The unfathomable nature of water

Over the month of May I connected with water through a series of group shamanic journeys, and this blog shares some of the experiences and understandings from these journeys.

I connected to “ocean” using the rune laug. I connect the rune laug with ocean, sea, the Vanir, and the Norse deity Njord. Our drummed journey started by going through a rune door with laug engraved on the door, walking through woodland to the world tree Yggdrasil, and then walking deeper still to the ocean.

Once at the shore line I started the lokk-seidr, a Nordic chant to deepen the state of altered consciousness. I started with a gentle “mann-a-mann” chant using the sound of Freya’s chant from the younger futhark. I associate Freya with moonlight and the shoreline and most of the participants felt this was a gentle stage of the journey. Many waded into the ocean, swimming or floating on the surface.

I have used floating on the ocean as a tool with many clients- it seems to be a way of exploring potential. The ocean reflects the potential, the collective unconscious. It is unfathomable, ever changing, and allows our mind to open out of linear form.

By floating we are still connected to air, still able to grasp ideas, arrange and order them. The deeper we sink into ocean the less able we are to retain the thoughts that come to us.

After a while I changed the chant to “laug….. laug” a deep, long, reverberating sound. The energy in the circle dropped, deepened. I could feel people sinking deeper into the trance.

Many people couldn’t recall any experiences from this point on, but described feeling rested, a healing energy, comforted, calm, held.

For those who did remember the experience there was a great deal of consistency about the experiences.

There was a feeling of “stripping away” of layers being removed, cleansed, washed away-not unpleasant, just a gentle easing away of the un-needed.

There were connections to ancestors, to beings and creatures older than we can comprehend, of the unfathomable age of the experiences at the depths of the ocean.

Most of all was the feeling of deep healing, rest, releasing. That the more we connected with ocean the smaller we felt, yet also part of a greater whole.

These experiences really resonated with my understanding of ocean- as a symbol in tarot I have come to see it as representing the collective unconscious – a collected tribal memory that reaches far far back. We can all connect to this at times – intuiting wisdom when we most need it or being influenced by fears in the darkest of moments that we know aren’t really ours. And yet we are a part of the collective unconscious.

As a shaman I have come to connect to ocean and water as a powerful element. In journeys it can be used to cleanse auras, remove entities, and as a way of journeying deeper to older parts of the psyche.

For past life and ancestral soul retrieval I use water to journey deep.

The more we consider water, the more it can reflect and inspire truths in our lives.

Water has a cycle- like the moon, the seasons, and our life, it moves through a cycle from ocean to rain, to mountain, to stream, and in time back to ocean. Often the wisest people just know when to let go and allow the journey to continue.

Water seems to have so many forms- salty or fresh, ice, snow, rain, river. It can be gentle as soft summer rain or destructive as a winters storm. Water can expand, can seep, and changes the face of our earth. When I travelled around America the Grand Canyon was not high on my list of places to visit (Mansfield Missouri was top of my list) but I found myself at Flag Staff and headed over to the Grand canyon as time allowed. I can vividly remember the physical shock as I first saw the Grand Canyon. Nothing had prepared me for the vastness, the sheer size. That is the power of water, it has shaped our earth of the millennia in ways that are still unfathomable.

Water seems to have an energy, a consciousness, a spirit of its own. Leonardo DaVinci says “water is the driver of nature” and that seems to fit well for me. If breath is the primal energy for man, then I see water as the primal energy for our earth.

Masaru Emoto’s work speaks loudly to me, that water is changed, influenced, moved by emotions. That is holds a memory of its own. imagine the pure potential of every drop of water, of all the memories and emotions that one drop has experienced. I have learnt to bless my water- before a bath, a drink, and before making my morning coffee.

On one of my journeys to Denmark I connected with a burial site and asked for guidance as to how to deepen my practice. The dead spoke to me and told me to always place a small bowl of water at the centre of my space when journeying as a connection with the Norns and Urds well. As I have chatted to other shamans from different paths this seems a universal way of connecting- to have a small bowl of water on our altar or in our working space.

The curiosity of water- is that by having a small body of water we are connected to the unfathomable potential of all water.