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Guided Meditation: Water Element

Good morning, friends. Welcome once again. This morning we're going to continue with this exploration of the elements. Yesterday we started with the earth element, and today I want to continue with the water element.

I have a sort of transitional quote for us from a Native American elder who was at Standing Rock. Unfortunately, I don't know their name, but this is what they said: "In the beginning there was first stone, then there was water. When the two came together they created a sacred sound. That sound is the life energy."

I spoke about earth yesterday, this being made up of the mineral, of the dust, of the substance of the earth. But clearly, if we were just earth, we would just be piles of dust, piles of dirt. Nothing much could happen with that. It's the water—it's like, you know, you take dirt and you add water, and now you've got something malleable, something that can hold together, that has cohesion, that has a fluidity and potential to it. It is no longer brittle. And this is us. We're this mix of the elements, and profoundly so the earth and the water.

When we work with the elements, as I spoke about some yesterday, we're using them to break down this story of separation and isolation, this story of "I, me, and mine." We do that working with the elements in a number of ways, and I just wanted to name those before we move into the guided meditation.

Part of what we're doing is changing the conceptual story that we carry around. We are all living by stories. We have stories that we tell ourselves and we tell each other in our minds, and many of these stories are centered around "I, me, and mine." As we practice with the elements, we are inviting a change in this conceptual story.

We're also, when we work with the elements, bypassing the story altogether at times. We're feeling this directly through the other sense gates besides the thinking one. We're feeling into the body and sensing the element of earth, and today the element of water, as we feel it and know it through our sensory perception. I've added in sound today because I have a little waterfall behind me, so we can feel the water element in us directly. This is part of what we do when we are practicing with the water element.

Then we also play with the element metaphorically or poetically, sort of bridging this gap from the story into the body, into the experience of it. So you'll hear in the guided meditations of the elements that we go back and forth. At times we do touch into the conceptual, trying to change the story that we're carrying, and then at other times we're just feeling directly in the body, and sometimes just sparking a different way of seeing and knowing.

I wanted to start with the poetic. This is a poem from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer called The Great Beyond, and once again, the invitation is to see beyond the self.

The way water knows itself not only as river and lake, but also as fern, as cloud, as cat. Forgive me for believing I end with this skin, these ideas, these imaginings. Sometimes I forget to choose vastness, forget to know the self as cliff, as macaque [?]^[1], as crumb. How is it I so often miss the invitation? How is it I overlook that I am lemon, asteroid, wren?

So let's do a little remembering. Go ahead and find your meditation posture.

Settle in. Feel your contact with the ground. Sense through the body, relaxing, opening. Letting your eyes close if you're comfortable with that.

As you relax, you might just start to notice that there are places where there might be a kind of rigidity or a frozenness. And as you relax them, there's a softening. In that relaxing, you're connecting with the water in that part of the body, allowing it to come into its more fluid nature, not holding it or freezing it in place, but instead opening it.

Feel your legs in contact with the ground. Notice how they are affected by both the pull of gravity and what they have contact with, the way that they're formed. Pooling, soft. You can start to sense the water, the wateriness inside your body. Letting the water drop towards the ground.

Feel this play of the earth element and the water as you feel the area of the hips and the lower belly. Letting the lower belly soften, you might notice its viscous, malleable nature softening towards the earth.

You can feel the earth element in your spine and in the uprightness, and then letting the softness of the belly, of the shoulders, pulling down, this internal lubrication dropping down towards the ground. And yet it stays cohesive. Nothing's going to turn into just a puddle. Held together, and yet soft.

Notice that the movement of breath in your chest and in your belly is made possible by this flexible and yet cohesive combination of water with the earth. As you breathe, the water element allows the expanding of breath.

Coming up into the area of the mouth and throat, and here you can feel the water element directly. You get a little taste, quite literally, of the inside of your body, of this wateriness that is all through us.

Coming up to your eyes, even if your eyes are closed, you can notice that your eyes have very slight movements as your eyeballs rest in their bath of water. And you might even notice, in spite of the hardness of our skull, this felt rigidity, that inside you might even sense that your brain is resting. Letting it soften and rest in its fluid bath.

Letting yourself feel this fluidity in the body. Perhaps you can sense in places the pulse of the blood moving through your veins, our internal irrigation system. All this wateriness here in us, coming from the water you have drunk, coming with the juiciness of fruit that you've eaten. This water, with the heat, rises into the sky, travels through the sky in clouds, rains down, flows in streams underground, and somewhere comes to the surface and comes to you.

And as you drink it, you're just a temporary location of this water. It's passing through you. We're like a little eddy in this flow of the river of water. It whirls in this corner, and then it flows back out. Evaporation through our skin, through our breath, through our pee. You too are part of the hydrological cycle. The water is simply coming in for a time, passing back out.

You might just let yourself feel—hopefully you have some idea where your water comes from—and let yourself sense that water falling down through some reservoir, flowing through you, back out again. This endless sharing of the water. It's so easy when it comes in to think that it's "me," "I," "mine," but it's simply water passing through. No inside, no outside. Just water.

When we, as fish, first decided to walk on land, we brought the ocean with us inside. The saltiness of our blood is the saltiness of the ocean. We carry the ocean with us, and we rejuvenate it and refresh it with each glass of water we drink. We, like every other creature, are water creatures.

Let yourself feel in the little micro-movements, even as you sit still, the little micro-movements of the body, of the breath. You can feel the fluidity. Notice if any part of your body becomes rigid, holding, if there's some contradiction in that to our natural fluid state, and then it softens again in its true nature of water, of softness, cohesive and yet fluid.

Simply water flowing through. No inside, no outside. Not yours. Feeling the softness, the cohesive yet fluid nature of the body. Notice the little micro-movements, the movement of the ribs in the breath, and the belly. Feel your own wateriness. You share this wateriness with all the other living beings, with the rivers and the oceans.

Let yourself also feel this blessing of the water, this aliveness that it carries. Every cell in your body touched by water. Nourished, allowed to move and change. Allowing it to do its work. The pliability of your skin, the lubrication in your joints. All the blessings of water.

Feel the softness, the fluidity of the body, as it continues to soften the micro-movements, the breath.

Nature as Teacher: Water Element

The water element—we're made up of 60 to 90 percent water apparently, depending on your age. When we're younger, we have more water in us, we're juicier. And as we get older, we're more earth, we're more ground. But we're still more than half water.

Hopefully in that meditation, you were starting to feel that beautiful combination that the water element offers us. This cohesion of holding the earthiness in us together, and yet it does it in this completely pliable, flexible way. Water is such a magical thing, the way it takes the shape of everything that it touches. In a river, it takes the shape of the river. In a cup, it takes the shape of the cup. In our bodies, it takes the shape of our bodies.

I read you part of a quote yesterday about the earth element, and I want to read you what the Buddha says about the water element. He talks about the elements very similarly, but here's what he says about the water element, and I want you to notice in particular where he talks about internal and clinging. Notice that, as well as his list of what the water element is. He's again speaking to his son, Rahula^[2].

"What, Rahula, is the water element? The water element may be either internal or external. What is the internal water element? Whatever internally, belonging to oneself, is water, watery, and clung to; that is, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, spittle, snot, oil of the joints, urine, or whatever else internally, belonging to oneself, is water, watery, and clung to. This is called the internal water element. Now, both the internal water element and the external water element are simply water element. And that should be seen as it actually is with proper wisdom thus: 'This is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself.' When one sees it thus as it actually is with proper wisdom, one becomes disenchanted with the water element and makes the mind dispassionate towards the water element."

He's speaking here very clearly how we name it internal when we cling to it. When we're not clinging to it, it's neither internal nor external; it's simply water flowing through. And we can feel this identity, this "me." Isn't it amazing that we have so much ownership and so much idea about this sack of water that is right here? More than half water, but somehow this water is "mine," is "me," but not the other water. Clinging. It's like we freeze. It's like we make the water, instead of its natural fluid state, we freeze it in place. And we can feel this in our concepts, in our way of moving and acting in the world. When we're frozen, when we are rigid, cut off, very much like frozen water. Clinging to who we are and what we've done, our roles, our identities, our stories.

It's so easy to see in a river. If we look at a river and we give it a name—nearby here is the Colorado River—and we give the Colorado River this name, it's not hard to notice that the name "Colorado River" is a concept that I have. But the water in it, and how it is, if you live near a river or you've been in it, you see that it changes. Not just the water in it, but the banks, the sediment, the color, the volume, it's all constantly changing. It's so easy to see that our name for it, the Colorado River, is just a concept that we overlay on this constant, oscillating, changing thing.

And we're like that. I'm a river named Susie, and you are a river with your own name. Constantly changing, everything flowing through. And when we freeze ourselves or freeze other people into some limited view as if we were static—the Buddha so clearly pointed out that it's believing in that static nature that causes our suffering.

So can we recognize our own fluidity, our transparency that's coming through us? Feel this water, this sacred water flowing through us, this giver of life. We are vessels of sacred water, part of the cycle, moving around, impermanent. Let yourself just shift your posture a little bit. Just sort of move a little bit and feel the fluidity in your joints. Feel how you're just kind of like a pool, a little stream that's moving a little. Let yourself sense your body, this sacred water we carry.

It's so lovely to think that human beings, our whole time, and animals too, organized right where we lived based on water. We lived by water. We lived where there were streams, where there was water to drink, water to move on. Not long ago, last winter, I was down in Phoenix, and there were these houses that had been built that apparently the people who built them knew there was no water. They couldn't dig wells, there was no city water available, and so the water has to get trucked to their house and put into a holding tank. I could feel in myself a kind of dis-ease in that. Like there's a way we're supposed to be connected into the cycle, and now those people have to have their connection into the hydrological cycle go through a truck and drive down the highway. There's something that when we feel in our bodies, and feel the clouds and the water flow through, the sacredness of water... Robin Wall Kimmerer, in a book you may be familiar with, Braiding Sweetgrass, talks about the error of buying bottled water. Like we've interrupted its cycle and we're not letting the whole thing come through, turning it into a commodity, this most sacred of elements. They're all sacred, but this sacred element.

This element of water gives us the opportunity to feel how powerful water is and how pliable water is. There's a beautiful story from Ajahn Chah^[3] where he asks a group of people, you may know the story, he says, "Have you ever seen moving water?" Everyone's like, "Yeah, I've seen moving water." And he says, "Have you ever seen still water?" "Yeah, we've all seen a pool of water." And he says, "Have you ever seen still flowing water?"

How can we in our practice be this moving, flexible, pliable water element, and yet there's a stillness, like a still pool, letting the mud and silt settle out to the bottom? Pure water has a clarity to it. Letting yourself feel the simplicity and clarity of water as it enters and flows through you. We like the world we live in is full of disruptions of water, floods and droughts. We've become very aware of the disturbance of water, and yet when it sits, it stills, it calms.

One last aspect of water that I just want to drop in is water as like the juiciness of aliveness, the juiciness of mettā^[4], really. That is what we share. We often say, "Oh my, you know, that's a juicy person," or "I need more juice in my practice." We're feeling this nourishing, abundant quality of the water. The way when you water a plant, you're giving it love, you're giving it appreciation, and it has the opportunity to grow.

I'll end today with a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke:

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing it and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, returning, I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels into the open sea.

So may you be a widening channel. Or, as Rosemerry said at the beginning, a wren, an asteroid, or a lemon. Feel your wateriness.

I encourage you today, as I suggested yesterday exploring your earthiness, as you go through this day, feel very much in your own body, in your joints as you move around, that you are water. You're part of the cycle of water in its juiciness moving through the day. Enjoy that. Let the drink of water, when you drink it in, feel the streams, the ocean come into you.

I wanted to let you know today we're going to end at the regular time, and tomorrow and the next three days I'll end at the regular time like this. And then we'll also continue for those who can for 15 minutes with questions if people would like to bring those. So we'll still end at quarter till and then have the option of continuing for those who would like.

So may you have a juicy, watery-filled day. Be well.