Floating in the ocean of wholeness

A somatic timeline of life's sweetest ebbs & flows, just in time for Pisces season

Diving Headfirst into the Churning Waters of Pisces

Yesterday, the sun and moon came together in the sign of the fishes, ushering in the last new moon of winter. Next month, Aries season’s ram-horn sprouts will burst through the earth, bringing the initiation of spring and the start of a new astrological year.

New moon nights, with their starry black skies, look a lot like rich, verdant soil. Dark moons like this are a time each month that is good for planting seeds of intention, and this new moon in Pisces has particularly fertile soil. As the last sign in the Zodiac, Pisces represents the composting of all the stages that came before it, the breaking down of earthly structures, the dissolution of identity into the pure void of spirit. Pisces is the classic Lauryn Hill song “Everything is Everything”, the incredible film “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Pisces is the meditator levitating high above the mountain peak, the graceful water ballerina twirling into the depths, the synesthesic artist who hears colors and tastes shapes.

In the life cycle of a butterfly, Pisces would be the moment in the chrysalis where the caterpillar fully dissolves, digesting themselves from the inside out, into liquid form. The old body is broken down into what are called ‘imaginal cells’- undifferentiated cells that can become anything in their next iteration of being. For several days, the chrysalis is a dangling bag of supple fluid, before the cells grow into new parts, form a new body, and then erupt out into the sky, born again as a butterfly.

The Pisces constellation, along with Aquarius, are located in the portion of the sky known as the Great Sea. Pisces is the primordial soup, the eternal ocean, the return to formlessness. The sign is symbolized by two fish, swimming in opposite directions, connected by a ribbon or cord. This cord represents the tie between the dualities of existence that are necessary to unite into wholeness: ebb & flow, yin & yang, shiva & shakti, masculine & feminine, giving & receiving, inhale & exhale.

Pisces reminds us that wholeness can be found by transcending either/or thinking in favor of both/and thinking. The fish swimming away from each other are simply creating a whirlpool, a black hole, to expand the scope of the seas rather than staying confined within a stagnant pond.

The Pisces glyph represents 2 fish connected together by a cord.

Pisces Opposite Virgo, a Love Story

Astrology is all about unifying polarities (I wrote about this in my last post). As the final archetype of the Zodiac wheel, Pisces is the single sign that embodies this unification of opposites.

In my own birth chart, the sun and mercury are in Virgo, the polar opposite sign from Pisces. The Virgo/Pisces axis highlights the contrasting differences between the specific (Virgo) and the general (Pisces), the minute and the grandiose, the tangible and the existential, the grounded and the ethereal. The cord between the two signs, the uniting principle, is the theme of service, devotion, and spirituality.

True to this theme, some of my deepest, most profoundly spiritual relationships have been with Pisces people. Many of my best friends and lovers have been Pisces suns, moons, or people with lots of planets in the 12th house (Pisces rules the 12th house of the Zodiac). Throughout my life, there has always been a mutual attraction, a dreamy and unavoidable depth of connection, that happens almost instantly with these people (y’all know who you are) . When I look back on my experiences with Pisces loves, I think of them as my greatest influences, the people who have subtly shown me the most profound truths in this lifetime.

With her archetype of the harvesting maiden, Virgo’s service is to analyze, separate, distinguish wheat from chaff. By contrast, Pisces’ service is to bring together, integrate, dissolve, unite, make whole again. People with Pisces prominent in their charts are generally in touch with the natural ebbs and flows of life. They seem to know, deep down, the alchemical wisdom of the universe, the cyclical nature of the planetary orbits and the seasons of life itself. As above, so below. As within, so without. What goes up must come down. What goes out must come in.

Perhaps because of this instant connection to Pisces friends, we have also encountered some of the most striking differences in perspective, deep miscommunications, and sudden ruptures. What has been hard for my earthy Virgo to understand, at times, is that Pisces inspired folks tend to teach without teaching, to lead from behind, to influence by osmosis, in dreams, outside of linear space-time. Sometimes, in the moment, I’ve been too in-my-head to really get that. I’ve been there trying to problem solve and put puzzle pieces together, peeling back onion layers to try to find common ground. Years later, in a dream or an epiphany, I feel why were were so connected in the first place- that the puzzle was already complete, already perfect. And I was a part of it- floating on that ocean of wholeness the entire time.

The Tides of the World and Conscious Connected Breath

Growing up, my grandparents had a rustic cabin on the Oregon coast that I would visit often. As a desert child, I was obsessed with getting a chance to meet the sea. I would rush out and bodysurf in the freezing waves of the Pacific, letting them carry me and hold me and play with me - even on rainy, grey December visits. I distinctly remember my first feelings of being swept into the perfect rhythm of the tides - waves being sucked out to sea, then crashing back to shore, again and again. I loved the ocean beyond words- I sensed in it the primordial connection to our mothers, to being back in the dark safety of the womb, feeling held by the rhythm of the ebbs and flows we experienced in utero. Throughout my life, whenever I’ve found myself near the ocean, I sit breathe along with the tides, and feel held by my body’s connection to this planet earth, and to the universe beyond.

Breathing the tides on the coast of Oregon.

I’m currently training to become a breathwork facilitator (with the amazing folks at Integrative Breath). I’m in an intensive 7-month course, and in this process I’ve been hosting and participating in a ton of conscious connected breathwork sessions. They consist of about 45 minutes of rhythmic breathing in and out through the mouth, with no pause at the top or bottom of each breath. I’ve always been pretty terrible at sitting and meditating - my Virgo brain has a hard time quieting her “monkey mind”- but the moment I discovered conscious connected breathwork, I was hooked. Like I’ve heard for years about meditation, breathwork allows me to enter the present moment through a guided focus on my breath. This presence with myself helps me enter a place of integrated wholeness, a place where deep, tucked away emotions can be released from where they’re held in my body.

No two breathwork sessions are ever quite the same, but in a good breathwork session - one where I breathe deeply and consistently, pushing through my own edges of discomfort - I can truly feel the elusive mind-body connection. I feel the integration of the stories and thoughts in my mind with my body’s intuitive widsom so palpably, so tangibly, that it lights me up inside. I’ve never felt such a true sense of peace, equanimity, dissolution of negative thought patterns, and infinitely deep belonging to both myself and something much greater than myself. Turns out, breath is the best drug I had never tried.

The thing about breathwork, however, is that it truly is work. It’s a challenge, and requires discipline, to show up to a session and breathe continuously for almost an hour. A lot of emotions can surface, as well as physical sensations, that aren’t the most pleasant, and no one can step in to do the work for you except yourself. Despite knowing of breathwork’s great benefits, I don’t think I would have showed up consistently to do this work at an earlier stage of my life. As much as I love it, I don’t necessarily think that the practice is for everyone.

But one thing I do know is that this Piscean sensation of wholeness, of dissolving into the larger universe, is something I’ve always craved. I believe it’s something we all crave, and something many of us spend our lives searching for, amidst the chaos of our messy human experiences on the earthly realm.

Many Paths Lead to the Sea

A few days ago, in an altered dream-state brought on by a breathwork session, I was transported back to early childhood. I was 2 or 3 years old, and I could feel my tired head laying in my mom’s lap. As I rested, her hand gently stroked my temple and brushed my hair back toward the nape of my neck, the consistency of her touch lulling me to sleep. I could feel my breath merge with hers; soft inhales, soft exhales, our bodies rising and falling together in unison.

From this beautifully safe place, I went on a breath-induced journey throughout my entire life. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, I was taken on a trip to various moments in my past, able to watch them from the outside. While sometimes during breathwork sessions I revisit memories of past pain and trauma, this time my personal ghosts took me on a tour of the specific moments that I felt the safest and most connected to the world around me, and the most in my body.

From birth to the present moment, these are the places and activities where I’ve felt most held, unified and whole:

• Infancy- Being Rocked & Held. Feeling my mama’s chest rising in and out, heart pumping, unconsciously matching my breath to hers, her matching her breath to mine. Being rocked and swayed in her arms to match the sensation of being in the womb, our nervous systems co-regulating, our pulses slowing.

• Childhood- Focused Play & Creativity. The hand/eye and mind/body coordination that happens when coloring, drawing, painting, and independenly playing with toys creates a felt sense of safety and flow in my body. Forgetting where I am and who’s around me, I zone into the colors and textures of a crayon on a page. (Now, when I watch my daughter and other young children in this focused state of limitless creation, I notice that their breath is steady, rhythmic, and slow, almost like when they’re falling asleep.)

• Adolescence- Bodysurfing. Growing up in a landlocked region, we were lucky enough to have access to a waterpark with a big wave pool. It was there I could live out my childhood fantasies of merging with the ocean that I discovered on the Oregon Coast. I became addicted to the sensation of bodysurfing, tumbling and diving through the waves at The Beach Waterpark in Albuquerque as massive tubes surrounded my head, spending hours upon hours in that fake concrete ocean. I remember the novel sensation of phantom waves continuing to flow through my body as I walked out into the parking lot, and even now that feeling of being one with the ocean tides has never left my body.

• Teeenage Years - Snowboarding. I started snowboarding when I was 13, and it continues to be one of my great loves. As I got good at carving, finding a gravitational rhythmic flow in my body, I started to think of the sport as dancing with the mountain. I still bring a lot of play into riding, moving my arms and legs and core in a constant expansion and contraction, a constant jellyfish-like oscillation. Over time, it also felt so good to find this flow state bombing down the mountain along with other people, as we weave in and out of each other’s paths, drawing out DNA helixes onto the hillsides.

• College - Capoiera and Tai Qi. In my early 20s, I lived in both Brazil and China and studied martial arts. In Brazilian capoiera, every movement in the body is trained to be in balance. To excel in a capoiera circle, or roda, one must be able to move to the left side equally as fluidly as the right, the front side as fluidly as the back. There is a consistent back-and-forth quality to the movement, as well as an embodied playfulness that keeps you light on your feet. Similarly in tai qi, the dynamic principles of yin and yang are applied to cultivate energy, or qi, in the body. I found a qi gong master teacher in the town I lived, and studied with him on the bank of the Li River. We practiced silently, gazing at the ebb and flow of the hypnotically slow moving water, moving bodies and breath back and forth, in and out, at the same pace as the water meandering through the limestone mountains.

• Throughout my 20s- Dance. I never took dance classes when I was young, so when I started going to raves in high school and dance clubs in college I remember feeling self conscious, standing on the sidelines, thinking of myself as ‘not a dancer’. At 21, started dating a DJ and would go to reggae clubs every weekend in New Orleans where he spun records. After taking in the incredibly fluidic dancers at these parties, and getting bored of being solo on the side, I finally gave up my self-judgement. Once I joined in, I felt so welcomed by the community without using words- only movements, only flow. This sense of nonverbal conversation, being part of an energy that was larger than myself, blew my mind. When I moved to San Francisco, my best friend there was a dance teacher and choreographer. Going dancing with her and her pro dancer friends always meant pushing the limits of how everyone else around us was moving, having so much fun playing with space. I’m so grateful for the embodied confidence that being around some of these dancers gave me, and for the many nights where my body truly merged with the highs and lows of the rhythms and beats, again feeling that sense of wholeness.

• Late 20s- Hot and cold water. When I was 27, I was in a bad housefire in San Francisco, and my partner at the time and I almost lost our lives. He suffered a major injury to his median nerve, and had ongoing trouble with pain and mobility of his arm and fingers. Hot water therapy helped with both pain and increasing circulation for healing, so we started frequenting Harbin Hot Springs, an incredible natural spring in the mountains above Calistoga. Harbin has a 113 degree hot pool inside a dark, meditative, candlelit building. Right outside of it is a freezing cold plunge surrounded by fig trees. That place, at that difficult time of our lives, became like church. After going through many cycles of hot and cold immersion, I would lay on a cedar bench, feeling my warm blood pumping powerfully through my veins. Feeling my heartbeat in my chest and breathing with its constant rhythm led to the transcendental feeling of being held, feeling whole, within myself.

• Early 30s- Yoga. I had taken yoga classes intermittently since my late teens, but something about the American subculture of spiritualized fitness yoga never quite aligned for me. I think it mostly had to do with a feeling of self consciousness in a room full of beautiful bodies that all seemed to know how to ‘do it right’. I kept going for my own exercise, but never really dropped in or felt connected to it in the deep, unified way that I heard people talk about. In 2016, I spontaneously attended a retreat at Esalen hosted by Mark Whitwell, a yogi who had studied in India in the 70’s with Krishnamacharya - a humble guru who is often called the "Father of Modern Yoga". Mark taught ha-tha Yoga, which against common understanding means ALL physical forms of Yoga practice, not a specific "style". Hatha means the merging of sun and moon, male and female, prana and apana (two energies), and is a purifying and remedial practice where breath and body movement are one. Through this weeklong retreat, I developed personal yoga practice that was simply based on moving my body to enhance natural inhales and exhales, finding flow in my breaths in order to feel union with myself.

• Mid 30s- Giving Birth. No matter how many birth classes one takes or books one reads, there’s really no way of preparing for the process of labor and the beautiful unfolding of bringing a human into this world. When I was pregnant, I deepened into my one-breath/one-movement yoga practice, getting an intuitive hit that the contractions of giving birth would have to be ridden like a wave, so I would need to deepen my practice of surfing. I also read somewhere about parts of the body’s natural way of mimicing eachother. So before going into labor, I darkened a room with blackout curtains so my pupils would be dilated, and created a playlist of Om sounds to chant along with so that my throat would be open. During labor, my doula, my partner and I all sang om’s for hours and hours in a pitch black cave of a room. I felt the way this openness in other parts of my body helped open me for giving birth. Oms require deep inhales to match the tonal exhale, and after so many hours of inhales and exhales, my labor experience felt pretty psychadelic! As my contractions increased in duration and pain, I found a position on my knees where, as soon as one contraction was over, I could drop face down into a pillow, and pass out for a restorative 5 minute nap before the next wave of pain rose up in my body. The more I could relax into the polarity of stillness before each contraction, the more productive a cycle of opening would be, and the closer I would be to birth, which for me brought the ultimate feeling of connection with the ocean of the universe.

• Late 30s- Breathwork & Voice. When my daughter was a few months old, I met another mama named Sophie who was starting a vocal training company called Voice Alchemy. I started working with her around the same time I stumbled upon my first conscious connected breathwork session. Both practices came at a time in life where I would benefit from them more than I could know. Sophie led me through one-on-one sessions where we would sing vibrational tones to the chakras of the body, make a chorus of animal sounds, aurally massage out harmonic scales, and get loose with freestyle call-and-response songs. Learning to have control over my voice and dropping inhibitions surrounding using it helped me breathe so much better, learning to sing out with more power by taking deeper inhales. In practicing both voice and breathwork, deep emotions started bubbling up from below the surface, thanks to consciously activating the breath and body. Both practices were slow enough, and in a safe enough space, to welcome the wild cries and laughs that needed to emerge from deep within me- oftentimes one right after another, cracking up right after breaking down in tears.(If you haven’t sang loudly while deeply sobbing in front of another person before, I highly recommend it for cathartic integration!) Feeling these seemingly polarized emotions emerge side-by-side felt like the cord between the two Pisces fish, as they welcomed all feeling and dissolved the mental stories around painful experiences into the primordial sea.

• Now- Holding, being held & surrendering to the sea. “Mama, hold me!” says my 4 year old at least 10 times a day. She’s getting heavy, but I pick her up and hold her tight. With her in my arms, I feel whole. I stroke her hair, her temple, and we breathe together. After all these experiences of learning to feel held by my own self -centered within the gravity of my bodies’ physical ebbs and flows in the waves and on the mountains and on the dance floor- I’ve recently started to allow myself to be held again, too. I feel lucky to have a deeply compassionate and loving partner who I am not afraid to surrender to, to be vulnerable with, to deeply relax into. Love itself is feeling held, going all the way back to the womb, and to the sea.

After waking up from this breathwork journey through time, it felt so clear to me that feeling held, and feeling whole, is a matter of leaning into the polarities of life, submitting to the everlasting pendulum between opposites. Just as the moon does in her orbit around the earth, creating the tides, and just as the earth does in her orbit around the sun, creating the seasons. Just as we do when we breathe, in and out.

The Discipline of Somatic Awareness

My dream for this Astrosomatics project (and beyond) is to continue helping myself and others discover ways to resource ourselves, to integrate our polarities and find our personal oceans of wholeness amidst the external tumultuousness of life. I believe there are many ways to do this, many ways to discover the integrative processes that are already happening within us. I hope to share many of these practices with you in the upcoming months.

Somatics is defined as a practice of percieving and understanding our bodies from within. I would include each of the practices I listed above as types of that embodied perception. In order to be truly in flow with any of these, I had to be consistently breathing, naturally opening up and contracting my body with rhythmic inhales and exhales. In this subconscious tour of my past, I was reminded in my body of the moments where, without even trying, I was floating on an ocean of wholeness. The moments where life was breathing me.

Some of these experiences, like submerging in a freezing cold plunge, are things that take your breath away - that force you to take a deep inhale to meet an intense sensation. Then, realizing that the pain can be transmuted to pleasure by sticking with it, you exhale softly, and deepen into a new cycle of deeper breaths. The only discipline that is required is submitting to the feelings of life as they arise, and ebbing and flowing through them as they change.

I saw an Instagram post about this the other day that stuck with me:

The word “Discipline” comes from “disciple”, which asks the question:

“What are you devoted to?”

And if you’re devoted to things that really reflect your soul, discipline is simply a chance to paint your essence on the canvas of life every day.

- (@jennazoe)

As we seep into the waters of Pisces season over the next month, I invite you to look at your life as if it were a perfect whole, made up by the dynamic union of opposing parts. Take a moment recognize the times in your life where you have experienced this fishlike polarity in motion, where you are alternately expanding and contracting, allowing a larger pool to form.

Pay attention to the activities and movements in your body that you find flow in, where your mind and body feel momentarily united, where you feel connected to and held by yourself. It might be as simple as giving yourself a hug, jogging to catch the bus, pushing your kid on a swing set, or stopping to look up at the clouds and then down at your muddy shoes. Whatever it is, feel the push and pull, the highs and lows, and notice how the feeling serves you. Notice how you can paint your essence on the canvas of these moments. Breathe in, and breathe out.

The chrysalis cannot stay a bag of imaginal goo forever. So enjoy the (sometimes confusing) sensation of floating on the eternal ocean, for now, and remove limits on your imagination to what body will emerge next month. Spring will be here soon, and the harvest not long after that.

xoxo

AMD