Biodynamic Practice Female Gender Part One

Articles

Chapter 26

Basic Points of Biodynamic Practice female gender

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is the creative application of a set of principles and processes, some of which are listed below. The rest are revealed while treating a client and living one’s life. Understand that this is a contemplative style of work. It is about establishing a relationship between Stillness, Love and Compassion.

Practice Instructions

I. Practitioner Orienting to Space
1. Orienting means to locate one’s attention in present time and know which direction is east, south, west and north.
2. The first practice instruction comes from the Psalms: “Be still and know”.
3. Settle into an upright still sitting posture (feet on the ground, pelvis balanced on the chair, accessibility of vertical midline in the spine, lift through the clavicles, head and neck, arms resting comfortably, mouth and face relaxed).
4. The practitioner orients her body through her pelvis and legs to the earth.
5. The practitioner minimizes thinking thoughts of the past and future as she orients to present time.
6. Access three-dimensionality (3D) in and/or around the practitioner’s fluid body:
  1. Breathe into the body 3D from top to bottom.
  2. Find the total surface volume of the skin 3D, either with sensation or image.
  3. 3D includes all the fragments as one shape with different densities.
  4. Move attention to the horizon 3D (front-back-sides-above-below) and then come back.
7. Rest in the stillness 3D whenever and wherever possible.
8. Sense the movement and activity of the heart 3D in the thorax.
9. Sense the blood moving 3D in the capillaries under the skin, in the veins and arteries of muscles, its production in the bone marrow and its process in the organs.
II. Practitioner Synchronizing with Their Slow Tempo
1. 1° is the mind of the fluid body.
2. Synchronize means to become conscious of a slow tempo in one’s self and fluid body first and then the client and so forth.
3. Practitioner allows Primary Respiration (1°) to be noticed by establishing 3D.
4. Wait for a 100 second cycle inside or outside one’s fluid body. 100 seconds is simply a doorway into the vast intelligence of 1°.
5. The three embryonic fulcrums for perceiving outside presence of 1° are the umbilicus, heart and third ventricle. These are the horizontal midlines relating the fluid body to other fluid bodies including the earth.
6. 1° has inside movement up and down the notochord like a vertical accordion two dimensionally or like 3D breathing. This is one of the vertical midlines.
7. Imagine the skin is like a tubular sea sponge and the entire content of the inside of the body is an aquamarine colored living ocean.
8. Imagine being held by a living ocean on the outside of the skin 3D.
III. Practitioner Synchronizing with the Client
1. Imagine the practitioner and the client are one interconnected fluid body, one united cardiovascular circulatory system and one interpersonal nervous system.
2. Maintain and grow the heart/blood rhythm throughout the practitioner’s whole body and especially to the hands.
3. Imagine one’s thorax and heart area is a satellite dish or giant clam shell and the client’s 1° is gently pushing and then pulling the dish before contact is made.
4. The practitioner waits for the felt sense of an intention in her heart to make contact with the client.
5. Negotiate permission to make contact.
6. Initial hand contact on the client requires the practitioner to be receptive, to reorient and to resynchronize.
7. Receptivity starts a harmonious flow in the shared circulatory system.
8. Upon each subsequent contact immediately reorient and resynchronize to one’s own body.
9. The practitioner inhales the client’s dilemma with the potency of her compassion in the tempo of 1°.
10. The practitioner exhales well-being to the client with the potency of her love in the tempo of 1°.
11. The practitioner allows her hands and arms to be like an umbilical cord wherever they are placed.
12. The perception of 1° goes through a series of progressive stages that may or may not follow this order:
  1. Practitioner. This includes outside presence, inside presence and the possible merging of those two into one state of 1°. This is a 3D perception of 1° and may involve the simultaneous perception of the expansion phase and the contraction phases occurring at the same time. This is non-linear perception.
  2. Client. The practitioner is able to distinguish the expansion and contraction phases of 1° in the client as distinct from her own. In addition the practitioner may sense different directional patterns of 1° in the client, especially on the midline of the notochord, the long bones, the transverse axis of the cranium and so forth. These are fields of activity in the fluid body.
  3. Practitioner-Client. Sometimes, the practitioner may sense her 1° and that of the client’s to be separate. This gradually changes into a sense of them being related and coherent with one another. This may develop into a sense of both of the Primary Respirations mirroring one another. At first, they may be sensed to be moving together in the same phase. Alternately, they may be sensed to be moving in clearly opposite phases to one another. It is a dance.
  4. Unified. At some point, a quantum event takes place and the sense of two Primary Respirations becomes one. The practitioner and client breathe together as one egg or one heart or one fluid body. At this point, it is important for the practitioner to retain enough attention on her heart so as to avoid becoming disoriented. This supports the client’s autonomy and self-regulation. The practitioner can achieve this sense of differentiation by maintaining an awareness of stillness in her heart as I mentioned or bare attention on her secondary respiration or suspending attention to include the holding environment of the office and surrounding environment. This unification encompasses the all the zones mentioned below.
  5. Stillness. This refers to the frequent experience of being able to track 1° and gradually loosing perception of it. Practitioners are encouraged to wait in the stillness for 1° to reemerge into consciousness rather than going looking for it.
  6. Perceptual process. It must be stated that the perception of the practitioner’s 1° is the priority and represents the majority of session time. In other words, the practitioner might spend 60-80% of a session working with her own perception of the inside and outside presence of 1°.
IV. Attunement – Safety
1. Attunement is the rhythmic slow movement of attention towards and away from the client.
2. Attunement is the key to the rehabilitation of the client’s nervous system.
3. Safety is established through attunement in a slow tempo.
4. Self regulation is reestablished by being conscious of the interconnected central nervous and cardiovascular systems of the client and practitioner.
5. Interconnectivity accesses the present time functions of the nervous system and changes the past.
6. Interconnectivity is a bit sloppy so learn to gently return to present time when carried away by thoughts of the past or future.
V. Attunement – Attention
1. Attunement means that during a session, the practitioner’s attention moves back and forth between the four zones of: 1.Practitioner, 2. Client, 3. Office space/building, 4. Natural world/horizon.
2. During a session, the conscious ability to observe activity in the zones is called attention.
3. Attention has phases of being focused within one zone and naturally unfocused in more than one zone.
4. The slow rhythm of focused and unfocused attention between the zones establishes evenly suspended attention.
5. The practitioner revisits evenly suspended attention regularly during a session like a submarine periscope coming above the water and looking around.
6. The tempo of attunement begins with 1° and progressively slows down during the middle of a session so eventually the zones are perceived as one homogenous space filled with stillness and/or 1°.
VI. Mindfulness
1. Mindfulness is a conscious quality of fluid body knowing that discerns the need to move attention from head to heart to hands to the natural world to the horizon and then back. It is the spam blocker of the mind.
2. Mindfulness is a function of present time that is an unattached, unbiased awareness. It could be considered a form of higher consciousness.
3. Mindfulness is grounded in the direct experience of a fluid body, itself a form of higher consciousness in which the totality of one’s relationship with life at has the possibility to be experienced.
4. Mindfulness of the fluid body is the ground of being in biodynamic practice.
5. Mindfulness is the mind of the wisdom of stillness. It requires mental serenity and equanimity oriented in the present moment to manifest its intelligence.
6. The wisdom of stillness discriminates between how much mindfulness is needed and where to place it such as in the zones, the hands and for how long to do so.
7. Concentration is the partner of mindfulness in that effort is periodically made to rest attention in one zone or the other and focus on local sensations.
8. Mindfulness selects only a slight degree of the practitioner’s attention to move rather than all of it.
9. Such mindfulness moves like a Feather on the Breath of God.
10. Mindfulness helps the practitioner to avoid lurching from one zone to the other.
11. Mindfulness points out 1° turning and other transition states, ignition, etc.
12. Mindfulness prefers to wait in stillness and simply watch and observe effortlessly.
13. When a session bogs down, stay related with the client in stillness and wait for mindfulness to offer direction and clarity or to point out 1°.
14. Mindfulness is ethically neutral. It’s exclusively a function of both stillness and compassion.
15. Mindfulness is the active element of compassion.