The first night I spend on Ko Totang, a barely inhabited, beautiful and relatively small Khmer island, all I can hear are the insects and the water. My bungalow on stilts is very close to the shore and it really feels as if the sea is my bed companion.
It switches on my vagus nerve and my parasympathetic system. I have the best sleeps here. I feel cradled and rocked by the sea.
I love islands, particularly small ones.
As a child I used to imagine my bed surrounded by waters infested with sharks but I was safe because I was tucked in on my island.
The waters around an island are like an embryonic cocoon, and this womb-like fluidity resonates deeply with my inner being.
Mother land becomes mother sea and the boundaries blur. As the land melts to the touch of this alive and sensual liquid I too surrender to its unconditional love. The warm salty water is like a bubble, a fluid membrane connecting with my fluid body so intimately through the skin, our biggest organ.
At first though I am quite literally testing the waters:
“Can I trust you to hold me?”
“Can I count on your support to go as far as I wish to go?”
“Can I witness all without disturbing?”
would be my typical inner questions. Interestingly these are concerns that may arise for clients or practitioners during a craniosacral session.
But the more I swim the more at ease I feel within, and the more at one with the sea. It has really and truly become a trusted friend and even a therapist. My internal fluids dance to the tidal rhythms of the sea. I am aware of my system adjusting, down regulating and feeling ever so relaxed. I listen to my breath, look up at the blue sky and feel the warmth of the sun rays as I backstroke slowly, savouring the setting and quality of this fluid contact. The outer expansiveness echoes my inner spaciousness and vice and versa.
I notice while I snorkel how everything breathes in this universe, this other world. The corals open and close ever so slightly. The urchins’s spikes move like antennas reading the currents. The sea itself rises and falls. Everything is in movement.
The sea is a giant organism sheltering and nurturing millions of species.
No wonder William Garner Sutherland, the founder of cranio sacral therapy used a lot of marine terms to name what he perceived. He spoke of the Intelligence of the Tide and the tides to name these internal rhythms that dance, express and breathe each and every cell of our bodies, each organ, each bone, tissues and the whole of us. It is the most fascinating and beautiful phenomenon I have ever witnessed.
When the sea is still, my fluid body is wearing it like a second skin: I am in midtide, a slow rhythm of expansion and contraction of all that is bathing in our fluids.
I starfish, floating in Mama sea’s arms, resourcing and embodying while listening to her beautiful melody and I reach a stillpoint.
This blissfully spiritual experience flows me to long tide. The boundaries disappear and I am breath with the breath of life.
I have given biodynamic craniosacral sessions to a few guests staying in this paradise and I have never felt the Tide so clearly and so powerfully. But then the setting for a practice is pretty perfect here: the session is outdoor (all the bungalows are wide open) with the sea right in front of me and I am listening and am supported by its harmonious and coherent music. The energetic field is unaffected by history, politics, traffic (no roads or vehicles), society or economics as there are less than 20 people living full time on this island otherwise teeming with natural life.
I am ever so grateful to the sea's Intelligence for its support and holding, and the powerful resourcing of my whole being.