Deep inner sea

Some years ago, I had a coaching session after an assessment. The coach emphasized the importance of learning how to sink into the emotional depth of my experience. We spoke about a deep inner sea. A longing bubbled up. Surely a transgenerational longing, I did not know where it stemmed from, how to root it, or follow its seamlessly endless grasping.

The longing appeared to be a nameless and faceless deep-sea creature, scaring the one in my mind always trying to oversee the depth.

I have always been drawn to the sea. Swimming is, next to dancing, my favorite sports. Funny enough, as a young girl, I was very hesitant to learn how to swim. I refused to go into the water, but when I finally did go, and I was about six years old, the flattering story goes that I learned swimming strikingly fast. I can’t remember the details; I do know that water has felt like a second skin.

So, during that coaching session, I imagined what it would be like to learn how to be as fluid as I can be, in a continuous dance with my environment, sensing its shapes, motions, and sensations in the most inner parts of my body, and offering nourishment by mirroring graciously, falling into an intuitive life. It felt appealing, a potential I wanted to explore, a beingness I wanted to celebrate before the disintegration of this marvelous life form.

Now, some years later, I give into what is needed to do so. To be as feelingly fluid as my body – and thus mind – can be. Throughout the years, and with everything that has happened and has shaped my emotional and relational tendencies, I know that fluidness has partially been formed for surviving instead of thriving. Internalized violence has come with a long battle with myself, and not seldom also with my most intimate social environment. Since softness and clear mental discernment are dominant qualities of my social surrounding these days, I can dive a little deeper into conditionings withholding me from solidifying that characterizable fluidness.

This process brings me in contact with that undirected longing. I now see that what I thought was a monster, is a deep-sea creature with fascinating and fine-tuned senses to swim (us) through the darkness.

And I found a bedrock for that deep inner sea. Earth firmly holding the sea to its chest, drawing it inwards with the help of gravity, knowing how the water is ultimately formed out of the most inner earthly gasses. Here, my attention draws equally to the meteoritic forces that play a vital role in the creation of the most fluid elements of all. Violence hasn’t created a wall out of water, it has roared it into being, onto the surface.

Not having any color, water reflects what-is. Moreso, it is part of a vital cycle, a life-giving potential that has the superpower to reshape and reshape, never in need of claiming a particular place or space for as long as Earth embeds.

Yesterday, after an intense session of emotional healing, I rested my hands and feet on the mud surrounding an elegant tree. As if I could draw in what was underneath the earth. And I could, by trusting the presence of the bedrock.