Hydrotherapy And Why We Absolutely Need Wildness

Until recently, I would’ve said that I’m not really a big water person. Taurus to the core, I found myself craving dirt and grass. I could long for the mountains and definitely the forests. And while I appreciated the sea, I didn’t usually find myself longing for it. But that has been changing lately.

This summer, especially, I have longed for the sea. The wild sea, mind you. I have longed to follow those narrow overgrown trails through the forest that lead to craggy openings where the sea washes up. My whole body wakes up. Will you go in? it asks. But I have a lot of fears about the water. For one, the water is extremely cold where I live. Shockingly cold, even in the summer. But more than that, I fear the world I am entering, so unknown and foreign to me. I fear things I cannot see and cannot relate to being the domesticated land animal that I am. I fear the depth.

Will you go in? my body asks.

At some point, I just get in.

And ah, the rush. Entering that world so much bigger than me, that world so different from mine. Ah, the rush of those freezing temperatures. At first it’s hard, but gradually the body adjusts and then it’s very hard to get out of the water. And ah, the rush of confidence I get. Swimming a little further each day, that tiny bit of bravery within me rises up. The material world, and all of the things that I measure myself by, all of the things that others measure me by as well, just slipping away. I am fully present, rooted yet flowing in the moment, a tiny creature making my own ripple.

Why has the sea become so healing for me?

I will say that I have been on an inner journey that has probably been awaiting me my whole life. Somedays it feels like I can’t go on with the healing process. That the layers of pain will just never stop unraveling. And that I’ll never truly understand who I was supposed to be in this life.

But the sea has been whispering another story to me. In deep, wild water, the sea has offered me access to a part of myself that I don’t normally have access to. A re-wiring. Or a re-wilding is more accurate perhaps.

Entering wild bodies of water, I have slowly begun to come back into my own body a little bit more. I say this even after a decade of practicing yoga, always trying to find my way back into my body, but never quite there. The sequences haven’t been able to do it for me. Perhaps it is the surrender I needed. The willingness not to stand my ground, but to lose it.

If you’re also one of those people who, from very early in life, was forced to leave your body just in order to cope, you may understand what I mean.

It wasn’t until I became a mother that I even began to acknowledge this. Something about carrying life in my own body, bringing it out into the world. As I said in another post, my children have been the only thing powerful enough to break through the barriers. But they’re also the ones who are triggering the trauma and pain of my past. As they grow, I must face some of those things.

If I could start over, from the beginning, I would start with the most invisible, the threads in the web of our ecosystem that are rarely named, much less revered. I would start by listing the names of the trees, the flowers, the seeds that carry the light that give us life, because this is what we have forgotten. This is where our reverence has not yet reached. ⠀
⠀
I would start with the honeybee and the sweet essential nectar it feeds on. I would start first with what goes unnoticed, with what we haven’t realized is the most sacred among us.⠀
⠀
I would start with the names of everyone we’ve excluded, of the street children, of the millions slowly starving to death in plain daylight. I would start with the outsiders, the outcasts. I would start with everyone of us who thinks we aren’t worthy of love just the way we are. I would say each of their names, each of our names, who have been made into objects, who have been violated, who have had to survive by leaving the body altogether.⠀
⠀
I would list the names of all the mothers who have known the unspeakable joy of gradually knitting life within her, of bringing life from the dark to the light. The mothers who have no idea where their heart is anymore, now that it’s also outside of them. The mothers who remind us, no matter who we are, that our first country was a woman’s body, and our first element water, and that our first reality was darkness. ⠀
⠀
If I could write the beginning, it wouldn’t be light. It would be in the womb, in the dark, in a cave, in an egg. It would be to name all that has been left out of what’s holy. The blood, the body. Nothing real or imagined has happened without it.
Meggan Watterson

Just a few days ago, a friend sent me a short film called Hydrotherapy. It’s a beautiful film about a woman who worked herself to the point where she was physically ill. Among the diagnoses she received, fibromyalgia was one of them. Not only was she in constant pain, but she was totally burnt out. “Some days I would feel 100 years old,” she says in the film.

The rest of her looked bleak. Until she began to swim outside in wild waters. It gave her body immediate relief from the pain. It allowed her to connect to the moment and feel grateful to even be alive at all.

“It’s almost like re-wilding yourself and remembering that, as humans, we’re not meant to be in these concrete jungles.”

We Need Wildness

There’s another feature-length film that I saw many months ago called My Octopus Teacher. Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the story of a very depressed person who could find no reason to live, until he began to re-enter the wild sea environment of his childhood. The one still waiting just outside of this door. I love that, actually. Craig didn’t pack up and leave his home, leave his family, in search of some exotic adventure out there. He simply walked outside of his front door, entered the grand adventure he already knew, and yet hardly knew at all.

Somehow, in the wild sea kelp forest, he meets an octopus. And as the film title suggests, she becomes his teacher, eventually bringing him back into his body, and into his family, back into his creativity and life’s work.

This is not your typical nature documentary, with the omniscient human narrative overriding the drama, but a very personal story about the necessity of wildness. Not only does his story awaken us to the wild wonder of the sea world, but also to the innate wildness within us as well.

The sea healed Craig, from the inside out. But his longing for the natural world had begun much earlier. A filmmaker himself, he once traveled to the bush of Africa, where he followed some of the best animal trackers on the planet.

To watch these men go into the incredible subtle science in nature, things that my eye couldn’t even see and then follow them, sometimes for hours, and find hidden animals in the landscape was just extraordinary to witness.
I mean, they were just inside of the natural world, and I could feel I was outside. And I had this deep longing to be inside that world.
Craig Foster

Very, very few of us are inside the natural world anymore. We have been fed the story of superiority and separation, discounting all of the other intelligences on this planet. Some intelligences perhaps even surpass ours, though they aren’t as dominant or destructive.

And I think many of us are longing to reconnect with our environment. Not only on an intellectual level, because now we actually know in our heads how crucial environment is to our overall health and well-being, but we’re also longing for it on internal level. Call it the soul, or the heart or whatever you may. That spiritual experience of being alive.

“Just under the skin we’re still fully wild.”

So what exactly did the octopus teach him?

“She taught me humility,” he says. “She taught me compassion. She opened my mind to just how complex and precious wild creatures are.” She also showed him how to mend the fractured relationship with this son, by allowing him to access those deep wild places within himself.

Of course you don’t have to wait until you meet an octopus or some other exotic creature. There is wildness everywhere. Certainly right outside of my door there is. I’ve even been letting nature take over my garden more and more lately, letting the dandelions, yarrow and plantain grow as wildly as they will. Beyond my garden there are highways and byways, but there is also a huge protected forest where old pines tower and blueberry bushes cover the ground. And just beyond that wild forest, “the hollow boom of the sea striking against the rocks,” as Rachel Carson wrote in The Sea Around Us.

Hydrotherapy is a term used for physical exercises that restore a physical disease or condition. But obviously, when practiced in wild spaces, it can restore a person beyond the physical. Is there a different term for that?

Anyone else out there have a story to tell about the sea?

I suppose any time spent in nature is going to come with incredible benefits. Personally, I just never imagined that diving into a freezing cold sea would come to feel so vital. And I wonder, what I will do during the winter?!