“Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world”
― Brenda Peterson
There is no sensation quite like the feel of water rushing over my body. When swept up in the force of a roaring river or a crashing wave I lose the boundaries of my body. For just a moment I am a particle of water, connected more to the thing we call river or ocean than to the thing I think of as self. It is a beautiful and terrifying experience: the oneness, the surrender. And it is an experience whose beauty I could not see until I learned to sit in the discomfort of the terror.
The first time the ocean took me the beauty of the experience was not available, I only felt the terror, I only felt the panic of losing control.
I was eight or nine years old and spending the day with my family at the beach. The ocean was strong that day and it was a beach that I was unfamiliar with. As I played along the shoreline, creeping further out towards the break, a giant wave came and took me. Later I would learn about body surfing, about catching a wave and riding it back to shore. This was not that. This was the wave catching me. This was getting picked up, tossed around, and turned head over heels. There was no riding happening here, this was being hurled.
When I returned to myself, when I could once again feel the boundaries of my body, I was lying naked on the shoreline. I had literally been thrown out of my shorts. I was terrified. I was embarrassed. There was water all the way up my nose and sand in every crevice of my body.
I was, at the time, what you might call a very floppy kid. I was not connected to the strength that lived in my body. I was not accustomed to holding myself upright, preferring to lean, to rest my weight on what I perceived to be a more solid surface - the wall, my bed, a parent. Later I would learn to stand upright, to recognize the boundaries of my body, to feel the stability of my own balance. But on that day when the water first took me I didn’t have the fortitude to hold my body together to the point that I could allow it to dissolve. I didn’t know enough about the boundaries of my own body to be able to discern if this experience made me feel unsafe or just uncomfortable.
When the ocean swallowed me up and spat me back out, was it telling me “Stop! This is Unsafe! Do Not Enter!”? Or was it saying, “Slow down… get your bearings… center yourself and this is something you will be able to manage… come towards me at a pace that you can handle”?
When reflecting on those questions I start with the truth that, yes, the ocean is dangerous. But, more than that, I didn’t know enough about the ocean. I didn’t yet know about riptides. I didn’t know what to do to keep myself safe. I didn’t know what signs to look for, I didn’t know how to measure the ristk. As I learned more about the environment of the ocean and the container of my body the experience of being tossed by the waves stopped feeling unsafe.
Once I started feeling safe, it took a lot of work to build up my ability to sit with and embrace the discomfort of being tossed under water. But building up my strength to ensure that I was safe, building up my capacity to sit in the discomfort of being tossed, unlocked one of the most profoundly joyous sensory experiences that I now get to have. It didn’t just come. I had to work for it. I had to embrace the discomfort. I had to build the fortitude in my body, to be clear about my boundaries. I had to have the strength to hold myself up, to hold myself together so that I could experience the wonder of surender into the oneness. I had to have a strong container, I had to have deep awareness of that container, in order to experience the bliss that comes with letting it dissolve.