We are rivers, each one of us. We have currents and pulses, silent pools and cascading torrents of rushing water. I am not speaking in metaphor, I’m talking about the Liquid Self.
When we are born we’re 70-80% water. As if trying to slip away unnoticed, water leaves us one tiny drop at a time as our life unfolds. If we ever fade below 50% liquid we cannot survive. It is the Liquid Self that makes our lives possible.
We see the liquidity of us as separate. Blood here, sinew here, and there some tears. But water has no sense of separation. Liquid is always one community.
I’ve had to make more room for the Liquid Me lately because I’m healing my spine from a car wreck. Whiplash is caused by sudden jarring movement bereft of liquidity. We can get stuck there, if we don’t know how to find our way back into the Liquid world.
Laying on my healers table I start to drift away into its currents. My breath reflects its tides. I am heavy water, sinking through the broken parts of me. As my soft tissue gradually lets go and relaxes, the Liquid Me flows forth, lifting vertebrae back to their natural place, suspended by the grace of the Liquid Self. Without liquidity there could be no healing, indeed no healthy spine. Water is the cure for this suffering.
The Liquid Self never doubts it will ultimately return to its source, the great Oceans of the world. Surfers,divers and fishermen know this. If you spend enough time in an Ocean the Liquid Self will not want to leave. A longing will overtake you, make you feel owned by something greater than yourself. It is the Liquid Self longing for its great Source.
I invoke the waves I’ve floated in to support my healing. Its not hard to remember resting off shore where they build before breaking. I dissolve into the the swells as they lift me, building before they subside. The Liquid Me wants them to keep building, not to subside, until everything material drifts away like soggy old wood, destined to decay on the Ocean floor.
Our way of life requires each one of us to be solid and sure, to face each day with methodical steps at the ready. We have to be tangible in a way that our Liquid Selves are not. We live in the contradiction of liquid made solid. Healing calls us all back to our Liquidity.
Once you listen to the Liquid Self you realize it has been showing up for you all along, its buoyancy making the solid selve’s life possible. It is the soft warmth that rises to meet a cut or broken bone to begin mending. All tissue, even the hardest bone is built from the Liquid Self.
We never listen to what the water in us wants to say. Its the solid self who speaks, the certain one. That self has boundaries, a future and a past – a beginning and end. Water is nowhere and everywhere – and it occupies the greater part of us. If you want to touch it, to hear what its saying, just pay attention to your breath. That is the current of the Liquid Self. That is its invitation to go deeper.
Image: When Water Drops Collide by LASZLO ILYES from Flickr, used under
a Creative Commons license
http://www.flickr.com/photos/laszlo-photo/4093575863/