Jenna Milner

While it’s the basis of the transformative work that we do, the Dynamic Stillness is not something that we can easily point to, because it’s not a thing or an experience. Meditation is one way that we can develop our recognition of this continuous, underlying stillness and thereby move our Biodynamic practice forward.

We live in a time with many easily available apps, wise teachers, and online opportunities for meditation. However, not all meditation is equally beneficial as a conduit for biodynamic insight. You absolutely might benefit from meditation that relaxes you, quiets your mind, or helps you concentrate or sleep. But those activities in themselves won’t necessarily be portals to the fluid body or the potency body, let alone the Dynamic Stillness.

I recommend non-dual meditation practice for Biodynamic practitioners. It lays the groundwork for recognizing the unified web that interconnects apparently separate things. Depending on the teachings, this “unity” might be called Consciousness, the Void, or many other names. But it’s the same as what we call the Dynamic Stillness.

Here I offer two fundamental ways to frame your non-dual practice. Try both, until you reach a point where one or the other arises organically whenever you sit.

RECEPTIVE MEDITATION (The “Yin” Method)

This practice is to simply sit in stillness and silence. This can be very difficult for beginning meditators, especially if the nervous system has a strong grip on awareness.

Whatever results is none of your business. You allow life to bubble up. Whether it is experienced as unpleasant or pleasant indicates very little.

Any particular session of meditation often features an initial stage, where a “froth” of thoughts rises to the surface; this is an opportunity to skim off this layer. Let the thoughts move on, and they are likely to do so.

If your mind has a lot to say, again, it’s none of your business. If tensions make themselves apparent, so be it. If your experience is blissful or emotional, same. It isn’t your job to achieve any particular experience.

The Dynamic Stillness is like the intangible blue sky. What we tend to pay attention to is the variety of clouds that drift across the sky.

As we sit in meditation, though, there’s no need to make anything stop. The “clouds” of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and memories drift by. By resting in stillness, we re-orient to the sky — the empty stillness — that makes possible the movement of the clouds.

Ultimately, through meditating in this receptive way, we start recognizing that there is nobody there meditating. Attention stops grasping so hard at the things that that somebody would focus on.

We surrender into being itself, without the effort to be anybody or do anything.

This is a helpful practice to import into our clinical Biodynamic work. Far from being passive, it’s a disciplined attunement to what truly matters: the Stillness at the core of profound healing.

ACTIVE MEDITATION (The “Yang” Method)

The receptive mode of meditation is much easier once you have a kinesthetic memory of how Stillness feels and how it moves (which is the Tides). Until then, you may wish to introduce some gentle activities into your meditation practice.

Meditators are often familiar with practices like repeating a word or phrase (a mantra) or watching the breath. These evoke different states or help the mind become more one-pointed, calm, or focused. I use ancient chants to invoke particular embodied states of consciousness that correlate with the Biodynamic map.

You also might use a “wash” of light, warmth, or awareness down the vertical innermost core of the body, from the forehead to the base of the spine. That vertical core is the Biodynamic Midline. I learned the Midline wash from Charles Ridley and did it for years as I entered meditation or sessions. I also did a wash each time I realized I had fallen out of the Neutral.

Alternately, you may continually return awareness to a particular place of perceptual freedom at the back of the heart, where life activity meets up with Stillness. (Through my website, I offer a deep-dive ebook about that practice.)

Or you can cultivate a practice of self-inquiry, which might look like this: Take a burning question with spiritual significance for you. Drop the question with great intent, like dropping a stone down from your crown into the waters of your body. Leave the answer to resolve itself outside of the realm of habitual consciousness. (I learned this valuable practice from my meditation teachers Adyashanti and Mukti Gray.)

LETTING GO OF CONTROL

Whether receptive or active, meditation as a cultivation of non-doing requires us to get out of the way, so we can plug our embodied being into the outlet of the Mystery — this other intelligence that we call the Tides or the Stillness. As Adyashanti says:

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever.

The meditation experience itself will vary widely. Sometimes it will be pleasurable, sometimes less so. In fact, it is never the experience (what you “get”) that is fundamental, but the way your perception of self is organized around the experience (how you “be” and “do” the meditation).

At first, you will probably organize as a “me” who is doing the meditation — a someone doing a something. Try watching your breath, or washing light down your Midline. These activities may very well brim over into your daily life. When driving to work or tending to a screaming kid, they can help you recover your Neutral and remember the stillness that underlies the surface turbulence. 

At some point, though, or on some occasions, these gentle activities may strike you as too much doing. Even in the subtlety of washing awareness down the Midline, you might catch the element of control, and it starts to make you uncomfortable. You feel the push and the investment in a goal. If this happens, then it’s time to dissolve even the subtlest doing, and rest in the simplicity of non-doing. 

WHY MEDITATE?

Why meditate? I believe it’s important for each of us to know why we meditate, even if that reason inevitably changes. Consciously knowing what’s important to you can help you find your course. (And it is surprisingly different from mistakenly believing that you are the one steering the boat.)

On any particular day or any particular era of your explorations, meditation might help you: 

• recognize from where in space you habitually notice the body
• settle into the whole body at once, including places where awareness is reluctant to enter
• get quiet and consolidate your Neutral
• connect with guidance, “download” information, and receive insights
• remind you to expand awareness beyond the body or beyond the room
• stay spacious so life can flow through you
• release your grip on form altogether and disappear into the nourishment of the Stillness

And that is only a partial list. Meditation in this model is simply an exploration of being itself — an exploration of awareness, and how awareness aligns with the body. That also happens to be how I experience Biodynamics as a table work modality.

So first and most essentially, in meditation we explore that alignment of body and awareness. And the activity of meditation will predispose us to successfully encounter other people, whether the context is bodywork or anything else. 

Meditation (like a session, like life) is an opportunity for things to arise that need processing, or to soothe your frazzled nervous system, or to ready you for the day ahead. But meditation is also an evolutionary boost, because it is an intentional activity that aligns you with an intelligence beyond mental intelligence.

To access this greater wisdom and accelerate your own evolution, no other activity better prepares you for skillful non-doing than a daily practice of meditation. At heart, this process is not only about making yourself more comfortable or getting yourself together. It is about actually getting to know yourself as Stillness itself.