Meeting the Mystery: Caterpillars, Reality and Biodynamics

Many years ago I lived in Boulder, Colorado, a city known for being 25 square miles surrounded by reality. You might think of it as a place where anything can happen, and, indeed, it is a town rampant with new discoveries and ideas in sciences like meteorology as well as the healing arts.

One day, I was walking to the supermarket in my quiet neighborhood. My eye was attracted to a bright green movement on the side of the street. Looking closer, I was shocked to see a giant, chartreuse green caterpillar meandering down the street next to the curb, looking like it had just inch-wormed its way out of the Disney studios. This was before the iPhone had been invented. Otherwise I would have photographic evidence. I’ll try to describe it.

It was, as I said, a huge green caterpillar. When I say huge, I mean it was, well, as big as a large cat or small dog, except stretched out into caterpillar! Almost florescent green, it looked to me like a cartoon character misplaced into a Boulder neighborhood.

You see, even you don’t believe me! I didn’t believe it, either. I walked up close to inspect it, but not too close because you never know how an over-sized caterpillar might behave. I half expected it to look up and smile at me, saying, “Lovely day isn’t it?” It was a lovely day, but it was Boulder. My experience was that the sun always shines in Boulder, except perhaps for half an hour each day between 4 and 5 p.m. in the summer when a thunderstorm comes along to cool things off. This day was no exception. But the caterpillar, looking very real even up close, was.

Or was it? I was still new to Boulder, having lived there only three or four years at the time. The next few days, I went about asking everyone I knew what this could be. Was there such a species in Colorado? People looked at me askance. No, I wasn’t high on anything. I’d even become accustomed to the sunshine by this point, not an easy adaptation for a Canadian who had lived in rainy Vancouver for a few years! Despite the denial of all those I questioned, the caterpillar was real.

How can this be?

What is reality?

My sighting of a live cartoon creature challenged my confidence in my knowledge of what is real and what isn’t. And this has turned out to be a gift, preparing me for the profound shifts in perception accompanying a Biodynamic journey.

Perception in Biodynamics

Not too long after meeting the caterpillar on the road, I met Biodynamics. Now, truth be told, I did not find Biodynamics challenging as many other students do. The perceptual stance in Biodynamics was actually welcoming to me. I declared earlier that I was not high on anything, and I can say this without doubt because I had never felt attracted to substances that would make me high. I had always felt I already lived in a different world than others. I already saw things differently. I didn’t need the side effects of drug or drink to support this.

When I came to Biodynamics, I was relieved. I had already taken some Cranio-Sacral Therapy courses earlier, where I had felt unmet. I had perceived things that the tutors couldn’t explain. They didn’t seem to be aware of or understand the phenomena I was sensing. In my very first Biodynamic class, however, the teachers were talking about what I had been sensing. I felt as if I had come home.

For many, though, Biodynamics involves altering perception within a larger a paradigm shift. Ok. It isn’t generally about viewing giant caterpillars, but the challenge to our perceptual confidence can be similar. We frequently remind students of the Buddhist concept of “beginners’ mind,” allowing ourselves to perceive freshly in the moment, without having to know, letting go of whatever expertise we may have identified with up to this moment.

From this place of relative openness and innocence, we can begin to receive what the client’s system has to show us. We can enter into the mystery of what we call the Breath of Life and its subtle rhythmic expressions, called Primary Respiration, and how the Intelligence of the client’s system knows how to proceed with its own healing.

One aspect of this shift is our orientation to wholeness, rather than just the pain or symptom or whatever catches our eye. If I had just focused in on the caterpillar, I might not have received the gift it had to offer me – the shake up of my trust that what I see is going to be what I expect to see. Instead, I allowed myself to take in the bright green color and I don’t think I mentioned the pink spots, as well as its impossible size. I perceived the caterpillar with a start because I saw it within a larger context. The whole included the quiet Boulder neighborhood. It would have been different if I’d encountered it on a street in Manhattan, or on a Shamanic journey in Peru.

When we perceive motion or patterns within our clients, we are aware of them in relationship to vast energetic fields, underlying formative forces, and the unfolding of what we call the inherent treatment plan. A motion occurring before we have settled deeply together has quite a different significance from a similar motion presenting after that settling.

Perceiving wholeness also relates to health. In our modern Western world, the tendency is to look for problems and how to solve them. Western medicine can be very useful for diagnosing acute illness or injury. Drugs, surgery, etc. are then administered to fix the problem. While this is important and I have been grateful for medical support when I have broken a bone, for example, Biodynamics is a very different approach with a different mind set.

Biodynamics involves perceiving health and wholeness, even where dis-ease and suffering are the predominant presentation. We can perceive the symptoms as expressions of deeper formative forces. We can also understand them as resulting from protective efforts of the life force, or potency, in the person’s system. Protection is an expression of health. Holding it as such, we can respect the intelligence that has enabled this person to survive and to function in the face of adverse conditions or traumas. We can support the system in remembering its connection to the whole, where support and safety are available to facilitate healing.

Perceiving the great green caterpillar within the context of a quiet Boulder neighborhood, I was startled, but I surmised I was safe. I saw no reason to interfere with the motion of the caterpillar. I left it to continue on its mysterious journey while I continued on my way to buy groceries. The caterpillar remains for me a symbol of the mystery and its ability to find its way into our daily lives.

What would it be like to be with not only our clients in this mode of respect, trust and awe, but also with ourselves and everyone and everything we met in our lives? Biodynamics can shift the way we interact with our lives and others we meet along the way. Our meeting with the mystery doesn’t end when the client walks out the door. It may be just beginning…