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Michael Shea Course Content Outline

Guidelines for Foundation Trainings

Teaching and Learning Content Outline

By Michael J. Shea, Ph.D.
www.michaelsheateaching.com
2007

1. Intention of BCST Practice.

  1. To support and facilitate self-regulation in self and other.
  2. To sense the movement of the whole Primary Respiratory System (PRS) and body.
  3. To support and facilitate balance within the subtle fluid nature of the whole PRS in self and other.

2. BCST Theory. The Primary Respiratory System is a continuum of at least five states of dynamic expression.

  1. Dynamic Stillness: powerful nourishing states in which movement seems to be suspended or absent.
  2. The Breath of Life: the underlying impulse that drives subsequent movement.
  3. The Long Tide: A deep slow foundational carrier wave for the Breath of Life. Also known as Primary Respiration or Tidal Body.
  4. The Mid-Tide: A somewhat faster cyclic wave form that is expressed in the fluids of structure and function. Also known as Fluid Body or Potency Tide.
  5. The CRI (Cranial Rhythmic Impulse): A relatively fast wave form that enables and expresses responses and adaptations to the environment. The CRI reflects interactions of the autonomic nervous system with the rest of the body.
  6. Perceiving and reflecting the Primary Respiratory System has potential therapeutic value within each of the five states.

3. Clinical Skills

  1. Communication: Verbal and non-verbal relationship skills.
  2. Orienting: Practitioners’ capacity to sustain attention on the location of their personal midline in space. It especially includes an awareness of stillness in the midline, other fulcrums of stillness in the PRS and the field of stillness in and around the body.
  3. Synchronizing: Resonating with the movement and presence of heart-felt loving kindness and compassion as a basis for relationship.
  4. Continuity: Holding and containing the whole via its rhythmic movement between slowness and stillness is the key to supporting self-regulation of the underlying formative forces that built the body originally and maintain it throughout life.
  5. Buoyancy: Sensing transparency in the hands when contacting the client.
  6. Receptivity: Openness with one’s mind, heart and hands to recognizing and appreciating the client’s expressions of health before, during and after a session.
  7. Disengagement: Recognizing expansion, space and settling at each stage of the session and at the end.
  8. Supervision: Having the support and guidance of professional colleagues especially for the establishment of appropriate therapeutic boundaries.

4. Biodynamic therapeutic perception and recognition: the observation of the systemic movement and whole continuity of the embryonic forces of growth and differentiation.

  1. Stillpoint: When the practitioner and client’s whole PRS becomes quiet for varying periods of time, ceasing its normal or aberrant movement. A stillpoint has the potential to expand beyond both bodies into the room and beyond.
  2. Automatic Shifting: How the Mid-Tide re-organizes as a normal function to its midline, guided by the underlying forces of Primary Respiration.
  3. Ignition: Initiation of the Breath of Life into the PRS at key moments in development and growth by ordering, maintaining and repairing the original intention of the embryo in the body.
  4. Metabolic fields: The unique positioning and shaping activity of cell aggregates condensing and partitioning into a body. Each field is interrelating and inducing one another’s growth in the embryo.

5. Biokinetic therapeutic perception: the observation of unique or localized movement of the embryonic forces of growth and differentiation within the whole.

  1. Symmetry: The way the fluids and tissues of the embryo develop around midlines and fulcrums, with balanced forces in spatial and functional equilibrium.
  2. Tensegrity: The interconnectedness of tissues and fluids of the PRS in the embryo by systemic fields of compression and decompression-tension. It encompasses one or more metabolic fields.
  3. Breathing: The universal presence and moving significance of reciprocal exchange and balance, on all levels from micro- to macro-.
  4. Flexion – Extension: The cyclic patterns of folding and unfolding in the whole, imprinted in the body fluids and tissues from the end of the embryonic period.
  5. Polarities: In biology it is the sense of densities and gradients of fluid activity on or around the midline and the fulcrum. In physics it is the presence of dynamic and complementary forces in all systems, at all levels (i.e., proton and electron in the atom). A subtle third neutral principle accompanies polarities (i.e., the neutron in the atom).
  6. Wholistic Shift: When the client’s autonomic nervous system pauses in an attempt to reach equilibrium which allows the PRS to self-regulate and self-correct at a deeper subtle level. Also known as the Neutral.#

6. Optional clinical skills

  1. Working with neurological affects
  2. Working with shock and trauma
  3. Working with embryonic germ-layer derivatives (ecto-, meso-, endo- layers)
  4. Working with Prenatal and peri-natal imprinting
  5. Working with injuries, syndromes and conditions
  6. Using functional and biomechanical skills and other more direct therapeutic methods