I now know why surfers love this place. The waves break far out into the deep. Multiple lines of waves rolling in for what seems like miles, you could get the longest ride of your life here. There is much to process from surf camp last week at San O, but one morning will stay emblazoned on my memory until my dying day.
That Wednesday, the dolphins showed up. Right there with us. Waves were over our heads, four to five feet high with an occasional six at least. After making it through a gauntlet of a set to get outside, we were in no hurry to catch a wave back in. Sitting outside, we were richly rewarded for our turtle rolls. A huge pod of dolphins swam around and among us, right next to us. We knew a big wave was coming when they gathered in a certain spot. We all gasped when they began leaping out of the back of the wave as it passed -- one, two, three to the north, then two more to the south. They seemed to be playing and happy to be there just like we were. The dolphins regarded us like we regarded them -- interesting wildlife. I wept. Sitting on my board gently rocking in the waves, swept away in awe, I thought, "I never thought I'd be living a life like this one." Such adventure. It was magical. Looking back at the beach so far away, the mist covering the tops of the mountains in the distance, the roar of the waves crashing, I was laughing and grinning while my salty tears were swallowed by the ocean.
Then, still out past the break -- far further out than we have ever been before -- I'm swooning in the mood: the misty gloom of June giving the whole experience an otherworldly feel on a desolate stretch of beach, no one else around but our little group. So peaceful sitting way out there, gently rocking, when suddenly, an enormous wave started building behind us. I heard a touch of alarm from our expert surf guides as they shouted, "Alright everyone, paddle out! Paddle out!" I turned to look at the biggest wave I have ever witnessed from a surfboard just to our south. My heart leapt -- not exactly in fear but in awe. We all dropped down and paddled to get beyond it -- no worries, plenty of time, we were well on the shoulder. Deliberate and focused, not panicking. The sun broke through the gloom for just a moment, glistening on this perfectly peaked building wave. Lying belly down on my board, paddling steadily, I looked around at everyone else moving swiftly even further out to sea, and I felt part of something much deeper than myself. It was all motion, choreographed in unison. The waves building and moving toward shore. The wind rippling the surface. Our surfboards cutting a path over the rising wave. The dolphins moving beneath us. We were all one: the surfers unified in our goal to ride such a wave, the nearby dolphins enjoying those waves themselves, the ocean giving us the challenge of our lives. I felt the energy of this wilderness flow through me.
Joseph Campbell said of this type of experience, “The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you feel that this has told you something; something has come through in your experience of your relationship to the harmony of being.” When processing the week with BTG, he reminded me of Maslow's peak experiences and how they can be life changing. Maslow wrote, "The peak experience. The mystic experience. The oceanic feeling. Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision. The feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and more helpless than one ever was before. The feeling of great ecstasy, wonder, and awe. A loss of placing in time and space. The conviction that something extremely important and valuable has just happened." Peak experiences. I was so happy to have words to describe this day. Awe, wonder, and ecstasy; a feeling of oneness with all things; a part of something much larger than myself. Transcendence. Elation. It was profoundly moving.
The other peak experience from the week was all of the moments I spent under water, getting deeper, to the still place below the waves described in my previous post. I wrote, "Under water, under a passing wave, there is this line: above the line, the wave action will take you into the spin cycle, but below the line, the water is largely undisturbed. I got to know this line really well.... I got to feel how it felt to get caught in the churn, swept back toward shore, feet tumbled around my head in a somersault, held under by the power of the ocean a bit longer than comfortable, and how it felt to get just a little lower below that point to where it is calm. It is really comforting to know that if I can just get a little deeper, all will be well. Things are calmer the deeper you go." I loved being down there. I love that I feel like I have a secret that I share with only a few other people who regularly go deep. And I love knowing -- a deep inner knowing -- that once I fully understand her secrets, the water will never hurt me. I have absolute confidence in my kinship with the ocean.
Going deep helped with the other peak experiences I had last week in the evenings after camp. Getting over the peaks of my emotional waves was also transformational. I began to learn to ride my emotional waves as well as the watery ones thanks to the guidance from both BTG and the meditation teacher training program. MMTCP guidance has talked about asking ourselves two questions whenever we meditate with this particular purpose: first, what am I noticing; and two, can I stay with it? Can I be with whatever is happening inside of me? BTG has discussed affect tolerance: extending my ability to stay with my emotions instead of bailing right away when things get uncomfortable. MMTCP has discussed the Window of Tolerance of our emotions and to keep an eye on that when we are meditating or leading meditations ourselves -- make sure people know that when they get outside of their window of tolerance, they can stop meditating. It's very important for everyone, but especially those who have experienced trauma (and who hasn't?), to have a means of escape and permission to stop. When you're within your window, you feel like you can handle what is happening. Thanks to BTG's guided meditations, I felt as supported in the evenings with my emotional waves as I did during the day with the surf instructors in the ocean waves, but I was definitely pushing the edges.
Every evening, I climbed into that jetted tub in my hotel room and listened to the guided meditations. I remembered things I haven't thought about in years. I cried a lot. I sobbed until I was done. Rode the whole wave. I acknowledged those experiences. Validated my anger, sadness, and fear around them. Sent myself compassion, apologies, and forgiveness, and exhaled in order to relax the tense places. One after another, memories rose and I acknowledged them. It was an ordeal. I have far to go, but I feel very different having survived that challenge as well. I am so calm this week. I feel like I have the time to do anything I want. Never one of my virtues, patience seems to have arrived on the scene. I am noticing more, observing, rather than reacting. I can breathe again. I took a walk to a meeting across campus the other day and was enamored with the purples in the flowers and the different needles on the pine trees -- I am a gardener and nature-lover, so this behavior is pretty common with me -- but everything was so much more vivid, more deeply felt. I could just be exhausted! And I did take several blows to the head! :) But I think there has been an internal shift. I need to take more time to have it all sink in.
Maybe magic does happen when you allow yourself to ride over the peak intensity of your emotions to the other side? I'm learning the benefits of sticking with something, not leaving right away. I actually bailed on BTG late last year when my initial reason for getting back into therapy was satisfied, but then went back. I'm so happy I did. I'm finding the real benefits of sticking with something until after the intensity passes. I'm looking at things differently, moving differently in the world. Self-compassion is key to surviving and dealing with trauma. So, compassion rather than judgement. Freedom rather than people pleasing. Boundaries rather than caretaking and codependence. Greater clarity comes in the calm waters below the chaos. Just have to get deeper, sink into my body. As BTG said, "Get heavier." Allow gravity to work. Just like getting over that rising wave, I find I have plenty of time. No need for urgency. No worries.
I worked through a great deal of my self-blame for things past. The amount of self-blame I continue to carry is definitely diminished. First, I remembered events that happened when I was very young. The first time I remember getting assaulted, I was 14. No way that was my fault. I think of how young a fourteen year old girl looks to me now and I am heartbroken by this memory of myself. So I was able to realize that because these things happened to me so young and continued to happen so often, it just became normal. Awful, boundary-violating behavior from men and boys became normal. No wonder I carried these really fucked up beliefs into adulthood -- I never processed these incidents. I think this week of fully feeling my emotions and working with them has moved the stone of grief that sits on my chest. It's still there, but it's manageable. I can sit with it now. I caught my breath. All thanks to working with a good therapist to develop these abilities over time in a safe psychological space.
I also became aware of another shark attack during the week to our south in Del Mar. It made me compare these ocean predators to the predators in my land life. Would I blame myself if I got bitten by a shark? No. Would I blame the shark? No. I would think that we were just swimming in the same waters and interacted, behaving normally for ourselves at the time in those circumstances. So why would I blame myself or my human predators? I can let go of a great amount of blame on all sides. I didn't get rid of all of the self-blame, but BTG said wrestling with self-blame is different from believing in my self-blame, so I can work with what's left -- think about what I did to contribute to the mess, what I can learn from it, and then attempt to forgive it. Because all of this talk about forgiveness is not about the predators in my past, but about me. I need to forgive me.
In the book I continue to read, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account by Matthew Ichihashi Potts, he quotes Hannah Arendt on forgiveness. She wrote, "Whatever the past has been or the future may bring, we can begin, and begin again. This is our freedom, not to be entirely unconditioned, but to initiate a new possibility into the conditions and contingencies out of which we have arisen." Potts writes, "...this newness accepts the risks of the future without pretending to have broken with the past." Again, I am reminded that no matter how often I baptize myself in saltwater, my past is coming with me. I will never be fully cleansed.
Potts again, "The only real freedom is to begin again in the midst of our inescapable consequences, and to risk a new set of unpredictable and irreversible outcomes." I am never free from other humans -- to go forth alone, abandoning all community to ensure a sense of safety is not only not possible, but not something I actually want. I love the idea of forgiveness as the only true freedom; that I can begin again in the same world with the same risks, but a different me. One who doesn't deny my past, but who welcomes my past and its lessons to accompany me on the journey situated within and alongside a new set of people.
This last year in California has been a massive new beginning and I'm highly optimistic about the future, because of the community I've found in the ocean. Walking around back on land this week, I missed my surf sisters. Even though the conditions at camp were well beyond anything we had taken on before -- indeed, had we shown up to that beach on our own, we would have turned around immediately and headed to a coffee shop -- we did it. We were in that water every day, learning how to handle that surf to varying degrees and growing our understanding of the ocean. I am so grateful to my fellow campers for being so brave while still knowing our limits. We walk this beautiful line between pushing each other to try new things, learn, and improve, and absolutely accepting each other's limitations and fears. We supported each other, cheered each other on, and helped each other out of the water after a rough go. Our relationships deepened this week.
I am also immeasurably grateful for the surf instructors: so graceful on the water and on the beach, they were excellent teachers, supportive and encouraging. So professional. For the first time, we were pushed out to get past the break, instead of only being pushed into waves. The breaking waves were so strong that we all needed help to get out at one point or another, so they rode behind us and gave us a push when we needed it. I will always remember Surf Sensei Paige's stick-drawn diagrams in the sand, making visible the lessons she was teaching us. And Ethan's delight when paddling right up to a smaller group of dolphins swimming past us out in the sea, then exclaiming, "If you put your ear under the water when they are close, you can hear their sounds!" Their joy and support helped me feel very safe in an environment that was not safe at all. I am grateful for similar support from BTG and my meditation sangha -- both give me a push when I need it and keep me feeling like I can handle a world that is not at all safe.
We learned so much in such a short amount of time this week, and the camp atmosphere was wonderful support for that learning. Our extended camp family was wonderful too! Hours-long conversations among us campers about how we handled that big one that just tried to kill us, wetsuit difficulties, cool surf spots, and different boards. One of my favorite memories is sitting next to Sherri and watching how one of the instructors paddled out. We were watching his moves like we were football players studying film. I love being with people who want to seriously learn this very fun sport. This is another line we walk very well: we are having tons of fun and we think the challenge is fun. Feeling so supported and joyful with people sharing a common purpose all week was amazing.
I never imagined living a life like this. Adventure and community. Love and challenge. Such joy and laughter and respect and support. After we got home, the Surfing Sisterhood group chat blew up. We all wrote about working on our pop-ups, holding our breath longer, building our strength, and increasing our commitment to going out more in the next few months. We're going to a pop up clinic in Dana Point this weekend after surfing at Doheny. We're starting a podcast and a blog, so others can learn from our mistakes and our joy can spread into the wider world. We're a little obsessed -- how wonderful to have friends who want to get stronger and healthier in this way with me -- to have people match my energy and excitement about something real and true. As we head into our second year as a group, we are building up and branching out, spending more time together, growing and strengthening our bond. I'm in awe. It's wonderful and amazing. I have a feeling of oneness with all of them; a part of something much larger than myself. Transcendence. Elation. It is profoundly moving.
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