embodied oceans

somatics inspired by the start of pisces season

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

We’re in the watery depths of Pisces season, from February 18th until March 20th. Pisces marks the end of the astrological year - here, we integrate all we’ve been through as the sun has moved through the signs, and then with the start of Aries season on March 21st, a new year begins.

In the spirit of Pisces season, here is an excerpt from my recently released book, Returning Home to Our Bodies, from Chapter 5: embodied oceans

We are saltwater bodies.
Our blood is approximately 83 percent water. Our brain and muscles are about 75 percent water, our heart is roughly 79 per- cent, our liver is around 85 percent.18 Even our bones, the driest part of the body, are surprisingly fluid: cortical bone is only about 20 percent water, but hematopoietic marrow, the marrow where red blood cells are born, is 40 percent water in adults. Our bodies are oceans: blood, interstitial fluid (the fluid in the space between cells), intracellular fluid (the fluid in the space within cells), serous fluid, cerebrospinal fluid, saliva ... the list of different types of salty fluids in the body is a long one. You are a fluid environment, neither fully liquid nor fully solid, an ecotone embodied.

This practice of grounding in a fluid body is a practice that takes patience, but it doesn’t necessarily take the linear measurement of time. Meaning: you can feel this immediately, even if you don’t understand why, or how to feel it again. The feeling is not the skill; it’s just happening. You are drawn toward the earth, like it or not. You are a fluid body, a breathing ocean, like it or not. You don’t need to do anything to become a fluid body; the effort goes toward not being in the way, not restricting.

The problem with telling you that the effort has to go to “not restricting” is that it immediately brings “restricting” into the con- versation. Tyson Yunkaporta writes about this in his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, when he speaks of how the concepts of nonlinearity and nonbinary slam the words linear and binary right into the middle of our thinking. Let’s show it in action: if I tell you not to think of a glass of orange juice, you just thought of a glass of orange juice. If I tell you not to restrict the body or the breath, all I’ve really done is drop the word restrict smack in the middle of your thoughts. It is incomplete to define what we are moving toward by only referring to what it is not.

But if I similarly tell you to “just relax” or to “go with the flow” as the alternative, whatever that means, I haven’t done much better. Relaxing is hardly an easy thing to “just” do, especially if for good reason it feels like if we let anything slide, everything could come toppling down on us. Going with the flow when the world feels like it is being washed out from under us is hardly a comforting thought.

So I am not going to tell you to do any of this. Rather, I am going to encourage you think of a stone dropped into a lake, the concen- tric ripples widening out to reach the shore. In a fluid environment, a change somewhere creates a rippling effect everywhere.

The ripples of any movement can be felt in the entire body, espe- cially if giving your attention to tending any restrictions or barri- ers. When I speak of restrictions and barriers, I am speaking to the barriers caused by illness and injury, which those who are able-bod- ied need to make space for with creative joy, rather than the pity or reluctance often extended. I’m even talking about the restriction of tight clothing; I am all for any kind of fashion expression, but maybe we can stage a collective breakup with restrictive shapewear and waistbands that are too tight, at least when we’re trying to do something as radical as remember we are embodied oceans. But I am primarily speaking of the ways we brace ourselves against the world, a very reasonable response to systems that create a constant level of stress or fear. In addition to all the various ways so many of us have faced individual traumas, if you have ever been housing insecure, or lived paycheck to paycheck, or if your race, gender, or sexuality puts you at risk in a racist, homophobic, sexist world, then it makes sense that you would be bracing, at least just a little, nearly all of the time.

It also makes sense that when we are taught to think of the body as a collection of parts, we lose the ability to feel the fluid fullness of our bodies.

Lucky us, these bodies are ready for us to return to them.

From Returning Home to Our Bodies: Reimagining the Relationship Between Our Bodies and the World, North Atlantic Books, 2024.

copyright Abigail Rose Clarke