Jenna Milner

Mastery seems like you should know more and more. Weirdly, in the field of Biodynamics, as we gain maturity in the work, we know less! How do we understand this slipping away of information that we used to take for granted?

THE ASCENDING CURRENT AS A PATH OF KNOWING LESS AND LESS

In my last blog I described a path to Biodynamic mastery that I called the Ascending Current. The Client’s Neutral, the Fluid Tide, Long Tide, and the Dynamic Stillness represent an evolutionary trajectory through which we increasingly become more integrated and expand the boundaries of our awareness.

In other words, the Neutral, Fluid Tide, Long Tide, and the Dynamic Stillness are not just breakthrough states of healing, but stages of surrender and openness that both client and practitioner can develop. This path constitutes an evolution of consciousness.

How do these stages apply to mastery in our clinical work?

Our skill in using the Cranial Wave participates in culturally recognized forms of expertise. Even though the motion patterns we work with are minute and subtle, the practitioner still assesses what is wrong and manipulates particular structures to affect function. We determine what needs fixing, attend to it, and then reassess. Our skill relies on gathering accurate information and implementing techniques.

Working with the Fluid Tide, neither the treatment nor the outcome is under the practitioner’s control. Yet we know all kinds of things, things that tend to impress the client and reassure our own mind. I remember those days fondly. I knew where in the client’s body the therapeutic work was happening. I could follow the process as it unfolded. I could feel the Fluid Tide as it welled up the Midline and radiated out beyond the skin. I was privy to abundant information about the client. And it was such a relief not to be constrained by the reactive nervous system and to feel confident in the healing process.

At the level of the Long Tide, the potential for healing is immeasurably greater. The atmosphere in our office is suffused by presence and transformed to a cathedral. The client tends to be awestruck and to pin the experience on the practitioner’s skill. But if we’re honest, there’s no longer anything for the practitioner to take pride in. The practitioner is barely there anymore; what we’ve gotten better at is letting go and allowing the underlying wisdom to do its magic. It isn’t even possible, unless our client has the capacity to let go, too.

I worked in and through the Dynamic Stillness for a time. It offered profound healing possibilities. The void represents the pinnacle of a client’s healing capacity: exquisite healing occurs with no process. There is no higher expression of a Biodynamic clinician’s work. Yet ironically, this expression of mastery comes with no information about the client or their experience. The Dynamic Stillness requires full surrender and deference to a therapeutic agency that’s entirely beyond the practitioner. We have lost all knowledge.

THE DYNAMIC STILLNESS: FULLY DEFERRING TO THAT WHICH DOES KNOW

On the Ascending Current, to experience the benefits of the void, the clinician must “blink out” entirely. For me, this was unnerving as a clinician. Because there was no “I” there at all, I lost the ability to be professionally accountable to my client, and I had nothing to share or communicate after the table work.

At that point, I had long since abandoned the crispness of a Cranial Wave orientation. But I had come to rely on an embarrassment of riches in the Fluid Tide, complemented by the immeasurable benefits of the Long Tide. After a Dynamic Stillness session, there was literally nothing to say…and nothing to know. And I couldn’t even pretend to have been present in a conventional way.

Often, if the clinician’s consciousness is still expanding, it’s when our client is infused with the profound stillness of the void that we also let go in that fundamental way. We — the clinician — surrender to the Dynamic Stillness. And in so doing, we know absolutely nothing about what occurs. Most likely, the client and the clinician “return” to the world at the same time. There’s a sense of profound healing with no process. That is the hallmark of the Dynamic Stillness: No process. Nothing to know.

With each step along the Ascending Current, the clinician achieves greater mastery, in the sense of making more healing possible for our client. But with each step, we know less.

THE DESCENDING CURRENT: A WHOLE NEW LEVEL OF NOT KNOWING

For many of us, we spend years falling into the blacker-than-black void. But then, something strange happens.

We stay lucid.

This represents a shift in our perspective, expressed through the phrase Descending Current. (This term comes from philosopher Ken Wilber, via Charles Ridley.)

This is essentially a shift of identity — an awareness of the Self as empty of substance. Even when the shift of identity still wavers, the perceptual breakthrough to the Descending Current makes available a new mode of perception: non-dual perception.

Non-dual perception arises when we become acclimated to the void. The infusion of Stillness is so saturated, that when we return from the void to the world of form, the Stillness comes with us.

In this implausible scenario, ordinary reality is palpably, visibly, or audibly permeated with emptiness. The two — thingness (ordinary physical reality) and no-thingness (the non-physical dimension or void) — interweave in a way that is utterly baffling. One byproduct of this perceptual landscape is that the previously crisp Biodynamic map devolves into a mishmash.

On the Descending Current, the clearcut boundaries of Biodynamic Craniosacral Work disappear.

I recall one instance of this early on, when my client and I were in a breathtakingly still, slow, and spacious Long Tide, reveling in the awe-inspiring vastness. And then I recognized the clunky dense nature of the thoughts that were arising — peaceable enough thoughts, and yet utterly out of place in the Long Tide and therefore disconcerting and even jarring.

This stage brings a whole new level of not knowing. As long as the practitioner is on the Ascending Current, we know we’re in the Fluid Tide because we feel the Fluid Tide, and we only experience phenomena associated with the Fluid Tide.

On the Descending Current, however, Stillness swallows up many of our usual perceptions. In general, we no longer sense the tides. And now we aren’t restricted to experiencing a single embodied universe at a time. For example, we are more likely to be aware of all the spatial dimensions at once, not just one of them.

Our client may very well be in the Fluid Tide. But the practitioner on the Descending Current won’t be aware of it, at least not in the way that we expect.

The practitioner is more whole and integrated; our access to Stillness is profound; and our maturity in the work is unquestionable. Yet when perception has evolved to the Descending Current, we are less able to identify the nitty gritty of our client’s experience.

How do we operate in this strange new world? That is what I will cover in Part 2 of this post. Please stay tuned!

How does this post strike you? What is your sense of what Biodynamic mastery entails? What information is still available to you? Do you still readily experience tidal phenomena?