From Hand to Heart to Head

workshops, education opportunities, and more

The most important part of a farm or garden isn’t the soil, the plants, the compost — it’s you.

The most important thing to develop isn’t the soil, but the soul of the farmer. But what is a “soul”? The way poets use it, it is not a matter of superstitious belief. It’s a word for our capacity to have a unique private inner life of feelings, thoughts, and wishes. We each have an inner life unlike anyone else’s.

Some of us are good at one thing, others at another. One person can have years of experience with woodworking and can build a beautiful house, while someone else has been exploring the inner world and can provide structurally sound spiritual guidelines for practical life. If a doctor tried to play mechanic without any experience, he wouldn’t even know where to begin. And if a mechanic tried to play the role of a doctor, he too would find himself out of his depth. But we need people to fix our cars and people to help heal our bodies. They are not interchangeable, but both are necessary. Someone with a broken car will likely value a mechanic more than a doctor, but someone with a broken leg will likely seek out a doctor and not an auto shop. Respect for the nuanced biographies of each individual is essential for the work of biodynamics. Extending trust to others within their own field of expertise is one of the most vital elements we need in our society. No one expects a mechanic to tell a doctor how to do open heart surgery, and no one expects a physician to weigh in on how a mechanic should fix a broken alternator. Everyone is an expert in their own experience, but acknowledging what is outside our experience requires enough humility to admit that there is a vast ocean of experience, and mine is but a meager droplet. Everyone else also only has a small portion of experience, but many people are much better than me at their particular vocation and I would never think to question their expertise. Only someone without any real expertise considers their own opinion important concerning endless topics in which they have no experience.

The process of making biodynamic preparations is fairly simple outwardly. You take this or that herb, place it in a suitable mammalian sheath, and then let it age. However, the simplicity of the biodynamic preparations is deceptive because these are things that would never happen by accident in nature. Like cooking, a recipe can seem completely straightforward, but some people make a delicious meal while others seem capable of burning a kettle of water. The difference is the person and their disciplined practice. Steiner even goes so far as to say that people who have a “knack” for something from birth merely carried a practiced skill over from another life. Therefore, start practicing now.

When you engage with your hands in the practical work of biodynamics, something else happens. You don’t have to understand what you’re doing for the effect to work on you any more than I need to understand how to digest food for a sandwich to provide me with energy. Likewise, you don’t have to understand what’s going on when making biodynamic preparations. But by doing the hard work and experiencing the process, a shift eventually arises as a new kind of inner birth.

In the preface to his book Theosophy, Steiner warns his readers that the difficulty of his writing is the point. Even if someone doesn’t understand the concepts initially, the exercise of will by wrestling with them is productive in and of itself. If you work out in a gym, the point isn’t lifting a single weight, however large, but repetition and exercise to develop specific muscles. It would be as absurd for someone to complain that Steiner’s carefully edited works are “difficult” as it would be for someone at the gym to complain that weights are heavy. Without exercise there is no development. The same is true in the human soul:

“This book cannot be read the way people ordinarily read books in this day and age. In some respects, its readers will have to work their way through each page and even each single sentence the hard way. This was done deliberately; it is the only way this book can become what it is intended to be for the reader. Simply reading it through is as good as not reading it at all. The spiritual scientific truths it contains must be experienced; that is the only way they can be of value.”¹

Biodynamics is a “path of the will,” as Hugh Courtney liked to say. What does this mean? It means that in biodynamics in this hemisphere, we tend to begin with our hands, not our heads. We tend to try it, and if we see results, then we investigate the ideas behind it — but we like to see proof before we bother digging deeper. Nonetheless, Hugh Courtney had a degree in Library Science and was an active reader. I myself am pretty serious about reading, but the ideas contained in books, by themselves, are like seeds stored in a seed packet. Only when planted in the real world do such idea-seeds produce fruit.² And not every idea contained in a book is viable. Being rooted in a real farm has had an enormously grounding effect on my imagination. I can’t afford to make risky speculations: it needs to produce results. Over time, real-world feedback from farming and gardening daily has trained my imagination to be ever more modest in its guesses while experience has taught me what is more or less likely to work.

By implementing the visionary imagination behind the biodynamic preparations by making them, we also bring our inner life of imagination along with that external activity. Before we know it, something has changed inside us. At first, the biodynamic preparations may seem strange and the only noticeable sensation is discomfort (or confusion) but with practice, this feeling develops into familiarity. Once working with offal and manure no longer gives us any pause, the meaning of the imaginations begins to whisper to us.

Our work is never over. Even if you don’t farm or garden, we each have an inner garden. Many of you might have read the book The Secret Garden, which was a childhood favorite of mine. Only much later did I discover this was a theosophical story, which demonstrates how the threads of karma are weaving around us all the time — long before we can be conscious of their dynamics. Even if you don’t grow plants, you do tend your own soul life. The work of making the preparations transforms the imagination. Hugh Courtney would warn people that biodynamics has a tendency to “accelerate karma.” If you take time out of your daily routine and start playing with the formative creative powers of the universe, the heat tends to get turned up a few notches. In Tibetan Buddhism this is referred to “adding wood to the fire.”³ Essentially, if you go out of your way to take night classes, your education is accelerated. If you intentionally take time to wrestle with esoteric themes, you’re taking advanced placement classes. The workload will increase, but it’s because you decided you wanted more from life.

Rudolf Steiner describes the humble yarrow plant in the Agriculture Course, “In a word, like sympathetic people in human society, who have a favorable influence by their mere presence and not by anything they say, so yarrow, in a district where it is plentiful, works beneficially by its mere presence.”⁴ People who are sympathetic tend to recognize in the responses of others their own truer face. Such people, distributed throughout society, don’t seem like much. They’re often not noticed and they’re rarely televised, but they make all of human life better by their patience and tolerance. As the imagination is transformed, it changes how we act with others and has a nearly “homeopathic” effect on society. Externally, it won’t look like much, but you never know when your act of unmerited kindness changed the course of events for the better. By engaging in unusual things and persisting until you can see their truth, you can transcend subjective antipathies and see the thing for what it really is by loving it. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, the truth of a thing is its light.

Steiner urges us to develop a special relationship with what is externally repulsive, particularly manure:

“We must know how to gain a kind of personal relationship to all things that concern our farming work, and above all—though it may be a hard saying—a personal relationship to the manure, especially to the task of working with the manure.”⁵

When we can find the truth in what is false, the beauty in what is ugly, the goodness in what is evil, we have entered a special space. Hugh Courtney liked to remind his students that “biodynamics is a path of initiation.” It may not look like it externally, but by making the preparations, one’s inner life is gradually changed. This isn’t a once-and-done practice. You can’t take one class in Ancient Greek and expect to have mastered the language. The key ingredient to all development is regular practice. Your future is merely your habits today multiplied by time.

But if you practice convening with likeminded souls aspiring after spiritual development and the fullness of truth, your imagination develops to accommodate the strange work your hands have been doing. For some, a single session of making biodynamic preparations is enough to inspire a lifetime of alchemical work renewing the earth. For others, the discipline itself becomes the transformative practice. During the last years of his life, I would visit Hugh Courtney at least once a year to practice making all the preparations time and again. By the end, he was having me teach the attendees, and he even asked me if I was still learning anything there. Often what we’re learning we don’t notice at the time, so I would return year after year to practice making the preparations. At home at my farm, I would repeat the process, making all of them twice a year until their ideas became second nature to me. This didn’t happen overnight, and I continue to make the preparations because I am not finished.

In biodynamic education tend to we work from hand to heart to head. We aren’t trying to stuff people’s heads full of information. At JPI workshops, we start with practical experience, which provokes an inner feeling, and only eventually — with enough practice and observation — does a suitable concept arrive to explain the vague feeling and the curious external work. In a way, each person should strive to be able to articulate biodynamics in their own words rather than repeating the words of anyone else. It doesn’t mean there won’t be overlap, but by trying to frame biodynamic experience in one’s own words, we avoid parroting dead “head knowledge” from anyone else.

With consistent practice, external skills are easily attainable. But developing clear feelings for what is going on in the preparations takes considerably more time. It doesn’t happen in a few years or even necessarily in a decade. In fact, in alchemy, apprentices were not allowed to make any remedies at all but were expected to tend the fire all day and all night — for seven years. Only once they had mastered the fire were they gradually entrusted with helping make remedies. Rudolf Steiner said somewhere that you shouldn’t trust a doctor who can’t repair a chair (because the human organism is much more complex). I would go further: you should never trust a spiritual leader who can’t keep a plant alive (because the human soul is much more complex).

External practice develops a familiar feeling, and intimate conversation with that feeling can give rise to the contemplative illumination from above. As one of the leading voices bringing anthroposophy to the English-speaking world, Owen Barfield writes in Poetic Diction,

“the kind of inspired thinking which I have attempted to depict, assumes the utmost intensity of feeling as a necessary pre-requisite. There could be no other way of reaching it. It can only begin when feeling has become too powerful to remain only personal, so that the individual is compelled by his human nature, either to think in reality, or to find, more or less instinctively, some suitable device for dimming his consciousness.”⁶

We begin with practical action, which stimulates feeling over time and out of that is born thought from feeling. This is not a dry academic path, but one birthed from life itself. It begins with the enthusiasm of the will and carries it through feeling into thought itself. Felt thinking is our aim. Or, as Steiner says: we must think our willing, and will our thinking. Which is to say, our actions must become deliberate, premeditated, and principled, while our thought processes must become focused, undistracted, and willful.

Our second event is our in-person 3-day Spring Biodynamic Workshop - June 14-16 2024 (meals included) where we will be making a whole spectrum of the biodynamic preparations. This will be in-person in Floyd, Virginia. Camping is available on-site, and additional lodging may be found in nearby Floyd. This gives you the opportunity to engage in practical applications of spiritual imaginations that inevitably reflect onto your own inner experience. Join us in this transformative community event and bring your will forces into collaborative creativity with us. Thank you for all your support. We can’t do this without you.

Meals are provided.

Click here for more information on our annual Spring Biodynamic workshop at the JPI farm in Virginia.

1. Steiner, Rudolf, introduction to Theosophy

2. In an esoteric sense, Steiner talks about the Western hemisphere having a “backward” time spirit. While much of the world begins with an inspired idea, develops feeling for that thought, and then produces action, things are somewhat different in particular parts of the world where the innate tendency is towards a kind of empiricism. In such an upside-down configuration, an idea must be implemented in order to be felt and then understood.

3. Mingyur Rinpoche, Yongey., Tworkov, Helen. In Love with the World: A Monk's Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying. United States: Random House Publishing Group, 2021, pg. 5.

4. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Leture V (GA327, 13 June, 1924 Koberwitz)

5. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture IV (GA327, 12 June, 1924 Koberwitz)

6. Owen Barfield, Preface to Poetic Diction, pg 13.