Jenna Milner

Any Biodynamic practitioner will tell you that our stillness carries something valuable and trustworthy. When we stop trying to make things happen, we discover an underlying wisdom that effortlessly expresses itself.

But how do we find our way to the genius of non-doing, when so much of our education and our very impulses are based on doing? 

The first step is to let go of effort and cultivate your Neutral. Biodynamics, the Neutral describes a natural state of wholeness, openness, and inner stillness that is the foundation of skillful non-doing.

In the Neutral, things unfold in an effective way, even though you aren’t controlling them. You relate with authenticity and a sense of deep connection, because you are seated in your wholeness.

The Neutral is powerful, because it makes you receptive to an intelligence that is greater than your intellect. Your intellect can be useful. But there is another wisdom available. In the Neutral, you are open to that greater wisdom; and Biodynamics is a process of reliably engaging it.

When your car’s gearshift is set to neutral, you’re not going anywhere — but you could go anywhere. A car in neutral is free to shift into any gear or drive in any direction, but it’s not moving. The Biodynamic Neutral expresses that same sense of potential.

Primary Respiration is an umbrella term for the flow of health and unconditioned life force in our bodies. The Neutral simply means you are free to shift in response to that flow. In fact, a useful definition of the Neutral is freedom to shift in response to Primary Respiration.

In other words, doing “nothing” only works because there is something else — Primary Respiration — that improves our outcomes better than using technical skill, protocol, or analysis. A Neutral underpins our access to the flow of life and health.

However, most of us are not in the Neutral much of the time. And ironically, one essential step that informs and engenders our Neutral is to release effort. How do we do that?!

At first, it can be difficult to understand what it means to do nothing. People tend to try too hard, which gets in the way.

In contrast, to do nothing means that you release the effort of doing, whether it is the effort to meditate, the effort to get something right, the effort to stop thoughts, or the effort to be still. 

It’s not that you are lax or passive, or strangely, that you don’t make any effort. Instead, you relax the sense of being the one who’s getting things done. This can be harder than it sounds.

Let’s take breathing as a practice arena. Take 20 or 30 seconds to breathe, without imposing any voluntary activity on your breath. How did that go?

Meditators routinely discover how challenging it is not to manage your breath once you bring awareness to it. It is much easier to control your breath: to extend your exhalation, retain the inhalation, or draw breath into your chest. But can you allow yourself to be breathed, instead of doing the breathing yourself? 

If this activity challenged you, keep in mind that the practice arena was breath — an involuntary activity that does not actually require our conscious help. What if we instead relax control over a life activity that we are accustomed to controlling? This can be remarkably challenging.

We live in a culture that respects personal will. For example, doing is presumed to emerge from personal intention: “I see a problem, I fix the problem.”

Intelligence is presumed to emerge from a personal mind: “I know what’s wrong, and I know how to address it.”

Love is presumed to emerge from a personal emotion: “I am a ‘someone’ loving someone else. I am a person in relationship with a different, external person.” 

It is a radical shift of perspective to recognize that I am not the one doing, knowing, or relating. But when you look deeply, any single action occurs in a kaleidoscope of actions that are not under the control of a single person.

The same way that the rain falls or the wind howls, the phenomena of a life arise without the personal intention of a “doer.” Life is managing itself. Successes arise, relationships arise. Everything has so many levels of cause and effect that it’s impossible to say that you are the one controlling your life.

This became clear to me in the domain of my small business as a massage therapist. My personal will was a factor, certainly: I am a hard worker and I wasn’t sitting on the couch. However, it became apparent that something else was at play beyond my personal will. 

I could discern intelligence in the way that my life and my schedule fell into new patterns. Oddly synchronistic events would turn me in new directions. 

For example, I intended to practice a particular massage modality. But midway through the training, I was sidelined at a workshop with a broken arm. I discovered Hugh Milne’s The Heart of Listening in a pile of books. My rational mind would not have chosen his angle on craniosacral work. But the book drew me in. It wasn’t long before my professional life turned in this new direction.

Not just in the arc of my career, but in everything from accessing creativity to my choice of a life partner, I’ve seen demonstrations of an intelligence that transcends the personal mind. My students have offered their own compelling examples.

In spite of our cultural reluctance to acknowledge this, our personal mind is linked to a greater mind. We split ourselves off from that broader intelligence when we insist that the individual will is the one in charge.

When our activity is aligned with the greater intelligence, it can live through us. So we can release the burden of thinking we’re the one who needs to get it all done.

Biodynamics suggests that we release personal effort and embrace our unity with the genius of non-doing. Then we open not just to enhanced perception, but also to enhanced action.

When you relax your identification as the one who is doing, it leads to more effective action and better results. Over time you will be able to align with the agency that is actually doing the doing.

I see this every day in my healing arts practice: Doing occurs, but it’s not my personal efforts that guide the client’s healing. The doing originates elsewhere.

Author Tosha Silver calls this intelligent agency Divine Order. Her hilarious anecdotes involve shopping triumphs, travel plans, and real estate transactions, all of which benefit from invoking this greater intelligence in daily life: Cashiers suddenly multiply in a crowded shop. The last plane ticket becomes available. Spontaneous wanderings through a big city lead the author to precisely the resource or sighting that she needs.

The intelligence we work with in Biodynamics doesn’t require a belief in the divine nor a genius for manifesting. I’m not making an argument that we can get what we want by praying for it or willing it to happen.

Instead, as we release personal effort, we allow life to be lived in its organic spontaneity and uncertainty, without pretending that “I” am the one making it all happen.

And ironically, these are also the ingredients for a thriving Biodynamic practice.