Jenna Milner

Are you convinced that your body is an isolated object, separate from everything else? Do you experience that your isolated brain is carried around passively by the workhorse of your body?

Actually, we exist in a network. Our bodies, our minds, and awareness itself are an interconnected web. Like mushrooms within their mycelium, our bodies seem to pop with individuality, while a vast intangible dimension links us all together. Like a wave within the sea, our physical bodies may seem to display a boundary, but in fact we are seamlessly interwoven with the rest of the water…that is, with the non-physical “material” that forms all the other bodies.

The biodynamic body, in other words, exists in a network. The tissue, fluid, and potency bodies (associated with cranial wave, fluid tide, and long tide) are field phenomena in which the seemingly solid body participates in a nested network of other increasingly comprehensive fields. What this means is that other peoples’ bodies, which may seem to be other, are intricately, inextricably interconnected with your own body.

When I was 11, I stopped eating meat. I understood that my body — my being — was connected to the animal bodies. There are other ways of expressing that interconnection with life that don’t require a vegetarian diet. One of my favorite books is The Dirty Life, about a community-supported agriculture program (https://essexfarmcsa.com) that provides all the elements of a whole foods diet. The animals and people form a network made conscious.

My body is part of the human network, its joys and sorrows. Through Biodynamics we recognize the unity of all life. As acclaimed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer frequently said, “Nobody’s free until every body’s free.” (https://www.aaihs.org/fannie-lou-hamers-message-to-contemporary-america/) When there is suffering on a mass scale, that horror reverberates through my body — presumably all bodies.

Our body is embedded in networks of energy, family, ancestry, culture, and more. For example, the feminist, gay rights, and civil rights movements long ago identified how being a woman, LGBTQ, or BIPOC informs how we live, communicate, move, and experience ourselves.

There are vivid examples of these ancestral connections in the amazing book What It Takes to Heal by Prentiss Hemphill (who is African American and uses the pronoun they/them). Hemphill points out that the masked face and demure eyes of enslaved ancestors were a form of self-defense that was passed on through the lineage. In a scene recalled from adolescence, Hemphill recognizes — and changes — the habit of circling around white-bodied people at the mall, instead of following a direct path. The people move aside.

Our body participates in our pleasures and our trials, and it benefits and suffers from the interdependent context in which it’s embedded. My father-in-law spent every day of his working life in a monstrously hot, loud factory, longing for time in the woods, among the trees. My own posture, nervous system, and appearance have been profoundly affected by my background and upbringing. Our DNA is an ancestral fulcrum; our ancestry affects us.

Both nature and nurture form a vital organizing force in this incarnation. They form an inertial fulcrum, when our conditioning saps us or deprives us of our desired life expression. (As my grandmother would say, nurture or nature, either way it’s her fault.)

Biodynamics is the premise as within, so without. The relationship between inside and outside generates our modality’s healing power. The Biodynamic Craniosacral practitioner taps into the stillness within, and this internal activity on our part resonates with our client “out there” on the table. My state of consciousness deeply affects my client’s state of consciousness. What’s more, healing is the return to our original form, as established by an outside fulcrum during embryogenesis. What then is inside, and what is outside?

Biodynamics goes beyond the ordinary definition of a body as that which is inside the skin. A fundamental biodynamic principle requires us to expand the boundaries of our body. This helps us investigate the relationship between matter and energy (or spirit), also called the hard problem of consciousness: How does consciousness arise; is it generated by my brain or does the brain arise within consciousness? In Biodynamics we are likely to come to an answer through personal experience: The body (and therefore the brain) arises within consciousness. The person arises inseparably from a unified field that includes all others.

Some clients find it deeply pleasurable to release their habitual confinement in the body. For them, expanding from Cranial Wave to Fluid Tide can be a sublime and revolutionary step. Newly inhabiting the fluid body, their sense of self extends beyond the physical form. This tends to feel natural, and comforting, like they can spread out. One client went to touch her shoulder and her hand landed in the air, about 6 or 8 inches beyond her physical shoulder.

Taking up more space reflects what’s already true. In Emily Conrad’s book Life On Land, the late biologist Mae Wan Ho describes the way that organisms overlap in space:

Think of each organism as an entity that is not really confined within the solid body we see, which just happens to be where its wave-function is most “dense”…The self is de-localized over all that we experience; just as all that we experience is entangled within our being.

For some of us, though, it can initially feel vulnerable to inhabit more space, especially in the company of others, who are now experienced as “within me,” instead of “outside me.” For these folks, it can feel terrifying or vulnerable to leave the bulwark of their physical form. I think this can be underestimated by the biodynamic practitioner, since by definition we practitioners are usually attracted to the expansive quality of Biodynamics.

Here’s an example from clinical practice. After a bumpy start to a session, I was thrilled to experience the robust and undeniable flow of the Fluid Tide. The tide repeatedly rose up, brimmed over the skin’s boundary, and receded back and down. I was particularly excited to feel this, because it’s rare that I strongly feel biodynamic phenomena any more. (If that topic interests you, check out my posts about the Descending Current.) The Fluid Tide! I expected that my client would be enthusiastic.

But after the session, the client led with a statement of how frightening it was. Only later did I hear about a pleasurable feeling of expansion.

What a reality check for me. And what a powerful reminder that it is indeed an evolutionary step to inhabit the wider sphere of the fluid body, after a lifetime of retrenchment in the tissue body. I had felt the client’s reticence to let go…but I assumed that the eventual surrender to the Fluid Tide would outshine the initial reluctance. Instead, that reluctance at least partially overshadowed the experience of dynamic flow, which ultimately coursed as the Fluid Tide through the session.

If you have any comments on this or examples of being in a networked body, please use the section below, as I’d love to hear from you.