The tenderness of fluids

Some time ago I heard myself saying to a client “The tenderness of fluids is always there”. These words flowed out of my inner well like water and it’s when I was speaking them that I sensed the scope of their meaning. Like a call and response chant I noticed my fluid body dwell in the soft, trusting leaning of these words. I held this client’s settling into their tender wrapping of the fluids.

I use the word tender here for kind and soft but also for the exquisitely intricate mesh of our fascia, this ultra sensorially alive and moist suit protecting all our organs; a whole body ‘architecture’ (Levin, Van der Wal) which spells the flexibility, ease and vitality of our physical and emotional bodies in constant flux.

I also sense ‘tender’ as the gentle motion enabling us to lean back and bask in our fluid bodies. As we ease our resistances, compressions or tensions gradually melt and we become more fluent as a coherent whole.

Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy adores fluids (and vice versa in my experience), from the cytoplasm of every cell, to the interstitium between the cells, the connective tissue, the cerebrospinal fluid, and our blood also considered a tissue shaping and dividing (Jaap Van der Wal). The craniosacral perception orients around the dances of the fluids orchestrated by the rhythms of the Tide (term coined by Cranial Osteopathy founder William Garner Sutherland). Our tidal bodies mirror the breathing fluctuations of the sea, contracting/receding and expanding. As we tune into a fluid organism from our own fluid body, fluctuations slow down and facilitate a reorganisation in the quality of expression, the tone, alignment and connectivity of each part relating to the whole. Thanks to the Intelligence of the tissues and fluids, what felt fragmented or dense flows towards more coherence.

As fellow BCST practitioner and teacher Margaret Rosenau explains: “Tissues and fluids are always attuning and responding to the present moment with the precise amount of fluidity or resistance needed.”

She invites us to consider how tissues and fluids are aware of each other in their respective and intertwined dances.

As a BCST practitioner I listen to the resistance of the fluids melting during a session. What was tensely held relaxes as it is acknowledged and given permission to withdraw, transform and release, allowing more vital or potent flow to take space and reintegrate the whole. What, for good reasons, numbed our presence, can be galvanised into revealing itself again. There is intelligence in our flow and our resistance, but when a response or reaction is held onto, what was initially a protective survival response or reaction can freeze us into recurring patterns that inform and shape our current reactivity. What was valid then may hinder us now.

It takes courage and patience to stay with what this resistance points to, not to bypass it but listen to it as PPN(Pre and Perinatal) and BCST practitioner Anna Chitty explains, to value its knowing so that it can safely relax its tight grip and integrate the whole as a simple awareness.  

Tender speaks to the relief of the fluids when resistance shifts and lets go; a long expansive “aaaaaaaaaaah” or a subtle unlocking and here we are in the ‘here and now’ of ‘blueprint’, of the “original matrix” (James Jealous, D.O.), of our essence. There we can rest in our potent fluid tissues to enjoy the always interconnected fluency of the whole in constant relationship with the external and internal ‘fluid field’.

BCST practitioner and teacher Franklyn Sills spoke and wrote of this fluid tissue matrix, made chiefly of collagen fibers, as a field of rapid communication:

“The organisation of connective tissue is basically energetic in nature. Recent research shows that the fluids in collagen fibers are connected by hydrogen bonds that create a unified and cohesive fluid field. (…) The fluid-cellular matrix that results forms a unified and ordered field throughout the body. Due to this, collagen fiber and its ordered fluid field have been likened to liquid crystal. The fibers assemble into coherent sheets that form and open, a liquid crystalline, fluid-tissue meshwork throughout the body. This meshwork has been found to be continuous and whole.” (Foundations in Craniosacral Biodynamics, Vol II, p 428)

Margaret Rosenau points out that the fascia meshwork, thanks to this crystalline quality enables and underlies “our felt sense of what is occurring both in and around us”. Through proprioception, “the ability to sense where we are positioned in space without using our eyes” but also through interoception, or internality perception. So that fascia can be felt as “ a sensory organ, that spans and supports the entire body” and stores, relays and responds to ‘information’ thanks to the presence and quality of fluids within and around it.

From Strolling Under the Skin by Jean Claude Guimberteau

BCST invites us to trust the inherent wisdom of this “fluid-tissue meshwork”, and become tender, malleable to this vast messaging Intelligence which, according to research (Ho and Knight, 2006) quoted by Franklyn Sills, communicates “much faster than the nervous system”, “perhaps at near the speed of light!”.

Tenderness, which includes the verbs to tend and attend within its etymological lineage, invites us to tend to our more vital and creative presence in the greater whole so that we can attend to life more wholesomely.

Margaret Rosenau adds that some anatomical terms convey “tender presences as well. The Pia Mater, meaning Tender Mother in Latin, a thin sheen of tissue which coats the outer surfaces of our brain and is porous enough for Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) to filter through. A tissue layer which supports rather than inhibits flow.”

What if tender was a path to dwell in Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafé’s ‘cracks’, these places of ‘fugitivity' where we can make sanctuary away from the dehumanising calamities of the ‘house of modernity’(Andreotti, 2017), beneath the social and political tyrannical trappings of our times, beneath the turmoils of this mortal coil to bask in a posthumanist bath where our bodies are floating ‘panels’ of creative communication with all there is in Earth’s fluid field, our second womb? Where our bodies are nodes of an Earthwide multispecies ‘mycelium’.

Earth mirrors this tenderness for us to behold in so many wondrous ways. I live in Ireland, a land where fluid changes mean many rainbows which bridge the in-between, the ‘crack’ between rain and sun with a full spectrum of colours. Rainbows are considered a gateway to the Otherworld in Irish folklore, a path for souls to travel to the afterlife. Could they also point to an other world than the one we may mistakenly consider to be the only living reality there is?

In this excerpt Irish philosopher John Moriarty compares the shape-shifting qualities of water to our ability to step into another reality, by transforming our perception: “When, in our world, the temperature drops below freezing point, very surprising things happen. Water, even where it is fluent or turbulent, turns to ice. Instead of rain we get snow. In damp houses, frost flowers bloom on the window panes. The moisture in our breath condenses in the air before us. But, as there is freezing point in the world, so is there a miracling point. People, usually people who meditate and pray, come unexpectedly into it. In the end they live from it, and then they don’t even need to perform miracles, miracles simply happen in their presence.” (What the Curlew Said, 2007)

Resting in the tenderness of fluids amounts to reaching this “miracling point” Moriarty evokes. Because “miracles” do happen when our bodies can rest there; unexpected changes occur that lead to resolution of internal ‘conflicts’ and a freeing of what was trapped, a thawing of what was frozen so that renewal becomes possible.

“The fluid tissue matrix of meshwork that is our fascia embodies this miraculousness in several ways. One is through the magnificent ability of tissues to contain fluid. This can be seen at the  microscopic level,” says Margaret Rosenau.

”Another part of the magic of fluid and tissue interactions, is the thixtropic capacity of tissues to change state, becoming more or less fluid as needed. Some call this a response to certain conditions of stress. But I invite you to consider it as an inherent capacity to respond to life’s ever changing conditions. This is a capacity of tenderness, to respond to the moment with openness and flexibility.”

As my friend and poet Caryl Church encapsulates, “Tender is the whimper of our times.”

And in the face of so much tension and resistance in the field as a result of human harm and ‘wrongdoings’, “the tenderness of fluids is always there” for us to remember and restore in its responsive and regenerative mesh.