In Devotion to the Water

This article is devoted to Water. The life blood of the Earth and our bodies.

As the exalted element of the Autumn season, Water helps to bring us down and in, helps us surrender the tight grip of control, and invites us into trust.

This letting go process is not often easy. Especially in a culture that clings on to an ever-growth-oriented process of progress and achievement. Letting go can be downright scary, especially to the parts of ourselves that believe endings are a failure.

And actually, so much of the time what we’re holding onto for dear life is what our body thinks is literally keeping us alive and safe. Like a habit, a mask, a belief, a way we interact with others, a role we play. So when the invitation to surrender arrives, fear can be stirred.

What’s beautiful about Water is that alongside the medicine of surrender, she is deeply patient and loving. She knows that deep-rooted things don’t shift overnight. She knows the stoned-set ways are softened over time.

She’s not in it for the reward of an end point, or finish line. She’s in it for the reward of the flowing, meandering journey. In it for that incremental, minute layer that softens. And that barely perceivable shift, that from the external world doesn’t look like much, but internally actually changes the entire landscape of experience.

Water’s gentle caress and compassionate nudge will invite surrender, over and over again, to our clenched muscles, our fast-paced mind, or the way we want to feel in control of our lives and the lives of others.

She’ll invite us to trust. In the most gentle, loving way. And lead us down the path of uncovering and cultivating our own inner wisdom.

Water is a matrix of Life.

In coherent water, the water is structured like a crystal. It contains a matrix that is intelligent, that can store and hold memory, just like a computer chip.

Remember, you are water.

We are about 70% water by volume, but over 99% water molecularly (the water molecule is particularly small, so water molecules make up about 99.2% of the total molecules in our body!). So if you tend the healthy, structured water in your body, and you drink healthy, living water, your own coherence, memory, and vitality is clear and crisp as a mountain stream. (Learn more about this on this podcast, or through Isabel Friend’s website).

Another aspect of water that delights me is her liminal way of being a threshold. She has long been revered and included in cross-cultural spiritual and religious rituals as a carrier of information and messages across worlds, across time and space, across the spiritual plane to the physical, and back again. Water connects us with the spiritual, with the unseen, with the underworld, with the Otherworld.

As a liminal time itself, the Autumn flows hand-in-hand with Water to take us through a journey of descent, into our selves, into our most liminal places, to the deepest parts of ourselves.

One thing I always feel when I’m giving a Cranialsacral therapy session is how the work connects the unconscious with the conscious. The spiritual with the physical. It bridges worlds within us, and so much of that is because we’re connecting to one of the deepest sources of water in the body.

Cranialsacral therapy works by feeling into the pulse of the cerebral spinal fluid and how it’s moving through the system. This is one of our deep oceans of water in the body that bathes the brain and spinal cord, and pulses in rhythmic waves, about 6 per minute.

I love connecting to the waters inside my clients’ bodies. I believe it is one of the ways I receive imprints of story, memory, emotion, and imagery during the sessions. It is a way their bodies speak to me, and show me what healing needs to happen.

Water is supremely healing. And as we step further into the reaches of the Autumn season, it’s helpful to befriend the water, to let it work you. Think about what it feels like to try to move or walk against a flowing current. It requires so much energy inside of us to resist the ways water is inviting us to flow. Yet so many of us resist this annual descent into the darkness.

This year, invite the water move you.

A few simple ways to ritually connect with Water:

*Stand in the rain, or in the shower, and let the wisdom of the water wash over your body. Allow it to cleanse you. *Harvest spring water, and while you're there, meditate with the upswell of water from the Earth - see what she has to share with you *Sing to the water in gratitude- whether a wild river, a puddle, or your glass of water *Pray into your water before you drink *As you’re drinking water, invoke the feeling state of how you’d like to feel, or what you’d like to cultivate inside of yourself. As you drink the water, it will infuse with the energy of the feeling, and carry the imprint into your cells *Speak words of what you’d like support releasing or surrendering in your life and body into a bowl of water, and then pour it outside onto the Earth *Let yourself float in a bath, soaking pool, or float tank, and feel your body begin to soften and release

If you want a deeper dive into how the energies and magic of the Water tie into the Autumn season, grab a Sacred Seasons Autumn Guidebook where you'll explore other metaphysical aspects of Water and enter into a connected experience with Autumn.