Fluid like water

I come back to this poem by Mary Oliver again and again. It feels like an invitation to stop resisting life quite so much and to trust its natural flow instead.

I Go Down to the Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall—

what should I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

“Excuse me, I have work to do.”

― Mary Oliver

We arrive at the shore carrying the weight of our human experience: our worries, struggles and unanswered questions. We seek answers or a remedy. Yet the sea seems too busy to pay attention to our troubles. It has "work to do".

What is that work? What does the sea do?

While it obviously plays a vital role in our ecosystem, what we can most easily recognise when standing at the shore is its movement. It flows in different directions. Sometimes quietly, sometimes angrily. Sometimes you can barely notice those movements; sometimes its waves crash against the shore.

Doesn't that fluidity sound nice to you? Soothing, even?

It definitely does to me.

I don't know how you experience life, but my experience is not fluid all the time. It tends to feel more flowy, "easy" when things go as planned and to my liking. But as soon as things get tricky, life can feel like travelling along a bumpy road in a cart with a badly fitted axle. Uneven. Slow. Painful. Sometimes it feels as though I need to get off the cart and push it with all my strength so it goes in the direction I want it to go.

There is a Sanskrit word and concept found in both Buddhism and Hinduism that I learned about very recently and immediately fell in love with because of its descriptive meaning: dukha. It is often translated as "suffering", "pain" or "dissatisfaction", but its original imagery refers to a badly fitting axle-hole in a cart. Some people also translate it as "hard to face", which makes even more sense to me.

It’s not really the thing that happens to us that creates suffering, but how we meet it, how we "face it".

Is it possible to meet life with more fluidity, instead of turning it into a painful, bumpy road where all we want to do is close our eyes and just get through it?

So when something happens in our lives, what is our reaction? Are we able to surrender to life as it is, or do we insist it should be as we want it to be, continuing to force it in a particular direction?

The element of water is associated with the sacral chakra, which is located around the hips. By bringing more awareness to this area in our practice, we might connect more deeply to the water element and its qualities of fluidity and adaptability.

If movement in the hips is restricted, some traditions suggest this may reflect unresolved emotions or relationships, often connected to our creativity, intimacy or sense of self-expression.

To me, fluidity creates more freedom, and I find myself returning to this again and again.

Lots of love,

Viki xxx