Jenna Milner

From crusty bread to a delectable cream-filled donut.

Many textbooks describe the Fluid Tide (or Midtide) as a rhythm of two to three cycles per minute, compared to the Cranial Wave at eight to 14 cycles per minute. I’ve even heard the Fluid Tide’s juicy fluctuation described as “the two-to-three.” But that sounds so, well, dry! No offense meant to the Cranial Wave, but imagine lava or syrup (the Fluid Tide) compared to dry toast. In the transition from tissue to fluid, not only does the tempo slow, but the substance of your being literally transmutes. Your subjective impression of having a body softens from crusty bread to a delectable cream-filled donut. And your body naturally balloons. The edges of you swell out beyond the skin. In fact, the boundary of the skin no longer contains you (nor is it even felt).

None of those words capture the heightened emotion and even beauty that is evoked by this bodily transition from brittle tissue to gooey fluids. But let’s start here by identifying the substance that marks the universe of the Fluid Tide; and its spatial dimension.

The Texture of the Fluid Body.

I know a family whose old-fashioned basement had a wild stream flowing through it. They would stash perishables in it and chill beer. Just like that basement, the physical body conceals a dynamic swirling essence. Imagine a moonscape where you dip under the crust of the arid lunar landscape, to discover the nectar that flows beneath the surface. This is the feeling of moving from the dry, stiff tissue body into the texture of the fluid body. It is a qualitative (not incremental) shift in which the very substance changes.

When you are submerged in the fluids — the universe of the Fluid Tide — the body is like a Boston cream donut. The supple, resilient skin of the donut barely contains the delectable, overflowing creaminess of the custard within. A client had no idea that I had ever used that metaphor, yet she told me after shifting into the fluids: “It’s like I’m a cream donut but my cream was missing!” The sensual, tactile, richly saturated tone and texture of this universe naturally evoke food metaphors. I have heard spontaneous reports of the fluid body as brownie batter, caramel, and bread dough. 

In Biodynamics, we are modern alchemists, catalyzing shifts that increase value, moving nimbly from one substance to another. The alchemists of the 17th century “would melt, in the way of ice, the crusted outer coagulation of metallic bodies, making them flow alive like quicksilver, in order to obtain the creative sparks of primal matter, the substantive intelligence around which the metal had embodied.” (Robert Bosnak, Embodiment, p. 75.)

We, too, concentrate the heat by augmenting consciousness. We melt the outer coagulation (the physical body) to reveal the quicksilver flow of the fluid tide below.  

How do we reveal the honey beneath the body’s crust? Just stop. Just be. (That is cultivating your Neutral.)

The Neutral is a state of rest, balance, and wholeness. Saturate your interior with awareness. You’re opening up the core of your body. (That is inhabiting your Midline.)

When you come deeply into the Midline, you fundamentally shift the body’s access to the healthy current flowing through the Midline, which is like an irrigation pipe in the center of a field. (That current is the Fluid Tide.)

The Spatial Dimension of the Fluid Tide.

Unlike a cream donut, a Fluid Body doesn’t stop at the skin; its “custard” overflows, and as we make the shift from tissue to fluid, we lose awareness of the skin as a boundary. Most of us think our personal acreage is quite limited; we normally identify the plot of our property as the physical body alone. But the embodied plot of our Fluid Body extends from the Midline out beyond the skin by a few feet.

Thus, when your Fluid Body expresses itself fully, you occupy the interior of the body and yet you also inhabit the area surrounding the body. When a good, robust Fluid Body manifests, I often feel a sense of being agreeably contained – not just a few feet out but actually within the walls of the room.

If the body is like a volcano, the Fluid Tide is the lava that emerges from the volcano and flows beyond it into the neighboring territory. The slow-motion movement of a single stream of lava out beyond the boundary of its previous territory is a beautiful description of the Fluid Tide. It takes up more space than the Tissue Body.

What is your own experience of the Fluid Tide? Please comment below, I’d love to hear.