March 8, 2015

“The ocean is healing,” said my love as we sat on the beach gazing on the limitless vista before us. So true! And what is it that makes the ocean such a balm to suffering?

I have often spoken in class about something I read once, the origin now lost in time. One of the downsides, I read, of urbanization is the limited vista that results from the cityscape. As a consequence of our limited sightline, our sense of self becomes magnified in relationship to the space around us.

When we can only see to the next building, we feel big and so our problems loom large. Vistas, like those found at the edge of the ocean or on top of a mountain, return us to a perspective that puts us in context within the vastness of the universe. In our relative smallness, our minor problems recede to appropriate scale. This is healing and perhaps part of the magic of being at the sea.

Sitting at the ocean’s edge, wave after wave beats a rhythmic reminder of our heartbeat and our breath. This reminder of our life’s rhythm moves us in step with the dance of the universe. The universe pulses in a rhythm our breath replicates. As I sit and breathe with the waves, I wonder if disease and unhappiness is the constraint or limitation of this rhythm.

I remember the ways constrained thoughts chain me to their repetitive cycle and how illness can act as a limit, requiring a slowing of a quickened energetic output. At the ocean, I experience spaciousness and freedom as the ocean waves free the flow of thoughts into an unrestrained pattern that allows me to connect at a level below each separate thought wave. I drift, held in the rhythm of world around me and inside me. I am left spacious and filled with a renewed wellbeing. Health then may be the return to an expansive, regular life and breath rhythm to which the ocean takes us back.

The ocean, for my love, is a holding and loving embrace, mirroring the deep attachment found in our love relationships. The urban environment, by contrast, can provoke a feeling of being lost in the sheer numbers of people for him. The heartbeat we felt in our mother’s womb and we feel as we hug is the beat of the waves on the shore. This pattern recalls the memory of the special, unique relationship that brought us to life and of two hearts beating as one. The reminder of this intimacy is a healing. As we know, science has proven over and over that to survive we need connection with others. We cannot survive alone, without touch, without love.

The ocean then is our heartbeat, our connectedness and a reminder of our place in the spectrum of the world and as such is healing. I believe it is this experience that we seek out and find on our yoga mat. We create an internal spaciousness where we return to our heartbeat, to the rhythm of the universe and we remember our profound interconnectedness. Time to get to my mat ☺