Charles Ridley - Stillness Touch: Union of Body & Love

Laying on of hands for healing has existed for thousands of years in the spiritual traditions. Modern cranial practice began in 1898 when, as a student at the Osteopathic College in Kirksville, Missouri, William Garner Sutherland walked past a skull on display in the college entrance hall. A direct intuition grabbed him that lasted his entire life, as Dr. Sutherland writes, The thought came, like a bolt from the blue, beveled like the gills of a fish, indicating articular mobility for a respiratory mechanism. That is how the cranial concept came. It is not mine. It never has been. 1

Even today, medical dogma asserts that no motion exists between the cranial bones; imagine how radical Sutherlands intuition about cranial articular mobility was 122 years ago. He dedicated fifty-five years of study that yielded three types of cranial work. First, Dr. Sutherland introduced biomechanical cranial - a brilliant anatomical structure-function approach, requiring a skillful tactile knowledge of cranial suture architecture. Then, he discovered the cranial rhythmic impulse and functional cranial therapy was born. Here, instead of being guided only by the biomechanical positions of the cranial bones, the cranial wave also guides the functional treatment. In the 1940s, after Dr. Sutherland moved to the California Coast, he realized that the practitioner is not the doer; it is the unerring potency of the Breath of Life that guides a session.

From then on, Sutherland emphasized a non-doing approach to cranial practice, which Dr. Becker later coined biodynamic. A biodynamic session begins when the practitioner realizes a neutral that naturally synchronizes awareness with Primary Respiration as the guiding principle. Primary Respiration contains the embryological power that creates the body, so there is no need to follow the cranial rhythmic impulse; instead, a biodynamic practitioner lets the potency of the stillness that is within the fluid tide and long tide of the Breath of Life be in charge.

Sutherland transmitted his spiritual disposition by writing, In reading between the lines, we suggest the mental vision through the small end of the microscope followed by the view through the big end of a telescope to observe the material elements disappearing into endless space. 2 Here Dr. Sutherland implies a realization of an infinite non-dual consciousness, which he explicitly etched on his headstone as,

BE STILL AND KNOW

Twenty years later, Adah, his wife, completed the phrase, by etching on her headstone, I AM. Putting their two sentences together reveals a spiritual transmission of the essence of a biodynamic cranial practice:

BE STILL AND KNOW I AM

The verbiage of the Sutherlands transmission is from the Bible, Psalms 46:10, Be Still and Know that I Am God; in the Vedas, I AM is the Self, the Purusha, or God in man.

To know I AM implies a realization of the infinite presence of stillness.Consciousness opens to infinity, everything ceases, and Stillness remains.Gone is the human-centric view, tides disappear, and the biodynamic map dissolves.This is the precious spiritual gift that the Sutherlands gave to us.

After Dr. Sutherlands death, his protege, Dr. Rollin Becker (1910-1996), introduced Dynamic Stillness, a term derived from Swami Chetananandas two-volume book that characterizes the principles of Kashmir Shaivism.3 Dynamic Stillness is the English translation for the realization of a sacred union between Shakti and Shiva. Shiva is the infinite presence of stillness in which the Shakti dwells as the Dynamic Pulse that creates all things. By a dedicated Kashmir Shaivism inner practice, these polar principles unite in the body. Union is by integrating the transpersonal consciousness of I AM, after which the infinite presence of stillness descends into the body. Here, within the cells of the body, dwells the substance of the Holy Grail, a Divine Feminine domain where the sacred marriage ignites a second birth, and we realize that the body is love.

This union of body and love in Christianity is called enfleshment.

Dr. Becker realized this, and I believe Dr. Sutherland and his wife Adah also enjoyed this domain. But because the osteopathic profession prohibited a public airing of anything resembling spirituality there is no documentation. Again, a non-doing biodynamic cranial practice awakened in Dr. Sutherland after he experienced that it is the unerring potency of the Breath of Life that does all the healing, which in 1948 he declared publicly in a single line,

Allowing the physiological functioning within to manifest its unerring potency, rather than the application of blind force from without.4

The Unerring Potency of Stillness Makes the Body

Body is nothing more than emptiness,

emptiness is nothing more than body.5

Figure 1. The Unerring Potency of Stillness Makes the Body

Orienting to Anatomy Bypasses Unerring Potency of Stillness

Figure 1: The source of unerring potency is Dynamic Stillness that emanates the template of wholeness to make the body as an indivisible whole unit. The template of wholeness contains the archetypal luminous vibrating geometric patterns that impress a blueprint of the whole body into the