21/08/2025
Dear Colleagues
As many of you will know, our community has suffered a great loss. My teacher, mentor and friend, Franklyn Sills, passed a couple of nights ago after complications arising from pneumonia and an existing COPD condition. This comes as a deep personal loss, but beyond that marks a watershed moment in our community and lineage.
Franklyn was one of a small band of adventurers who attempted something special and unique at the time. Having been inspired by the arcane and often esoteric writings and teachings of WG Sutherland, R Becker, R Stone, E Bleschsmidt and others, they began to explain craniosacral work through the lens of biodynamics. This, you should realise, was a niche subject already without taking the work in a whole new direction. The teachers of biodynamics that had come before were often deliberately or unwittingly obscure and lacking in clear explanation, indeed there was a tradition amongst the osteopathic community of being obtuse to ‘see who naturally resonated with the work’.
Franklyn came to the work with a somewhat unique set of skills and resonance with pioneering teachers. Having ‘dodged’ the Vietnam war by becoming a Thai forest monk, Franklyn began his own self enquiry. Simultaneously he became fascinated by the embodied practices of tai chi and chi kung. Many were the times in those early days I witnessed Franklyn doing ‘pushing hands’ with other tai chi adepts and invariably remaining centred and calm throughout.
Perhaps more importantly Franklyn studied with Dr Stone, and an extraordinary set of colleagues at Esalan Institute. These people included William Emerson, Ray Castellino, Jim Feil and Jim Said. As a study group meeting the likes of Randolph Stone, Rollin Becker, Ida Rolf and Stanislav Grof they developed in each others company and personally in their own unique ways.
Later Franklyn moved to the UK and through meetings with RD Laing, his partner at the time, Maura, introduced Franklyn to the psychotherapeutic world. This formative time gave Franklyn the unique perspective (at the time) of conducting therapy in a ‘trauma informed’ way. Whilst Franklyn would happily relate Ronnie describing the birth process to him at dinner and Franklyn ending up laying on the floor sucking his thumb, regressing, he chose the path of safe containment and resource before these terms were even invented.
I attended a postgrad on conception, implantation and birth with Franklyn’s early colleague Dr William Emerson. Whilst William took a group of Core Process Psychotherapists and me through our early lives through regression, Franklyn was always there in the role of assistant holding the field and containing the excesses when they arose.
This led to Franklyn knowing the excesses of the fledgeling CST world when he saw it in things like John Upledger’s SER work where we witnessed re-traumatisation done in the name of therapy. Then Franklyn met Peter Levine. Until that moment Peter believed all CST was innately unsafe due to the excesses of earlier times (the practices at Osho’s Poone ashram being another example). Both teachers obviously benefited greatly from the meeting and developed accordingly, Franklyn using more embodied presence in biodynamics and Peter introducing more informed touch into SE.
Similarly, Franklyn developed ideas with other pioneers in the field. Whilst being Franklyn’s assistant I was privy to his communication with Jim Jealous. Two colleagues exploring the new ways of expressing the subtleties of biodynamics, both fully cogniscent of the importance of Blechschmidt’s work on embryology but also devouring the works of David Bohm, Victor Schalberger, Mae Won Ho, Dr Gasser, Leonart Nilsson amongst many others. From their communication, I took this from Franklyn “Truth arises out of stillness. Stillness permeates the world. It is an expression of the
divine creative intention. It is the ground of emergence for all form”.
Franklyn was generous with everyone he taught, he impressed on us, as all good teachers do, the importance of ‘standing on his shoulders’. Not being content to keep the skills as some arcane obtuse practice, but to spread the word clearly with the fervour of that dynamic stillness we are sometimes blessed to witness in clinic. He took us through inner exploration into the nature of our formation and from here to our innate buddha nature or goodness. We listened in awe to his eloquent explanation of the nature of the Tide, the transmutation of form through potency, to the Tide and out into the tissue world. The nature of Franklyn’s analogies were always directed towards the innate good in humanity, away from the be******ty of the rationalist, reductionist world view with its sanitised conformity. Franklyn loved science, don’t misinterpret me please, but as he once said to me, ‘the limits of science are the limits of what can be physically measured, often what we perceive cannot and possibly will never be measured in this way’. This is still true today, my friend, and I hope will still be the case when I make the great journey you are embarked upon.
Many like myself were unhappy with the first two books on Craniosacral Biodynamics, flashes of brilliance amongst multiple repetitions and the need of an editor. But later came ‘Being and Becoming’ my personal favourite book from Franklyn and then the Foundations of Craniosacral Biodynamics series. Some students today profess that they are challenged by Franklyn’s writing. I say good, he is making you think then and doing what he always did, challenging the assumptions we comfortably make that limit our perception.
I was lucky enough, through a desire to learn, to make myself invaluable to Franklyn, in the new world of email and the internet, being his administrator and personal assistant for 5 years. We developed not only a professional relationship, but also a friendship. I hope our love of the work continues to infect those we meet, wherever that journey now takes you, my friend. You showed me in an age of egotistical teachers and false gurus the integrity to speak from direct experience, to say you didn’t know when you don’t and to encourage others to find their own unique expression within this field we now call Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. This was a term you always thought was too clunky so we will always be, ‘servants of the Breath of Life’
May all beings find peace, may all being become enlightened.
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