And There Was Light: Perception in Craniosacral Biodynamics

The bookcase seemed to have beckoned to me and, once I was near it, the book jumped out at me. Not literally. It didn’t fall off the shelf as sometimes happens, but its title seemed to come into focus, demanding my attention. And Then There Was Light.

I wasn’t looking for a book. I wasn’t planning to go to the bookcase. And this is the kind of vision the author, Jaques Lusseyran, a leader of the French Resistance, describes so eloquently, the kind of perception required in practicing Craniosacral Biodynamics.

When an accident rendered him completely blind at age eight, Lusseyran discovered that the light he had always loved and felt so attracted to was even stronger without the vision of eyes.

“It was a great surprise to me to find myself blind, and being blind was not at all as I imagined it. Nor was it as the people around me seemed to think it. They told me that to be blind meant not to see. Yet how was I to believe them when I saw? Not at once, I admit. Not in the days immediately after the operation. For at that time I still wanted to use my eyes. I followed their usual path. I looked in the direction where I was in the habit of seeing before the accident, and there was anguish, a lack, something like a void, which filled me with what grown-ups call despair.

 “Finally, one day, and it was not long in coming, I realized that I was looking in the wrong way. It was as simple as that. I was making something very like the mistake people make who change their glasses without adjusting themselves. I was looking too far off, and too much on the surface of things.”

This is exactly what we teach in training Biodynamic practitioners. We practice not focusing in on issues presenting on the surface, which relate to personal history, held traumas, and other life conditions. There is a relatively fast rhythm identified by Craniosacral therapists often called the Cranial rhythm or Cranial Rhythmic Impulse (CRI). A highly variable rhythm, Biodynamic practitioners consider it to be like the waves on the surface of the ocean, influenced by conditions like weather or disturbances related to life experience.

While many forms of Craniosacral therapy focus on identifying and fixing these surface phenomena, in Biodynamics we look deeper. We practice orienting to deeper tidal phenomena, like ocean tides, that move subtly and slowly under the surface. Being relatively stable and universal, they are less affected by conditional events.

We learn to “rely upon the Tide,” as father of Cranial Osteopathy William Sutherland advised. Here we encounter “potency,” also known as “liquid light,” an embodied life force responsible for organising our cells and tissues as embryos and throughout life, engendering and preserving life.

Learning New Ways to Perceive

Lusseyran, describes how he quickly discovered after becoming blind that he could sense where objects were around him, but this required using a different kind of perception. He writes,

“As I walked along a country road bordered by trees, I could point to each one of the trees by the road, even if they were not spaced at regular intervals. I knew whether the trees were straight and tall, carrying their branches as a body carries its head, or gathered into thickets and partly covering the ground around them.

 “This kind of exercise soon tired me out, I must admit, but it succeeded. And the fatigue did not come from the trees, from their number or shape, but from myself. To see them like this I had to hold myself in a state so far removed from old habits that I could not keep it up for very long. I had to let the trees come towards me, and not allow the slightest inclination to move towards them, the smallest wish to know them, to come between them and me. I couldn’t afford to be curious or impatient or proud of my accomplishment.”

Again, this is exactly what teach our students. In learning to perceive the subtle phenomena arising in the client’s energetic fields, we must let go of needing to accomplish, fix, or even find the problem or object. We learn to settle back and rest in fields within fields within fields of support, listening to the expressions of the Inherent Treatment Plan emerging as an Intelligence with a capital “I” directs the session. It is a bit like waiting to see animals in the wild. We must sit quietly, waiting for them to become curious and approach us. If we rustle about trying to find them, they hide. Any attempt in Biodynamics to move towards gets in the way and we are less likely to accurately perceive and facilitate what is needed. This is very different from how most of us have learned to perceive or engage in life.

The Health is Always Present

When we practice in this way, we discover that the Health is always present, and that it can express with more integrity.

When Lusseyran became very ill while in a concentration camp, he discovered the power of the light again:

“Have I said that death was already there? If I have I was wrong. Sickness and pain, yes, but not death. Quite the opposite, life, and that was the unbelievable thing that had taken possession of me. I had never lived so fully before.”

How is it possible to experience living more fully than ever before when one is seemingly on one’s death bed? Lusseyren found that the light he had been gifted with when he first became blind was again strong for him.

“Life had become a substance within me. It broke into my cage, pushed by a force a thousand times stronger than I. It was certainly not made of flesh and blood, not even of ideas It came towards me like a shimmering wave, like the caress of light. I could see it beyond my eyes and my forehead and above my head. It touched me and filled me to overflowing. I let myself float upon it.

 …”I was not going to leave that celestial stream. For that matter it was not strange to me, having come to me right after my old accident when I found I was blind. Here was the same thing all over again, the Life which sustained the life in me.”

It takes a certain degree of surrender to perceive such light, and allow such health. Then, often when we least expect it, we perceive again that “shimmering wave, like the caress of light” coming towards us, filling us to overflowing, the light of potency infusing and in-forming our form. Here we can rest, allow, receive and heal.