The Ocean of Love
I have told this story before, but I’d like to tell it again, as another layer of depth in this life experience has unfolded for me recently.
Nearly two years ago, I was on retreat in Mexico, on the Pacific Coast. I was processing a lot of stored trauma from my womb on this particular yoga immersion, and during the breaks, I would lie in the sun and jump in the waves to help my physical body and my energy body to cleanse and release before heading back into the “fire”. After a challenging morning, I joined the group in the sea, paying no mind to the extremely large waves, my Gulf Coast sensibility unaware of the unparalleled might of the Pacific. I wanted to float, to find some solace from the intensely confronting physical and emotional practice by immersing in the saltwater, letting my soul float back to my childhood growing up on Galveston Island.
I learned to swim in the sea before I was even a year old, loved to taste the smell of Sargassum, came of age, alone, on a canoe in the salty marsh. I have always found comfort in its vastness.
Floating there, like a mermaid come up for air, I didn't realize I had been pulled into a rip current. The ocean had taken me into her arms like a mother scoops up her crying tot. By the time I opened my eyes, I was past the breaks of the waves, past even their beginning swells. I knew to find the coast line and swim parallel to the beach, but after swimming until my strength was waning, I was pulled underwater by the current and my weakness. When I emerged and looked toward the beach, I saw my friends heading up toward the dunes. They hadn’t realized I was struggling. I felt my body begin to panic, my heartbeat racing, and my breath becoming shallower. Realizing I needed to save my prana to save my life, I resumed my float and began to practice pranayama.
I don’t know how long I was there, but my body & mind became transparent, like cellophane, and my soul felt as if it merged with the ocean. I could feel the waves breaking on the shores of the Asian coast, and the seafloor was the center of the Earth and the center of it all. My heart sync’d up with the subtle yet incomprehensibly deep swell of the sea, and the fighting fell away. There was only love and awe and complete peace.
Part of me wanted to stay there, in that oneness.
And, I did decide to come back to shore, and that’s another long, quite dramatic story - one of friendship, sacrifice, instinct, practice, duty, and surrender - maybe for another day!
In these two years back on shore, embodied and IN my body, I sometimes forget that feeling. I look almost every day, though, at this beautiful picture of those waves that almost folded me back in. And, I remember. I sit on my meditation cushion and listen to the ocean of silence, and I remember. I chant and sing, feel the rhythm, and I remember. I braid my daughter’s golden hair, and I remember. I feel my love’s heartbeat on my skin, and I remember. I let the sun soak through my pores and into my bones, and I remember. I feel the strength of the thunder crashing with the summer storms, and I remember. I look into my teacher’s eyes, and I remember. It is all love. It is all divine. And, it is all inside of us. No one can take it from us, and we don’t need anyone to give it to us. As my teacher, Manorama, reminded me the other day:
“You already are the ocean.”
Can you sit for a few minutes and feel it, too?
