Introduction to the Biodynamic Heart: The Four Intentions

Michael J. Shea, PhD
2025

The first intention of my new book is to save lives. Following the publication of my previous book, The Biodynamics of the Immune System, I was interviewed many times and always asked the same question: Why did I write the book? My answer was simple and, for some of the interviewers, surprising: to save lives.

That same intention inspired this book, The Biodynamic Heart. While setting out to save lives is altruistic, and certainly the intention is to see our world with more compassion, through the process of writing I came to realize that this work is also about saving my own life. The reader will see, starting with chapter 1, how I narrowly escaped death and the work I have subsequently put in to save my own life by every means possible. I have received a lot of love and support along the way, especially from the infants and children I worked with. It is by saving my own life that I can share my learning that can save other lives.

The second intention is to teach practitioners and all health care providers that Biodynamic Cardiovascular Therapy (BCVT) is a ministry of laying on of hands. It is a ministry of using our hands to bless every client. The terminology used in biodynamic practice lends itself to mysticism and direct experience of the sacred regardless of religious affiliation. We can no longer avoid this reality, as many clients cannot make the changes necessary to relieve their metabolic syndrome and thus biodynamic work becomes palliative care in which we make our offering and our blessing for its potential to assist the client in waking their instinct for self-transcendence. Through palliative care, we help clients bear their sorrow and joy. This is the work of compassion and the essence of this book. The felt sense of sorrow is warmth and coziness. It is the music of the heart. It exists on a continuum with joy, the felt sense of brightness and clarity. It is with contemplative practice that sorrow and joy become a single continuum. They are as inseparable as the different movements in a piano concerto. They are inseparable because neither state is superior or inferior to the other. In its essence of infinite equality, the present moment of awareness, awakened by contemplative practice, provides this insight of beauty that is always there, waiting to be recognized and remembered as the preexisting condition of life and death. This is the deeper meaning of biodynamic practice.

This is a book about multifaith spirituality rather than furthering concepts about God, male or female, who lives in the natural world or heaven, and whose depictions are based on the need of different cultures and the fashion of the times. The premise of this book is that everyone can experience their very subtle nature and essence of spirituality as clear light, color, and form without fear. These are the doorways that contemplative practice provides so that we can experience essence and spirit. Such metaphors are still conceptual, though, and deep contemplative practice allows the disappearance of concept, leaving the felt sense of sorrow and joy. Contemplative practice is about turning inward and learning to love one’s self by feeding oneself internally as the basis for being a compassionate, social human being. Said another way, the second intention of this book is to view biodynamic practice as spiritual practice based on the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience.

The third intention is to help readers form a contemplative relationship with their thoughts, emotions, concepts, and life views. To recognize, reframe-release, and relax mental and emotional afflictions are the skills necessary for spiritual resilience. Contemplative practice invokes each individual’s spiritual formation and leads to spiritual maturation. Gradually spiritual maturation fulfills itself as direct knowing of the sacred without an interpreter. This book provides a framework for a multifaith direct knowing of the sacred. Contemplative practice is the key to self-transcendence of self and other.

The purpose of contemplative practices is, first, to be able to recognize challenging or disruptive internal states of mind associated with thoughts, emotions, concepts, and views. Such recognition comes through mindfulness and awareness practices. Next, upon recognition, there is an immediate reframing or empathetic response to one’s own internal state. Finally, one simply relaxes into such freedom that contemplative practice gives by the enhancement of nonreferential awareness and nonattachment to internal states. Over time this type of contemplative practice develops spiritual resilience and allows thoughts, emotions, and concepts to reside in the heart, as they are transmuted into loving kindness and compassion. This is called heart-mind. In this way, contemplative practice is food for our heart.

The fourth intention is to help readers feel the physical and spiritual nature of the human heart as one thing. The heartbeat and the Stillpoint at the back of the heart are the home of our spiritual essence, the heart inside the heart. The overall intention of this book is to help readers find their heart, and to do this, we will discuss the heart in numerous ways, from the physical to the spiritual.

Overview

This book describes the categories of conceptual and spiritual knowing that support the professional practice of BCVT. BCVT is a contemplative manual therapeutic art form in which the priority is kindness and sublime gentleness radiating from the heart of the practitioner as light. BCVT is initiated by the application of biodynamic craniosacral therapy to the cardiovascular system. It integrates skills derived from Eastern and Western cosmologies and human embryology. It originates partly with Andrew Taylor Still, the late nineteenth-century founder of osteopathy, who said, “The rule of the artery is supreme.” This tradition was moved forward by William Garner Sutherland, a student of Still who claimed the osteopathic tradition to be religious or spiritual in its essence. Its core foundations further derive from all ancient animistic and shamanistic medical traditions. And as a ministry of laying on of hands, BCVT is derived from all spiritual traditions involving hands-on healing or “spiritist passe” (Carneiro, Moraes, and Terra 2016; Carneiro et al. 2017). Yet it is an emergent knowing rather than an eclectic or mixed-bag therapeutic approach for the contemporary client.

This book elaborates a comprehensive set of perceptual and palpation competencies for the contemporary practitioner and client for integrating mind-body-spirit. The palpation skills are derived from a variety of sources including osteopathy and its derivatives, traditional cultural methods as just mentioned, and especially spontaneous knowing from contemplative practice.
This book clarifies the core principles and scope of clinical practice for the international community of biodynamic practitioners, and especially biodynamic cardiovascular therapy practitioners, who are interested in the spiritual domain of making meaning around pain and suffering in the contemporary world, which faces significant civilizational issues.

BCVT is a contemplative art form that explores a range of subtle motions, forms, and colors that are expressed within and around the body. A practitioner’s ability to visualize them is considered a spiritual aptitude, as is the ability to perceive stillness and Primary Respiration (PR). The exploration of these biodynamic spiritual aptitudes is associated with optimizing metabolic function. This book explores the Indo-Tibetan system of wisdom colors from which the elements of space, wind, fire, water, and earth emerge in the evolution of universes big and small. BCVT further differentiates the use of yogic mudras, classical Chinese medicine meridians, and the Sino-Tibetan system of elements. BCVT creates bridges to ancient systems of healing that recognize the innate unity of mind-body-spirit in all sentient beings. Consequently, BCVT practitioners are expected to cultivate a personal contemplative practice that supports their spiritual maturation and leads to a direct experience of the sacred. There is a need for an inner practice to develop emotional resilience and an outer practice that connects practitioners to the natural world as both sentient and medicinal. I introduce biodynamic healing practices that apply to both the client and the practitioner’s spiritual formation without dogma. This traditional medical capacity predates all formal Eastern and Western medical practices. BCVT is animistic-shamanistic, mystical, and practical without romanticizing traditional ways of knowing and healing or politicizing its origins. No one has the right to claim dominion over such healing practices.

The emphasis in BCVT is for practitioners to hold themselves and their client as an interconnected whole extending to the horizon in order to harmonize the forces of Health in the natural world with the inner forces of Health that organize the subtle body with the metabolism of structure and function. The inner and outer organization of Health is uniformly scaled across the universe as colors, their associated elements, and states of mental clarity. Practitioners synchronize their attention with the immutable Health that is preexisting inside and outside the human body as a single continuum ultimately free of a perceptual reference point. It can be called nonreferential awareness or God and numerous other metaphors because of a multifaith orientation in BCVT. Health in the context of a biodynamic session is the potency of PR, a deep wisdom expression of the wind and fire elements that drive all life expressions and the instincts discussed thoroughly in this book. All BCVT processes and life experiences are perceived from within a person’s heart and soma as a sacred center extending to the edge of the universe. All origins are located in the heart inside the heart of every sentient being. It is within this universal context of manifestation arising from subtle perception of the heart-mind of love that change process constantly takes place. This includes death and dying, since our body is constantly igniting its death at the cellular level. The inability to accept natural and constant change leads to disease.

BCVT palpation skills are discussed in the context of the term synchronization. As osteopath Anne Wales wrote in 1953, “The first step in the management of this [biodynamic] fluid action is to establish a contact without disturbing its activity. This may be compared to the problem of a rider who desires to mount a horse in motion” (Wales 1953, 35–36). This means that practitioners are constantly synchronizing with the activity of PR in themselves and in their client. BCVT is an essential inquiry into an embodied interconnected harmony with all things that are constantly changing. We can call this the cycle of attunement. The cycle of attunement is the first step in synchronizing with the universe with care and mindfulness of where one’s attention is located and how to automatically shift attention to the subtle and sublime nature of PR and the stillness. This requires skill at recognizing the three spiritual aptitudes of PR, stillness, and visualization of the sacred.

BCVT relies on the perceptual exploration of Health based on a core set of spiritual principles set forth in the chapters of this book. The lineage holders of osteopathy in the cranial field were Christian mystics. However, as mentioned, BCVT is a multifaith approach for the contemporary client who is suffering. Furthermore, BCVT is an experientially based contemplative practice in which practitioners are empowered to apply these principles in accordance with their own spiritual formation and level of spiritual maturation.

BCVT includes interoceptive awareness as a critical embodied practice for the development of body knowing—that is, recognition of the body as an intelligence that speaks to us and reveals its needs from the inside. As such, the principles contained herein are available for exploration and evolution in each practitioner in order for all to realize a reliable sovereignty over their body and mind while acknowledging the human heart as the center of the universe. This is what is offered to the client as a blessing from the hands and heart of the practitioner.

Part 1: Ignition of Life and Death, Conception and Birth

There are four parts to this book. In part 1, the journey of the heart begins with loss and the ignition of sorrow. Without sorrow, it is difficult to experience deep love and deep grief. These core elements of compassion require the ability to integrate constant change and loss from the mundane moment by moment to the extraordinary social and tribal conditions on our planet. This first part includes my own story and that of others finding their heart in the midst of loss. My experience is that compassion is based on a heart of sorrow. Sorrow is the capacity to bear all things, but especially loss. And it is the very nature of being human to experience constant loss, whether personally or impersonally through the media. Sorrow is not grief but helps ferment grief into an expanded capacity to love and potentize compassion.

Part 1 contains eight chapters. Chapter 1 begins with my near-death experience in a terrorist bombing attack on May 11, 1972, while I was in the military. It is here where I was given a baptism of life and death, and the ignition of a compassionate life that brought me to this book and all the books I have written. Chapter 2 describes my career in pediatric craniosacral therapy for more than forty years. I worked with children and infants with moderate to severe developmental disabilities. These children and their parents taught me a deeper nature of compassion and its relationship to sorrow and loss. Chapter 3 is a contemplation on death as an ignition and in particular my mother’s death. Chapters 4 and 5 were written by professional colleagues of mine, Ann Weinstein and Barry Williams; Ann describes her experience in losing a grandchild and Barry describes his own experience as a parent losing his child who was born in a persistent vegetative state and lived to the age of 26. These gifts that awaken a heart of sorrow—gifts given to all of us—also grant us the capacity to expand our heart and form a pillar of BCVT. While not usually seen as a gift in the immediacy of grief, sorrow allows grief to ferment a very deep and ever-expanding love for the lost one. The first part continues with a chapter on pregnancy as a great act of compassion. This is followed by two chapters from Mary Monro on the metabolic nature of pregnancy and birth. Finally, Michelle Doyle, a gifted midwife, shares her experience with helping to deliver a stillborn baby. With a genuine heart of sorrow balanced with a genuine heart of joy, I continue to the second part.

Part 2: Mindfulness and Awareness, Empathy and Compassion

Part 2 begins an in-depth look at the way of healing self and others with a compassionate heart. I begin with chapter 10 and the formal diagnosis of a PTSD disability that I was given by the Veterans Administration (VA) after a year of rigorous evaluation. I then turn to the healing ceremonies I underwent while apprenticing with John Nelson, a Diné medicine man on a reservation in Arizona. During one such ceremony, spirit revealed to John that a gun in my heart was blocking my healing. My heart needed to melt away its blockages, and so we transition to chapter 11, which discusses the Buddhist concept of the Four Immeasurables, which together relate to loving kindness and compassion as applied to recognizing one’s state of mind for self-healing and helping others. This begins a crucial discussion of the necessity of contemplative practices for self-healing and igniting compassion.

Chapter 12 discusses the four foundations of mindfulness and begins to take a deeper look at the nature and necessity of contemplative practice for dealing with mental and emotional challenges of all kinds. It is critical to be able to recognize debilitating states of mind in order to reframe the experience and relax. Contemplative practice is both medicine and food for emotional and cognitive challenges. It is said that biodynamic practice is a study of perception, and chapter 13 is oriented toward therapeutic relationships and how to work heart-to-heart with the perception of Primary Respiration (PR) and the dynamic stillness. PR and stillness are the two foundational perceptual practices at the core of biodynamic cardiovascular therapy. Chapter 13 ends with a thorough review of interpersonal neurobiology and the necessity of maintaining awareness of one’s own state of mind, not only in therapeutic practice with clients, but throughout life. Here awareness is differentiated from mindfulness and compassion. It is directly related to nonduality and consequently the essence of appropriate compassionate responses.

At this point in the book, I begin to pivot toward understanding these processes through the lens of the Indo-Tibetan elements of space, wind, fire, water, and earth. Chapter 14 discusses the deep nature of care for self and other. It includes an outline of how to create one’s own origin story. Origin stories as personal mythologies are opportunities to integrate life experience. If we can frame each of our lives in a context of an originality, we can be of greater service to others.

Chapter 15 is an in-depth discussion of the nature of health, from both a physical and a spiritual point of view. Spiritual health is spelled Health. It introduces the reader to the manner in which past and present forms of biodynamic practice perceive the Breath of Life described in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Chapter 16 discusses the five Indo-Tibetan elements and their importance in working biodynamically with clients who have metabolic problems. The five elements are directly related to biodynamic perceptual processes, especially PR, the stillness, and the Breath of Life as a light. I introduce visualization practices to support and enhance biodynamic practice with self and other. I finish chapter 16 with a personal experience of how my auditory and visual hallucinations resulting from my PTSD transformed into apparitions of Buddhist deities in order to relieve a core of fear and terror in my heart and body. Once the gun was removed from my heart and home, the deep states of fear and terror could be reckoned with. And thus in part 3 I delve deeply into the reduction of fear and terror in transmuting trauma.

Part 3: Instincts, Metabolism, and Embodiment

I have the great good fortune to introduce you to the embryology of the human heart. My good friend Friedrich Wolf, a biodynamic instructor from Germany, made twenty-four watercolor drawings of the development of the heart, which you’ll find beginning on the insert in the book. We worked together to write the captions, and these together with the illustrations are designed to give the reader a sense of the unfolding of the heart and vascular system. The images themselves are important contemplations for seeing and feeling the heart. They are healing images. Following these drawings are ten images that offer a complete mapping of the entire arterial system of the human body. These images come from European anatomy texts and use Latin nomenclature for the individual arteries. In addition, there is a beautiful illustration of the vascular tree, set up as if it were the Tree of Life from the Book of Genesis. It is. At the bottom of this image readers will find a picture of the artery wall, which is essential to its palpation. This is important in terms of the visualization practices taught in parts 3 and 4. Furthermore there are 10 images of cardiovascular anatomy of the adult depicted as a labyrinth to investigate visually in order to find one’s heart as an embodied experience.

Chapters 17, 18, and 19 develop a profound view of the origin of our human metabolism being rooted in three primary instincts: self-preservation, self-healing, and self-transcendence. To understand metabolism and trauma, it is important to have a thorough embodied understanding and felt sense of these three instincts. Interoception is key to our human instincts and here is differentiated from exteroception, which involves the five senses. I create a bridge to my own instinctual processes in healing my symptoms related to complex PTSD. Trauma in all of its forms must now be understood in its relationship to human metabolism and the influence of instinctual drives. All clients have a trauma story, and this section of the book presents a new model of working with trauma. Chapter 20, which I wrote together with my wife Cathy, explores the deep metabolism of the enteric nervous system (ENS). The ENS derives from the vagus nerve in embryology and is of critical importance due to its relationships with the gut, the spinal cord, the heart, and the brain. The ENS is a major player in pain mediation and the gut microbiome. This chapter also contains an important discussion of the pelvic floor and its neurovascular relationships with the abdominal viscera. Chapter 21 introduces the reader to important terminology used in biodynamic practice associated with ignition, midline, and spiritual aptitude. Part 1 began with spiritual ignition, and in this chapter I go much deeper and show how it relates to clinical practice and life in general. I begin exploring embodied spirituality, and especially how to develop the biodynamic spiritual aptitude of visualization practice. Finally, chapter 22 is a thorough exploration of synchronization. This involves a much deeper understanding of the perceptual processes involved in developing biodynamic spiritual aptitudes and introduces the reader and clinician to the cycle of attunement, the root perceptual biodynamic practice. An entire outline of the biodynamic cardiovascular therapy model is presented.

Part 4: A Ministry of Laying On of Hands

Part 4 offers a complete exploration of clinical practice with BCVT. Chapter 23 begins with the basic guidelines for integrating perception and palpation of the cardiovascular system. Starting with chapter 24, I present four basic protocols in sequential order for optimal effectiveness in helping the client self-regulate their cardiovascular system at a metabolic level. Chapter 25 presents the four intermediate levels and their protocols with the same intention to improve metabolism. Chapter 26 presents the first of several advanced protocols. Michelle Doyle, who contributed chapter 9, here demonstrates how to safely work metabolically with a pregnant client.

Chapter 27 explores three protocols for the fire element based on Tibetan medicine. It also includes a lengthy discussion of potency, another key osteopathic concept. The potency of PR is directly related to the fire element and is a marker for an optimal outcome at the end of a BCVT session. Chapter 28 explores three protocols for the water and earth elements based on Tibetan medicine. All of these advanced protocols involve visualization practices, and chapters 27 and 28 introduce the biodynamic practitioner and all health care providers to important guidelines for visualizing Health as discussed in chapter 15. In these advanced protocols, Health is associated with color, form, and light. Visualization practices, as I teach them, are medicine and food for the inner work of recovering harmony in the three major instincts discussed in part 3.

Chapter 29 contains three advanced protocols for working with concussions and mild traumatic brain injuries. This level of trauma is becoming more common in our culture and is linked to a breakdown in the metabolic barrier function of the intestines. It is a basic premise of this book that all trauma negatively affects the gut.

Chapter 30, written by Bill Harvey, explores a deep spiritual ignition of the heart. To end the book, chapter 31 takes a deep dive into the heart inside the heart, where spirit lives, and the phenomenon of spiritual heart ignition. I present three protocols to contact the spiritual essence of the heart and its radiance of virtue through the blood to every single cell in the human body.

In this book, I recognize the evolution of biodynamic practices and their various roots in the human embryology of morphology and the cosmology of a variety of ancient world traditions. This evolution meets the needs of the contemporary client suffering with metabolic problems. BCVT is the emergence of a new and constantly evolving biodynamic approach. It is a spiritual practice to wake up the instincts for self-healing and self-transcendence. BCVT is a contemplative-based practice leading to appropriate compassionate responsiveness. It is now time to find our multidimensional heart centered in spirit.