Rewilding with Long Tide

Is Long Tide a measure of the wild within us?

A slower fluctuating rhythm breathing our whole bodies every 50 seconds, Long Tide, like a respiration contracting and expanding living matter, can be felt throughout nature.

In a biodynamic craniosacral session,“It seems to arise from “nowhere”, manifests like a great wind arising within a vast field of action and radiates through everything. (…) The Long Tide is known in many cultures. The Tibetans call it the Unconditioned Winds of the Vital Forces. It is “unconditioned” as it is not affected or conditioned by our personal experience.” (Franklyn Sills, BCST) 

As the vital force that is Long Tide 'lifts' and settles fluids and tissues, I look out the window of my practice and feel a continuous expansive energetic field unfurl, cohere and unify. A profound peace fills all, permeating every pore, every cell and every particle.

The whole body I’m deeply listening to with light hands-on contact drops to 'the bottom of an ocean or a canyon' and anchors there while reorganisation occurs in its multilayered knowing ways.

A creative life manifesting force, Long Tide “generates an ordering matrix and midline (…) which orchestrates the morphology of the embryo and maintains tissue organization throughout life.” (Sills, Fooundations, Vol II, 2012)

This primary expression threading much of life on earth emanates from the wild and speaks its language. The term ‘wild’ can send shivers down your spine and yet it lies at the very source of its creation. For each élan vital springs from that same creative wild Intelligence that binds us to the heart of nature, our nature, all of earth’s nature. Each primitive streak bursting forth in the embryo in week three of its life grows the roots that will become the trunk of the spine.

All of Earth birthed by the same wild music, that ancient cosmic melody that created and keeps calling life forth.

Why did the fierce, unpredictable, uncontrollable, chaotic version of ‘wild’ prevail in our modern zeitgeist? When did we lose these other, very peaceful and regenerative attributes of wild that spin the ‘web of life’ to which we all belong?

I sometimes wonder whether BCSTs and other holistic therapists facilitating the slowing down of traumatised, rushed, stressed bodies actually revive these buried and neglected facets of the wild, those spelling the fluency of peace, connectivity, coherence, wisdom, and flowing stillness in our constantly creating forms; allowing us to align with our true nature.

“Our practice includes the retrieval and remembrance of the lost midline of peace, serenity, grace, and love.” says Michael Shea, BCST .

Just like the growing number of land custodians who entrust and work with the inherent regenerative patterns of the soil, we are re-wilding bodies. 

The wild Intelligence that expresses in the land also fuels the creative forces of the embryo and keeps ‘performing’ within us, protecting, processing, renewing, restoring, transforming, growing, repairing. 

Hence healing is inherently wild. Health has organised with life as an extension of Earth’s matrix since the beginning of time, therefore its wild nonverbal language runs through us all, adapting and evolving, encoding and decoding in relation to time and space. 

Could we look at dis-ease as a mirroring of what we have shutdown about our wild selves, like a dis-integration, our bodies' ecosystems floundering from the disconnect, the visceral separation with the rest of the wild?

Most if not all modern chronic illnesses (autoimmune and metabolic diseases are the number one cause of death in the world*) derive from a breakdown of the sleep/digest/healing functions of our autonomous nervous system, the more ancient part of our nervous system which we share with wolf, bear but also trees and all other plants, all metabolising beings on earth. 

I know that practising and receiving BCST keeps healing this foundation and has opened doorways to the wild in and around me, like a relationship I keep tending through foraging, tracking, wild swimming, wandering, and deep listening from my sit spot. The more I switch on and re-ignite this ancient wiring in me, the healthier and more vital I feel.

And like any relationship it works both ways. The wild mirrors closeness naturally because intimacy is its native language. As I attune and listen more regularly I can lean into this intimacy more tangibly to revitalise but also simply to grieve. I have sung, danced and cried in the wild, and have noticed that birds come closer, otter, seal show up and a few times a single fox or foxes appeared out of the blue. What better soul medicine than listening to or watching animals unafraid of playing and being themselves in front of me, or just sitting under Linden, Elder or Hawthorn in full bloom.

The more I can vibrate in tune with these melodies, the more I embody the grounding of the wild in my being, the more I can powerfully, naturally, engage with this creative healing force I share with other creatures, and the more I can participate in the polyphonic voicing of all that exists. 

Irish philosopher John Moriarty talks about the urgent need for us to reignite our ‘bush soul’. “Unless there’s wildness around you something terrible happens to the wildness inside of you and if the wildness inside of you dies like, I think you’re finished. There’s a good wildness, I’m not talking about wickedness now (…) There’s a wildness in which you don’t need to break laws, you don’t have to become an anarchist  you know, but it’s just that you’re not dominated and overwhelmed by who you’re sociologically are.” 

Long Tide anchors us beneath our history, beyond our socio cultural conditioning precisely because it pertains to the wild that underpins and spins all life.

Craig Foster’s beautiful stories of healing encounters with animals in the depths of the ocean off the South African coast deeply move me. An avid free diver for whom the ocean is home, Craig belongs there just like the Kelp and wild animals inhabiting it. The scenes of complete intimacy with the octopus in his academy award winning documentary My Octopus Teacher , are so stunningly magical. The slow, quietening and replenishing qualities of Long Tide settled in the room, and I received something akin to a biodynamic craniosacral session while watching it, an experience shared by other practitioners.

After all, Life started there, so Long Tide pervades the oceanic brine.  

Franklyn Sills borrows from the Ayurveda, the ancient traditional medicine of India, a beautifully distilled description of the stages of transmutation from stillness to form:

“From Stillness arises motion,

from motion arises force,

from force arises the fluid nature

this manifests as cohesion and 

from cohesion, form is organised. 

“In this simple framework, stillness is the ground from which all else arises.”

(Foundations, Vol 1, 2012)

Is the force arising from motion described in this ancient text Long Tide? Or is it motion itself?

I remember feeling the potency of South Africa’s Long Tide in the body of a regular client who had just spent a month there. The medicine of this wild land was palpable in the spaciousness and wide openness of their whole organism.

Can we let down our guards and absorb the nourishment of the deep medicine of the wild? Can we trust it and return to its intimate enfolding to revive and allow Health restore and renew us?

Reviving Long Tide as a measure of our connection to the wild is the antidote of our times.

William G Sutherland, the founder of cranial osteopathy, describes what his disciple Rollin Becker would later call Long Tide, as a “groundswell” and he ties the wild ocean, the original womb of life with the Tide:

"Then you begin to understand something about the groundswell of the ocean and differentiation of the tide, of the waves and so forth. There is a sort of spiral movement. You have heard of the different movements of the brain. Let us explore another – a spiral movement of the Tide. Make a diagram with a pencil on a piece of paper. Make a dot at a given point. Starting with the dot, draw a line around in a curve and then around and around. Then, make a dotted line around the other way back to the original dot. Let these illustrate a spiral movement.

If you want to use this diagram to represent a material manifestation, designate a positive pole and a negative pole. Then we get something in between the positive and negative poles to see in that slow movement of the Tide, that coil, a moving out and a coming together. How many spiral movements can you visualize in the Tide? How many little coils?

Go with me along a shore where there is a lot of seaweed growing. Watch this seaweed moving rhythmically in a coiling form, one going clockwise, another counterclockwise, spiralling with the groundswell. Look at the hurricane. See the potency in the eye of the hurricane, not the destruction around the outside. See the potency of the eye, the stillness of the Tide, the spiral movement."

(Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy by William Garner Sutherland, D. O. p16-17)

That same spiralling force animates the embryo’s midline as an axis of orientation around which form arises from motion, a creative and regenerative process which continues throughout our lives and one which BCST attunes to and supports.

All pics by Sophie Rieu unless otherwise credited