Jenna Milner

The Biodynamic Craniosacral community has settled on four embodied qualities to which we aspire and to which we attune. They are:

We could also refer to the biodynamic qualities as four substances: tissue, fluid, potency, and void.

What is their relationship to one another? Is there a bigger whole in which they participate?

Biodynamic author Charles Ridley has described our four “enfoldments” as forming a single trajectory that he calls the Ascending Current. Building on the work of philosopher Ken Wilber, Ridley asserts that each enfoldment can be seen more broadly as a state of consciousness. As we move along the Ascending Current, we experience an evolution of consciousness.

In my experience, this view carries enormous practical benefit for the biodynamic practitioner. The Ascending Current is a path from separation to unity, and from contraction to freedom. And Biodynamic Cranial Work gives us a non-conceptual, kinesthetic map of this territory.

It turns out that the four fundamental units of our work are a map of embodied consciousness. They form a single trajectory from Cranial Wave to Dynamic Stillness.

In clinical work, the Ascending Current suggests that it’s meaningful and non-random which enfoldment arises in a session. When we apply this map to personal growth, the Ascending Current is a path of spiritual awakening.

Our professional field tends to emphasize the rhythms that are associated with Primary Respiration, that is, Cranial Wave, Fluid Tide, and Long Tide.

Although some practitioners are able to perceive additional rhythms, I would argue that our four primary enfoldments, including the Dynamic Stillness, form an archetypal whole.

The four enfoldments are not just rhythms that get incrementally wider and slower. They are qualitatively different from each other. I prefer to think about them as universes or atmospheres.

Yes, we can experience the fluctuation of the Fluid Tide as a coherent, embodied rhythm at two and a half cycles per minute. But the Fluid Tide has other correlates, many of which are widely acknowledged. Here are a few:

• The spatial dimension is the biosphere or egg shape that contains and surrounds the tissue body

• A substantial gooey substance takes up the space of the biosphere

• There’s a quality of saturation, both emotionally (perhaps accompanied by weeping) and kinesthetically (a density, a substantial feeling like a wet sponge)

• Physiological healing is palpable, often as a sequence of subtle fractal motions in a fluid matrix

• Guidance proliferates, intuition flows, and time slows

If you perceive any of those features, you know you are in the universe of the Fluid Tide.

The Ascending Current is just like international travel: If you’re in Paris, you can easily see that you’re not in Rome.

If you are in the Fluid Tide, the only phenomena that you will perceive are Fluid Tide phenomena. If you perceive the Long Tide, the only substance you will be aware of is a dispersed, quiet radiance that permeates a vast space. And if you are infused by the Dynamic Stillness, there won’t be anything distinguishable — not a you, not an other, no body, just darkness.

The Initiatory Neutral, the Fluid Tide, the Long Tide, and the Dynamic Stillness are distinct nodes along the trajectory of the Ascending Current. With each step, the embodied environment becomes less personal, less confined, and less conditioned — and more transpersonal, more free, and more potent for healing.

The Ascending Current, in other words, is an evolutionary path. Each enfoldment can be a breakthrough state, or we can stabilize in it as a stage.

As we evolve along this path, the body’s felt boundaries relax. It is as though the body, which initially felt solid, empties out. We become transparent, because life can increasingly move through us without impediment. 

When you begin this work, you may experience your body as a tightly bounded and dense object. You are either contained in it — or you are separate from it. But either way, you are identified with that body. In other words, you experience it as your body. And it seems straightforward to describe this body as something that you are in. Your identity is fused with the body. (Very likely, the word bodymind instead of body would be equally accurate.)

Inevitably, however, while you are evolving along the Ascending Current, your sense of you will stretch to include the outside of the body. The body starts to include space, including space that incorporates other people, animals, plants, and objects. You can intuit many — perhaps unexpected — things about these other beings.

Meanwhile, the air around your physical form takes on a sense of aliveness, responsiveness, and electricity that is undeniable to you. This enlarged body is composed of a viscous substance that is distinctly different from the dense, tight, rigid, and boundaried tissue that previously exemplified your body. You may feel juicy rhythms and soothing motion patterns circulating or surging through this caramelized body.

In all of this, of course, I am simply describing the state of a healthy fluid body.

When you are initially — the first time or the first number of times — expanding from the tissue body to the fluid body, you experience this transition as a quantum leap. Your body feels absolutely gigantic. Your emotions are large and perhaps intense; your sense of personal healing may be profound. You feel so porous and unboundaried that you may be quite hesitant to go out into the world without your ordinary armor to protect you.

This sense of busting through an invisible threshold continues with each step. Given enough safety, stillness, and opportunities for letting go, I’d put my bets on you becoming familiar with the entire Ascending Current.

The Ascending Current is a transcendent process. This impulse toward freedom ultimately leads us to surrender our identification with form altogether. In Biodynamics, we call that the Dynamic Stillness, which is the apex of the Ascending Current.

As I said, on the Ascending Current, we are only in one enfoldment at a time. In Paris, you’re only in Paris.

At this stage of perception, there’s either awareness of the world of form (even if it’s the luminously expanded, transcendent form of the Long Tide). Or awareness is submerged in the world of the formless (the Dynamic Stillness or void).

It’s either/or. There are two sides of a coin, and we are only aware of one side at a time. So the conventional Biodynamic “map” remains squarely in duality.

Fortunately, there’s a lesser known part of the map that takes us further into wholeness and freedom through a non-dual perspective. That’s what I’m building to here, and will speak about in a future post.

Another important note that I’ll dig into another time, is that this transcendent process is about expanding the possibilities, not about establishing a hierarchy. I’m not saying “Long Tide is better than Fluid Tide.” Instead, the point is that different enfoldments expose us to different potentials. Each territory offers different laws of healing, for example.

Meanwhile, I’d be so grateful for your comments below about your own perspective. Do you experience the enfoldments as rhythms…or as states of consciousness…or both? What are the embodied boundaries that are meaningful for you? Do you identify your “self” with an enfoldment? How are you aware that you’re in a particular enfoldment?