. This is the long tide. And in ordinary clinical language, we may simply call that the Tide. But there is another way of understanding this term.

If the Tide is the engine behind all engines, the ordering intelligence from which these phenomena arise, then the question changes. The buzzing of the cerebellum, buoyancy of a tissue, the stuckness of a knee joint, a trapped nerve finding more space, a whole-body shift toward greater coherence… All of these are like the seaweed.

They are phenomena occurring within a much larger field. And if you continue perceptually beneath the phenomenon, beneath the movement, beneath the anatomical event, beneath even the bio-rhythm itself, eventually you come to something much less easily named. The source from which the movement arises.

That to me gets much closer to what we mean by the Tide.

It begins to resemble a nondual view of the world: everything arising from one source, with all of creation appearing as the phenomena produced within it. In that sense, almost anything we perceive is not the Tide itself, but something happening of it. This distinction is not merely philosophical; it changes clinical work.

The moment our perception stops focusing on the phenomenon and drops underneath it toward the organizing source from which the phenomenon is arising, we are no longer simply observing movement, but orienting to the intelligence behind it. That perceptual shift alone can orchestrate profound therapeutic change.

There is, however, a practical answer for practitioners who are still developing their perception. If you are learning to recognize biodynamic rhythms, you don’t need to solve this metaphysical question before you can practice.

Learn the bio-rhythm you are working with – its speed,  territory, quality, how the system reacts when you come into relationship with it. Call it the Tide if that helps you orient, because these bio-rhythms are expressions of the same underlying force. And then, with experience, you may discover that the more interesting question is not: “Is this the Tide?”, but: “What is moving this?”

Before we can work with the Tide with any real precision, we need an understanding of what we mean by it: the relationship between the Breath of Life, the Tide, and the biorhythms.