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James Nemec LMT, CST-D, All Rights Reserved, No part of this may be reproduced in any form whatsoever unless by permission of the author.
Toward the end of my stay in LA, I discovered a secret beach north of Malibu. I went there with a client, call her Marcy, a young woman who had suffered the sudden loss of her mother and who had wanted to experience the work in the ocean. We negotiated the cliff down to the beach and she chose an area that seemed sheltered by rocks, similar to Anini Beach in Kauai.
Ocean session in Kauai, 2009
We waited for a sense of invitation. When we went in, I found my feet moving over kelp and long strands of green seaweed. The green seaweed floated to her belly. She had had issues there. She became very cold. She asked the ocean if it could make her warmer. In another minute one wave came, then another, and we were gently moved to a place that was only 3 and a half feet deep with warm water.
After the session, still in the glow and processing, she walked along the beach alone. I joined her for a while. We had both hoped we might see dolphins. Suddenly, a sea lion appeared and it seemed to walk along with her. More than once, the seal lifted it’s head from the medium-sized waves, turned, and looked directly at her. It wasn’t looking at me. They continued to “walk” together. and I left them alone and went back up the beach to rest. She felt comforted by the ocean, the kelp, and the seal. Since the loss of one of her parents, she had felt disconnected from the rest of life. The connection with the seal, with seaweed, with the ocean comforted her.
I had offered to work in this same, secret beach location with another client, Lydia, but we found it would be more convenient to go out to the ocean next to the Hermosa Beach Pier. Lydia, a blonde, shapely woman who works behind the scenes in the movie industry, had experienced her first and only ocean session the year before. When I arrived at her home, I met her new boyfriend, Bernard, who was a long distance sailor from France. He had sailed solo in parts around the world, most recently, from San Diego to New Zealand. Lydia hadn’t had a boyfriend the last time I was here, although several men were interested, I recalled.
Bernard became fascinated when Lydia’s shared the story of her first ocean session, which had then taken place next to the Hermosa Beach pier. He wasn’t sure about going into the water himself. For him, the challenge was to stay on the water and not to be in the water – a sailor’s superstition. Bernard, a man with kindly eyes in his late 60’s, showed interest in how book, Touch the Ocean, suggests to wait for a sense of invitation before going into the water. When Lydia went upstairs to get ready for the beach, Bernard took me aside and said that he would like to try the ocean session too. He shared something that was most interesting. He said that the day before he goes on a long passage, he shuts down. He talks with no one. He walks along the ocean, alone, and becomes very still. He never knew why he did this, and I withheld comment, best I could. It was amazing to me that a solo-sailor would practice what had been described in Touch the Ocean, and he’d never read the book! “The body knows,” I then said, somewhat astonished. Bernard was a man who had had very real experiences, and who had learned much from the ocean. When Lydia came back, I offered that after each of them had had their sessions in the water, we could then do a tandem session with both of them in the water at once! They liked this idea very much. Of course, as soon I had said this, I realized that I had asssummed that the water would be as still as a pond. It wasn’t.
The three of us drove to the ocean in my Hertz Rental car, walked down to the beach and then waited. The waves were coming in fast and there were cross currents at the trough, just past the said. I became silent. I noticed there weren’t any kids on boggie board like there were the first time I’d worked on Lydia more than a year before, at this same beach, and few swimmers. People were staying away from the water, for the most part, and just sunbathing or hanging out. The water was a bit rough. Lydia said, “But we’re always invited.” I said, “No, not always. And if we are not invited, we don’t go in.” “Intuition?” asked Bernard. “Something like that,” I said. Bernard reflected that intution is something he feels when he is sailing in the ocean. It’s not something that he can control, it just comes to him. Lydia, who is highly intuitive herself, agreed with him. “I guess there’s all kinds of ways,” I said. The three of us waited until we all had a sense of invitation from the ocean. Now, we were all clear on this – the ocean invited us. Lydia and I would go in first while Bernard would look on from where our towels were farther up on the beach.
“The waves are a little different this time,” said Lydia, hesitant.
“Yes, they are.”
I thought of her first session in the ocean.
During Lydia’s first session, the waves were thick and well spaced apart. The two of us had waited in the moment before. We then trundled into the cold water making our way past the swimmers and dodging the kids on boggie boards. She leaned back and rested her head in my open palms. Soon I marveled at how the waves would lift her away from my hands, as if they were in a mutual agreement with her. One wave, and then another, would lift her and move her head, neck and upper torso as if a limp swan. At times, I could only hold onto her elbows and ankles as the waves moved in synchrony with her body. I hadn’t taken her medical history before the session then, as I like to get the information from the intelligence with the body itself as we go along. It seemed she had done a great deal of unwinding with the waves. After the session, standing on the beach that day, she said the work was “Okay.” Just okay? Then on the drive back in her Jeep, she began to say, “I get it, I get it.” “Get what?” I asked her. She said she was feeling her organs release, spontaneously, one by one – - her internal organs were all moving together as one. She then said her ribcage was opening like never before. “Interesting, “ I said. I felt a flash of gratitude for the way Dr. Upledger had introduced us fledging therapists to the work with the dolphins in the Bahamas. This work, that we read about in detail in Touch the Ocean, and the work in the Ocean was inspired in part by Upledger Bioaquatic Therapy and Craniosacral Therapy. As an homage, Dr. Upledger’s genius was by not having us study the usual anatomy and behaviors of dolphins first, but in having us directly experience ourselves with the dolphins without the slightest notion of what we were getting into! (Recall the mantra, “The less “I” know the better?”)
Still driving the Jeep, Lydia then told me something of her medical history. When she was in her late teens, she was in a beach Jeep with a group of friends and they were all partying. The Jeep approached some slat-wood barrier fencing on the sand, but her head was hanging outside the jeep. She was just having fun. Her head then made contact with the fencing and the others didn’t know. She couldn’t scream and she couldn’t get back inside the Jeep. Her neck had been broken in seven places. No wonder the movement of the waves, I wondered. I had an image of the long neck of a swan, limp, in water and wave. (Or perhaps of a seal?) “The waves were moving you around like, I don’t know, like a swan, “ I said. “Yes, “ she answered, “I still feel the waves moving inside of me, and they are releasing everything! This is the piece, inside my body, that I’ve been looking for, for years!”
This time, Lydia wore a full body wetsuit against the cold water. She was a little stiff in the wetsuit, and the water was a little stiff. It wasn’t as quiet and serene as a pool. The waves were coming up in short bursts. She was resisting them. And the waves were resisting her, it seemed. After a while, we were both getting clobbered. I didn’t know what to do. I longed for the wild beach location north of Malibu where the water was cold but calm. Then I reflected how we had taken a “moment before” going into the water.
Now the waves knocked her and they knocked me. I could hardly keep my footing. We had only been there a few minutes when a seal crawled onto the beach. I looked at the seal and then at her. Lydia looked at me and back to the seal. A seal on Hermosa Beach with so many people around was, for me, was a rare sight. The waves washed up and swished around the body of the seal, then retreated. We took it as a cue. One wave knocked us, then another, and in another moment the bottom current lifted us and we were on the beach sand. She went down to one knee and lied down on her back. I got on my stomach and placed open hands under her shoulders. I had never worked on anyone on the sand before. The waves swished around her body and retreated just as they had done with the seal. Soon she relaxed and went deeper into the moment.
As we walked toward Bernard, she said it was so interesting how different the ocean was with her this time. The crowded beach scene today at the Hermosa Beach Pier was very similar to the year before, when I had worked with this woman in the same location, but the waves were very different. Before, the ocean had taken her almost as a lover. And Lydia was different this time too.
“You can’t step into the same ocean twice,” I repeated, almost quoting the book, Touch the Ocean, word-for-word.
“Exactly,” she said.
What I couldn’t get over was that all this happened, not in Panama, not in Kauai, but at a busy urban beach, Hermosa. When we reached Bernard, she lied on the warm sand and I applied some finishing touches to the session. A tall security person walked by, as if to inspect what we had been doing. He looked out of context somehow in her radiance. He paused for a moment, his walkie-talkie in hand, then turned away.
“The animals know,” said her boyfriend, Bernard. After she had gotten dry, he told us a story of how he was once out at sea and struggling to gain the wind. Then he saw a flock of birds land and float on the water. They were not trying to gain the wind, he observed. Then he chose to do nothing. After some hours of drifting, the wind picked up and his sails filled to take him on his journey. He had no stress, and he had gotten some much needed rest. Bernard was a man who had already gained a great deal of wisdom from the ocean, and from listening.
Now, it was Bernard’s turn to go into the water. We both waited again before going into the water. The waves were still packed together and coming in fast. We looked for a calm area beyond the shore breakers and headed to it. Unlike Lydia, he was able to lie down. He was only wearing a bathing suit and no wetsuit and he let go. A wave took his body, then another. I held his elbow, his knee, his ankles. This is where this ocean work becomes more like supervised swimming, the difference is in the mutual blend with the sea.
His body then wrapped around me, let go, and wrapped around my body again. There was an embryonic feeling to it. We rocked together quietly. Then he let go and formed himself into a fetal position. The waves began to roll him and roll him again. We went more than 75 yards down the beach with the current as the waves rolled him. Then seemingly out of nowhere, one wave slapped him in the face, knocking him to the side, and seconds later, another wave slapped him. I let go of him. He opened his eyes and his feet found the sand. Everything seemed to come to a stop. The session was over.
“That woke me up!” he said.
As we walked together down the beach back toward his girlfriend, closer to the pier, he said, “I felt happiness.” He hadn’t let himself let go like that in the water since he was a child. He said that as a child, he and his friends would just let the waves take them and roll them around. He was non-resistant, he didn’t resist the waves, or the ocean, and he was amazed that he wasn’t at all cold. When we got back to Lydia, they embraced. Then the sensations of the cold set in. He began to shiver. His fingers turned an pale yellow color. Lydia and I held his hands and warmed his fingers. He sat quietly and received our care. Before we departed the beach, we turned once again to thank the ocean. We didn’t do this in words, just a simple acknowledgement of gratefulness. Now, back in the rented car, Lydia realized that Bernard had experienced possibly the long distanced sailor’s worst fear, the embrace of the water. She’s made a good point: He had made the drop from the safety of his craft, and in doing so, had released a tremendous dis-charge of the fear of drowning. He had gone into the water and let it take him away. He had surrendered to it. However, at the same time, he had touched the ocean.
As I write this, I recall the words of the poet Antonio Machado –
Mankind owns four things that are no good at sea.
Anchor, rudder, oars, and the fear of going down.
Recall, we had talked of doing a session with the both of them in the water, in tandem, after they had done their individual sessions. But the waves were too high, or the water too cold, and we dropped the idea. However, a few weeks later, after I’d returned to Florida, I received a message on my phone from Lydia and Bernard. They had just visited Sedona, Arizona and had spent time together in what are called “vortexes” there. The vortexes of Sedona are invisible pools of energy that rise up from the Earth in various locations much like a thermal air current, however, they cannot be seen, only felt. Some of the vortexes are described by the Intuitives and Energy Workers there as masculine, others as feminine, yet others as having both qualities of masculine and feminine. Lydia and Bernard said that in the vortexes, they experienced the spiraling energies that they had felt after their ocean sessions. Bernard also said, “I felt so very calm in the Vortex, just like I had felt in the Ocean.” He and Lydia entered one of the famous Vortexes together and sat down on the rocks, facing each other. He said he felt what she was feeling, and she was feelng him Then he felt an energy rise from his lower back and travel up to his head where it felt like a soft, felt-helmet had formed. When I heard this, I tried to describe the unique physiology of the craniosacral system, but it was no use over the phone, especially with his scant command of the English language. Lydia sat quietly and supported him as he continued to feel the sensation of velvet, or felt, surround his head. They were both rooted to the spot, as it were, and could not move to leave the Vortex. Finally, things calmed down, and after they stood up, Bernard’s hands and fingers again took on that same pale yellow color, as they had when he had left the ocean, but his hands were not cold. Soon the sensation passed and the color in his hands normalized. He realized then that his hands were not cold in the ocean but that it was an “opening” for him. They both said that their time in the water prepared them for this new adventure in vortex as a couple. It was a break-through for them and their new but intimate relationship softly deepened.
In the last moments of our phone conversation, and this was quite recent. Bernard offered something that has stayed with me. He said, “When I am alone on the ocean in the sailboat, I feel a feeling of humility, and I feels small, very small, in my little boat on the wide ocean, but at the same time, always Welcome.”
For example, when we open up to a person and shake hands. Or hold a pet that we love. Or touch the ocean. We are always blending, even with the environment. We are not aware that we are. We are blending individually and collectively.
