Ocean's Got My Back
A Lesson On Ease
When I was a kid, the ocean taught me how to float.
I laid on a shallow part of the ocean with a life vest on, and my body learned how it felt like to be carried by water – what shape it has to take, where my weight has to be, where to be rigid and where to let go. Later that day I laid on a pool without a vest and my body simply remembered what to do.
For over 30 years I didn’t know how to swim but I could lay on my back and float.
My relationship with water has always been complex.
Very few things can calm me down the way sitting on the shore by clear blue waters does. And there’s also nothing that terrifies me quite as much as imagining big strong waves pulling me down into the bottom of the ocean.
The element of water has played an essential part in my healing for years. And with roots in the Philippines, especially in the seafaring Visayan islands, water is in my blood.
The key lesson that water has been teaching me is this: let ease in.
I recently had a beach shore tattooed diagonally across my back.
In the weeks leading up to my session I had been reflecting on parts of my life in relation to ease, and as I prepared to go to the studio to receive my tattoo, an insight dropped on what I had been holding subconsciously: it’s dangerous for things to be easy. I can only imagine how deeply this survival conditioning runs in my lineage.
My instinct was to respond by fixing. I thought, “I should do energy work on myself to clear the belief while the artist draws the shore on my back” and soon realized that wasn’t the easeful route.
Instead, I leaned back and let myself be held.
I put on a sound recording titled “soft waves” as I text back and forth with dear friends who kept me company for hours. I forgot to prepare the snacks and medicines I needed but a beloved was there to bring them to me. My artist was so skilled and gentle and kind, which helped me access my capacity to befriend the pain.
It was a beautiful ritual, capped with some light rain as another cute nod from the universe.
That day my body learned what it’s like to feel safe when things are easy.
Image credit: Erika Serrano
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