Meditation in Water
A guide on how to move into your body through the element of water
There are a lot of areas in Bali where you can travel and live. Everyones choices are different. Perhaps you like the busy and shirtless testosterone driven Canggu or a hippy and somewhat heavy with all that trauma healing Ubud. I much prefer Uluwatu which is in a way a combination of both. There is a place for spirituality there, but also nature, surfing and lots of good food, which is pretty much everywhere in Bali. In fact it is getting pretty busy down in the south right now and most restaurants are opening up their second branches in Uluwatu. It still however has a lot of virgin land and empty pink beaches, not soiled and brown as we find them in Canggu, but the access to the water comes at a price with its steep descent either via steps or on scooter.
But this post is not about any of those places. On the most east side of the island you will find a small little village called Amed. It is know for the diving schools that are located on its black from lava shores. I don’t know who or what is responsible for the serene feeling that you get in this area of Bali, but I come here to rejuvenate, meditate, heal and generally get back to me. It has to be the proximity to Mr. Agung mountain and the ocean that is so profoundly transformative. Perhaps if you are looking for some action, party, high end restaurants this place is not for you, but if you seeking the WAY of the WATER, a totally new way of being, this is where you will find it.
The way I use snorkelling here in Amed is a form of meditation. I spend a long time releasing my control of the movements and relax my body in all areas it is contracted. If you focus you can feel into where the heaviness, weight and tiredness have accumulated. Of course the immediate present pressure is from the mask but I release into that too. Focusing on the breath, releasing a little further, feeling that I am safe in this new and other worldly environment with its mushroom like roses of corals and other planetary purple and green blobs of formations, I take my time to breath and let go. You would be surprised how far you can go with releasing and releasing a little deeper and opening up eventually to personal wisdom.
The trick is to stop moving, focus on body’s emotional intelligence and stay as still as possible eventually doing a vipassana in water, whilst I’m getting entertained by the unique and magical colours, shapes, patterns and beings of the underwater world, simultatniously merging with the environment as fish swim pass me.
The most important thing to do is do nothing but surrender, stop the resistance, give up the control and allow the meditation to happen naturally. As a wise man once said ‘you will not be meditating, you will be meditated’. Please do be careful when trying. Make sure that you are snorkelling in a safe area with no current, ideally you ll be out on a still and sunny morning.
Stay here as long as you possibly can or at least you can physically feel your body turn into a still sculpture and what you will experience is that shortly after a realisation will happen because you have created an environment that is conducive to an alpha state of mind. Read more about it here
This is where healing happens, truths revealed. It is a way to help yourself. These processes will deepen the more time you spend in water. Take it one day at a time. Slow is an assured way that yields results. Here is the short clip of me doing this work on daily basis in the area of Amed.
Now that you are out in a water reservoir be it ocean bed, sea, lake, bathtub, where possible I recommend you use salt for your journeys. Here is a link for Amed’s salt hand sourced by local artisans during the months of August to October.
Continue to process of moving into your body when laying in bed. Feel where inside you feel contracted, release, keep moving around the different areas, stay in it for hours on end and days until you have moved in for good.
The reason why it sometimes feels easier to do in water is because submerging ourselves into an element that is 80% our body makes us feel lighter, the salt water creates weightlessness, hence why the emersion tanks have been created. The floating is a doorway to meditation. When your body stays effortlessly buoyant and safe it allows you to enter deep mental and physical relaxation. It brings us back to being in the mothers womb, safe, warm, protected and nurtured.
Water represents emotions. World oceans and their state is a representation of the collective emotional trauma physically manifesting in extreme amount of pollution on the planet Earth. In the universe of reflections and mirroring healing this collective emotional trauma i.e. attending to emotional ecology of humans will reflect in physical awareness around environmental ecology. It takes Emotional Intelligence to recognise the need for healing.
