Ocean of Remembrance: On Swimming as Sacred Practice
The pool is always crowded on Saturdays. I know this by now. I pull out the little tin I keep my joints in, turn onto 9th Street and stand in front of the Shantideva Center because it feels less hectic here and because I’m about to do something holy. I give myself over to the high while reciting my self prescribed mantra: “I’m about to have so much fun”. I joined this YMCA a month ago and it’s already a fixture of my routine. I stub out my joint, head inside past the membership desk, down the narrow stairs and into the ladies locker room where I pass an employee sleeping through their break. I find this to be an unexpectedly good omen: if she feels safe enough to sleep here the vibes must be immaculate. I fumble out of my clothes, squeeze into my suit, pass the naked woman drying her hair, pass the water aerobics class in the small pool, descend another flight of stairs and assess my options. Maybe it’s the mantra, but everything about the Y is delighting me today.
There are already many people in each speed-grouped lane, but let’s be real, this is a community pool, and I have to judge by vibes. I remind myself, lovingly, that I’m high. I pick a lane with two people and attune myself to their rhythm. I can’t match their speed but the lane next to us feels chaotic; I want to be led by swimmers who know their etiquette today. I abandon any fantasy of endurance swimming. I give each swimmer a bit of a lead, sprint after them, the stop every two laps to let them pass me. I don’t bother to time my splits either, I just pause, let them pass and go again, surrendering over and over again to the current we’ve created together.
I use the space between breaths to reflect on how different today’s swim is from two days earlier. Everything about the Y was irritating my nervous system: the drab beige lockers, the overly crowded lanes, the too narrow stairwell. I was splitting a lane with just one other person, slowly making my way through a 500 hundred without pausing, hitting each flip turn with stoic determination, shooting energetic daggers at anyone who looked tempted to join us. Eventually a very sweet young woman asked if we would mind circling and I had to adapt to a new flow. I tried unsuccessfully to mask my frustration.
Today I’m having the time of my life and the contrast is striking. The hyper obsessive part of my brain has gone quiet while I luxuriate in the water like a mermaid. It’s a sensation that reminds me more of swimming in the ocean than in this pool. My mind drifts back further to busy swim-team practices where I was hardly the fastest and would often get scolded for chatting with friends or finish my laps with a couples lazy dolphin-dives to get me to the wall. I can remember feeling viciously competitive, but I can also remember having so much fun.
One of the symbols I work with a lot in active imagination is the cave. I imagine myself landing in the womb of myself. I descend down, down, down into the darkness of myself. I let my feet land in earth. I notice if my toes are squishing into mud or sliding on smooth stone, or sinking into folds of sand. I let the darkness envelop me until the cave starts to take form around me. Some days there’s a small cenote off to one side, or a room where I go to pray. Once I watched enamored as light reflected off of bits of gold embedded in the walls. Each day my womb can be different if I don’t get too attached. I’ve started to recognize wombs in the waking world. Liminal spaces, vortexes even, where time seems to standstill. The Sema I attended in Turkey was undoubtably a womb. This YMCA with its decades of community spirt, this pool three floors deep below street level, also definitely a womb. When we enter the sacred circle of the Sema, we bow and kiss the floor. Growing up Catholic, whenever I entered the Church, I would bless myself with the sign of the cross. The physical gesture subtly cueing my spirit to realign itself with the divine. Today the joint was my not so subtle somatic technology.
As I kept swimming, I allowed my consciousness to continue to journey. My thoughts went many places at once. Water purifies. If you enter a pool in a state of stress, it’s nearly impossible to maintain that frequency. I perceived the pool as a shared field of energy. The sufis say that the Sema, the act of whirling, but more so the ceremony itself, is the work of making love. As a group, we come together and create a sort of vortex in which the frequency of love is cultivated and whirled out into the universe. Sometimes, in order to whirl, I need to allow the blockages to be cleared from my heart. Swimming is the same. I might enter in one state of vibration, but I undoubtably leave in another. I became aware all at once of the vibration I was offering to the water and by extension to the other swimmers in it. I wonder if my thoughts are affecting them or if the energy of the thoughts is being absorbed directly into the water. I remember all the times as I child I would cry my pain into the privacy of the water, how I relied on the pool to hold me. I recall little Carey in my minds’ eye and hold her in my arms. I begin to send prayers to the other swimmers in the water. May we be happy. May we be loved.
In the sauna afterwards, a cave within a cave, the women talk of the ICE shootings in Minnesota. I want to gift something more beautiful. I think about the impending blizzard and imagine the whole city about to be cocooned in snow, we shift together to talk of snow days and snow angels.
In Sohbet the following day, in a moment of divine synchronicity, Cem Baba talks of the universe as a pool, a field we share with every being on this planet. He tells us our highest work is frequency maintenance, to elevate our consciousness to the highest level and hold that vibration, to be the transmitters, the beacons, the candles if you would, of light, if you have enough candles together then you have light. That's just the way it works, he said. The next time I go to the pool I commit to working with the pool, the field, for the purpose of frequency maintenance. I stand at the edge for a moment and say a prayer, aligning my spriit with the divine: “Use me as an instrument of divine will, clear any blockages to my highest good and the highest good of all, make me a clear channel of love and light. I surrender myself to your will.”
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