Ocean

Ebb and Flow

The ebb and flow of life is never more clearly represented than in the oceans’ movements. The tides of these great bodies of water rise and fall in regular rhythms, and the waves continue to roll to the shores in endless and varied patterns, just as they have been doing for millions of years and will continue to do so for millions more.

These tides and waves maintain a relative predictability unless other unforeseeable forces of Nature intervene, which have been known to happen. Hurricanes and earthquakes, for instance, can have a dramatic effect on the characteristics of both the tides and the waves.

The oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth, and the human body averages a composition of 70 percent water. The dynamic gravitational interaction of the sun and moon that moves these massive bodies of water and creates the shifting tides also affects our human bodies in ways that we respond to instinctually, often having a great deal more influence over our moods and emotional states than we’re aware of.

An important aspect in the art of living is to move with the ebb  and flow of your emotions, joining their fluidity but not being captured by it. It is also not necessary to become obsessed with any particular fluctuation in the mood or feeling. They are simply emotions, often activated in ways that are completely beyond your understanding. When you neither minimize nor exaggerate the intensity and importance of your emotions, you then have a greater sense of when and how to express them.

You have been fighting the ebb and flow  of your own feelings – denying your hurt, anger, or sorrow – by either attaching yourself to one or the other and nurturing it as if it were a nursing child, or else smoothing over your feelings with more practiced responses that deny and hide what is going on beneath the surface of your expression. When you attempt to constrict yourself from experiencing your emotions, it is much like trying to stem the tides that grow even more forceful with every attempt humans make to control them. Allow yourself to swim with these variations rather than resisting them.