Diving Deeper

Experiencing aquatic bodywork

  In the early days of my training in aquatic bodywork (Watsu and more), much of my learning came from receiving.  Since I find writing a valuable way of uncovering and expressing experiences, I often recorded those sessions.  Later, I encouraged clients to do this, whether in writing or artwork (whatever right-brain method was best for them).

Here are two accounts illustrating contrasting experiences for the same receiver, in this case myself.  I hope they will provide insight into the power of this work and into the creative potential there is in recording the process and following up in whatever ways seem appropriate and helpful.

The first account, written immediately after a session, records a process that repeated itself through many subsequent sessions until it finally resolved, and along with it the body memories it was releasing in me. 

Our bodies are repositories of our experiences and they benefit from free-flowing expression of that.

A creative journey in water (aquatic bodywork)

An account of the creative potential of aquatic bodywork for inspiring the artist in each of us.

Water has been associated with the creative unconscious.  In the form of aquatic bodywork I practice (based on Watsu), I've found it possible to travel beyond consensual reality and back again: between these two places is the warm-water womb, the sacred pool, a portal to dreamtime.  

I use gentle massage and motion while suspending a person in warm water to open the body  to the messages of the unconscious.   When the body is permitted its expression and intelligence, creative insights or solutions  may arise of their own accord.  There is opportunity for  profound shifts in awareness.  

As a practitioner of aquatic bodywork, I seek out the creative in myself and the responsive in others so as to participate in  natural or spontaneous form.  Describing my work as art rather  than therapy  reminds me that we are involved in a dance of life and can neither control nor anticipate outcome.  

The artist-shamanist* who takes a  mysterious and imaginative view of human experience, allowing for chaos, for unpredictability, and the inexplicable, is my role model.  Sometimes it seems that an ancient birthing ritual or baptism into life is being enacted.  The water is the facilitator of it all.

Originating in the primal soup, nurtured in the watery womb, made mostly of liquid substance ourselves, the aquatic experience can be a  homecoming. In water, more primitive brain functions begin to surface - archetypes, feelings, sensate awareness, somatic memories - allowing access to our deeper selves.

Often the experiences a person has during water sessions are preverbal and  must be elaborated in much the same manner as dreams.  The best way to reflect such images and fantasies  is through artistic expression and my hope is that this work will be recognized as a valuable tool for creativity.

The experience extends beyond the physical, integrating mind and spirit in ways that will be unique to each person.  The receiver usually has their eyes closed throughout and because their ears are immersed below the water's surface, they drop most easily into their inner being. 

Neptune has a heart (poem by Sulis)

Astronomers said today
that Neptune, long dismissed
as a cobalt-blue gas giant
cloaked in deathly cold,
has a warm south pole.

Didn't they know this
master of disguises, of
clouded issues lurking
beneath the surface,
has a burning heart?

Neptune's nebulous urge
a transcendent impulse
to touch a greater glamor:
Venus' high manifestation,
vehicle of sacrifice reborn.

Cruel planet of deception,
oppressed and abandoned:
society's hopeless misfits
and crazed visionaries, it
spins out enlightenment.

Things aren't as they seem:
derangement, persecution,
confinement, abandonment.
Only if Saturn's test is passed
does Neptune show advantage.

Planet of faith, trust and hope:
a paradox of freedom reached
through bleakest bondage,
shattering the mundane, a
lofty dream made manifest.

Neptune has a heart.

This poem was inspired by my studies at the Astropoetic School of Soul Discovery with Joe Landwehr.  Addendum:  With regard to the Saturn-Neptune connection, I have Saturn sextile Neptune natally.  One source suggests that 'this gives the ability to bring realism and idealism together for constructive aims. It fosters patience and responsibility tied to altruisitc motivations. Those born with this aspect are willing to work hard to make their dreams reality and can usually find a sense of satisfaction and higher purpose in the tasks that appear mundane to others.'  Hoping so! 

The age of dreaming has come

The karmic dust of angels is everywhere.
The secret side of things is open to us.
The time of innocence is gone.
The age of dreaming has come.
Ben Okri

Do you remember your dreams?  If you do, or if you don't, does it matter?  Is there a way in which your dreams might make a difference to those around you, and to the world you live in?  What does it mean to live a dream?  These are questions I am asking myself. 

Dream recall is a relatively recent experience for me, and coincided with my introduction to aquatic bodywork around the millennium.  Awake-dreaming in the water while receiving this buoyant form of movement therapy, seemed to give access to my night dreaming world as well.

Water, I found, could trigger an altered state of consciousness in which as a willing receiver I was flooded with images, perceptions, feelings, and sensations that made possible profound shifts in my being.  I recorded these and encouraged my clients to do the same.

Water and the Soul

In mythology, water has been associated with the unconscious.  Archetypal psychologist, Jung said that when the spirit becomes heavy it turns to water; that the way of the soul leads to water.  And one of my favorite poets of soul Mary Oliver concludes:

Nobody knows what the soul is;
it comes and goes like wind over water.

Some of us are more watery, more dreamy, more soulful perhaps than others, and many of the ancient healing methods considered the contribution of this archetypal element to an individual's make-up. My friend Jonathan DeVierville considers that 'Water is to the Body, as Dreams are to the Soul'.

Jung's theory, says Barbara Bowen, 'suggests that our psyches are born connected to a deeper collective "ocean" of awareness from which our personal dreams flow. Like tributaries, dreams deliver ancient motifs that play a mysterious role in humanity's evolution of consciousness. ...

'No matter how clarified, puzzling or outlandish their language may be, our dreams are trying to tell us something. They often require us to dwell for a time within ambiguities, to bathe in cool pools of uncertainty, before we profess to know what they have in mind.'

Jungian psychotherapist, Arnold Mindell, described the 'dreambody', the part of us that does not conform to collective materialistic definitions, but hovers somewhere between physical sensation and mythic visualization when we surrender to the water.  He wrote:

The dreambody is released in every deep, sentient body experience.  These experiences often dissolve the boundaries of time, expanding it to infinity, almost abolishing its existence.  Or they condense fate, drawing life times together in minutes. Dreambody: The Body's Role in Revealing the Self, 1998. p. 283.

Exploring dreams

I came to think of my warm water pool as a portal to the unconscious or the dreamtime where my dreambody revealed herself.   In the past year, personal circumstances kept me from my pool haven.  But interestingly, seven significant night dreams have offered me powerful water imagery.

Four water-associated dreams in the previous years, and since I encountered aquatic bodywork, have had aspects to them which make them seem very significant parts of my personal mythology and perhaps also of the role I am playing out in this lifetime with respect to others.

I've been exploring different ways to relate to these dreams and to weave them into the fabric and understanding of my everyday life. My partner Joe, whose own work, Astropoetics, inspires a creative interface between personal imagery and astrological cycles, is my fellow explorer.

As we progress with these studies, there will I hope be much more to share that is useful to others on this soul journey.  Meanwhile, on this weblog I will be writing about some of the personal insights gained so far.  The vulnerability inherent in this does call for some courage.

Dreams seem to me to be Neptunian creatures of the deep and easily mistaken.  They cannot be approached head on but they ought to be attended to respectfully, otherwise they turn from shy messengers into fearsome monsters. 

In the years since I began aquatic bodywork, I have faced a few monsters myself, and cannot say that this is an easy path.  This is what led me to consider the shamanic implications of this work when conducted in a manner that resembles journeying, diving below the surface of things (see below for a link to more on this).

To benefit from our night dreams, we must allow that they have valuable messages to convey to us; it also seems essential to adopt the ritual of setting the intention to remember them and to have the discipline consistently to record whatever we recall without judgment.  

In the same way, to dive deep into the self through aquatic bodywork, seems to require an open attitude and commitment to the process as it unfolds.  As far as I know, no-one has seriously explored (and recorded) the dream world made more accessible by water.

Season's Greetings 2008-2009

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and
next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot

In the writing of Missouri-born poet, T. S. Eliot, Water often appears. 

From a warm haven in a silent and water-bound forest in the Missouri Ozarks,  I want to mark the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 with two quotes from T.S. Eliot's work. 

I hope they will inspire you too.

I'd like to thank all those who have supported my quest for soul this year and in previous years. 

I am posting this on a new website - one of three rivers of words with which I'm endeavoring to celebrate and support Water.

Please take a moment to view the trailer for a forthcoming film about Water from the Healing Water Institute, New Zealand.

 As I cannot thank all of you adequately and individually this year, I will be making a donation to this project as a gesture of gratitude to you and to Water.

Divine Water is an inspiring film intended to 'show the world what water really is ... how water is really like a human being.....or really how human beings are like water'. 

I support these concepts wholeheartedly! 

Whether  you came to this post via a notice from me, or have found it serendipitously, please consider yourself welcome to the Water. 

I invite you to sign my Guest Book by leaving a short comment below. 

If you'd like to follow my writing on water, please do subscribe (see below).

Here is a familiar final stanza from Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, ... final stanza

Wishing us all and our blue planet a hopeful and happy future. 

Sulis

My other water-related blogs (find subscription boxes on each of them):

Vision Spa Retreat: Reflections on Spa, Soul, and the Role of Water

Aquapoetics: Creative Aquatic Bodywork

Don't forget to leave your message below - Thank you!

Oceans (poem by Sulis)

Oceans by Sulis (2006)

Because all your questions
might not be enough
you know
there was no
new myth

That's why
a single
feeling
breaks a long silence
a drop of water sliding off

oceans

This work by Sara Firman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Deep water (poem by Sulis)

Deep water by Sulis (2007)

The world will not end
in flood

When in deep water
become a diver

Not by holding fast
your breath

Forcing yourself through
the surface

But instead by releasing
slow bubbles

Until you descend
naturally

Submerging, sinking
your soul
 
Where soul's like to go
for healing

Down, down, down
into the murky

It is there that roots
take hold

From there you grow
slowly
 
Like a lotus stem
swaying

Until you're floating
flowering

The world always begins
in flood

This work by Sara Firman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Writing spirit and finding water

'We should write because it is human nature to write', says Julia Cameron in her friendly and encouraging book The Right to Write:  An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life.  I've always loved words and one of my childhood wishes was to 'be a writer' but I've struggled with my right to that wish.

Back in 2002, I wrote the following regards my 'writing spirit'.  I was in love and water was the medium and mediator for that love.  I can't agree now that there 'is no gushing or turmoil' in my writing but I'm working on that!

A painter of still lifes?

 

Some days I can hardly wait to live my life (and record my thoughts about it), other days it feels like I am pushing through tick-and-chigger infested undergrowth or salt-bathing the resulting wounds and welts from that (summer life in an Ozark forest!).  Life rarely feels still to me though.

Comparing living to painting as the writer quoted below does is an interesting exercise. 'If your life were a painting, what kind of painting would it be?'  In attempts to actually paint, I've noticed that I favor 'blown-up details'.  Danny Kaye is quoted as saying: 'Life is like a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.'

The question of truth and the ethics of memoir was discussed interestingly and at length by Carol Spindel  in a article entitled 'When ambiguity becomes deception' in The Writer's Chronicle, December 2007, p. 19-24.  Here are some extracts from that article:

As much as I value truth, I also value a good story, and good stories are often made better by a thimbleful of embroidery, a sprinkle of exaggeration, and a trainload of boxcar-sized omissions.  In order to articulate an ethics of memoir, we have to bring the compact between memoir writer and memoir reader into the light of day.

...

I do not change the order of events or compress characters in my own nonfiction writing ... I want to be a painter of still lifes.  And yet the still life paintings I most admire are cubist, with their own particular and exaggerated way of seeing.  Psychology tells us that our beliefs and perceptions about what happened may be more important than what actually happened and I would not want to exclude this mythology from the literary account of a life.

... memoir as it is presently evolving, has a particularly fluid and ambiguous compact with it's readers.

Regards ethical questions and audacious storytelling, one of the best books I have read in recentl years is Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, 2003.  It is specifically labeled 'A Novel' but the author's biography on the back cover gives the reader cause to speculate about that.

Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay - where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gun runner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia.

Despite this unnerving account, I (like many, many others) found the story to be both thrilling and touching.  A film starring Jonny Depp (one of my favorite actors) and directed by Mira Nair is currently in preproduction (for 2009).

Gregory David Roberts now lives in Bombay and is very active in support of charitable causes as well as sharing his writing skills.  His website was quiet for a few years but he began posting again in May 2008 and it's well worth a visit. 

He notes there:  'I’ll say this now for the record ... all the characters in my novel are created characters, fictions, invented by me, and none of them resemble living persons in any way.'  Apparently, he's been deluged with letters from people who feel deep empathy with the story and have found much healing in it.

'It’s a funny thing, how people react to the “discovery” that Karla and Prabaker, Abdullah and Khaderbhai, Didier and Khaled Ansari and all the others are created characters, and not real beings....[They are] stricken with disappointment...'

'I understand the thoughts and emotions involved. The novel is so closely linked to the real experiences of my life that people read the book as autobiography, rather than as the novel that it is. The rule of thumb for Shantaram, and for the sequel, which I’m completing now in these months, is that the experiences are all real, taken from my own life and direct personal experience, but the characters and the dialogue and the narrative structure are all creations. I gotta tell ya, dear Friends and New Visitors, that it’s a strange thing, a strange, double-edged sword of a thing to have readers utterly convinced and committed by your creative art, and then disappointed by the same creativity at the same time. I hope, if readers pick up and read the sequel to Shantaram, that they’ll find all the new characters left standing at the end of Shantaram just as fresh and alive in the sequel, and in the company of a whole new set of characters to know, and love, and revile, as the case may be.'

An aphorism I came across recently really seems to apply here:  Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation.  That's something I hope eventually to get to in my own living-writing - neither explaining nor apologizing but just telling it like it is for me.

Along the same lines is another aphorism:  Never let someone else's opinion of you become your reality.  And one more favorite of mine:  If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning  (attributed anonymous I beleive).

Back to pondering the question of what kind of painting my life would be, if I painted it.  To be honest, I think the best thing to do here is get out the paints or the scissors (for collage) and see what images come through or appeal.  I'll be sure to share the results with you here.