Hey #080: Beach, sea waves, and me…

Sea waves gave me the second biggest realization about emotions

In 2022, I visited Mumbai.

It was my first time there.

Also, it was my first time near the sea and on the beach.

On one of the beaches, my brother clicked me looking at the glimmering sea.

I remember my emotional state at the time I was standing on this beach.

I was feeling anger, disappointment and grief. I remember because this emotional state led to some ugly confrontations and beautiful realizations in the coming days.

Anyways, I was looking at the sea and the waves touching the beach.

There were people walking on the beach. So their footprints were all over the sand.

The footprints stayed as long as the sea waves stayed in the sea.

But sea waves are meant to rise and crash. So they followed their nature.

They came running towards the beach, taking away footprints along with them.

It was surreal to watch.

I recalled that one can experience calm by syncing their emotional state with a water body.

So that's what I did.

Mainly because, my emotional state was creating chaos within and had started spilling in the outside world.

I wanted to feel calm.

Hence, I focused on the waves.

Gradually, I synced my emotional state with the sea — its waves, its depth, its entirety.

I felt the crashing of waves as my inner conflict. I felt the vastness of the sea as my limitlessness. I felt the moving stillness of the water as the living paradox that I'm.

I felt it all.

And it gave me the second biggest realization about emotions:

(The first realization happened in 2020 — Emotions are waves. They come and go. It's their nature. Our emotional intelligence is determined by how well we surf on those waves.)

This brand new realization blew my mind.

I discovered that my anger, hurt and grief were working for me, not against me.

Those emotions weren't only asking me to feel them. But they were also asking me to let them wash away my attachment with the painful memories. The memories which were fueling my pain and suffering.

There was so much in these memories that was giving me an illusion of truth, making me weave more and more stories which weren't a reality.

They were making me relive my past in the present.

While reliving them gave some clarity, my strong attachment with them made the whole process less helpful, and more detrimental.

It's when emotions came like crashing waves.

I was under the impression that I've to just surf over these waves by feeling them.

But the new realization told me to do more.

To not just feel. But also to let emotions dissolve the attachment that wasn't serving me.

Why am I writing about this now?

Because a similar experience happened a month back.

This time my attachment was with certain wishes and expectations.

The more uncertainty ruined my desires, the more attached I got with my desires. The more I held onto, the more intense the grief got.

This intensity was overwhelming. So I started avoiding my grief and kept holding onto coulda woulda shoulda.

But then the one year old realization struck:

I needed to stop resisting.

So I stepped back and let the wave of grief do its job — take away the footprints of attachment.

The process is still going on. And I’m mindful of it.

The truth is:

Just like a literal beach, my metaphorical beach will keep getting crowded with footprints. For it's the nature of a beach.

And just like literal sea waves, my metaphorical sea waves will keep washing away the footprints from the beach. For it's the nature of sea waves.

All I can do is look at the glimmering sea, the beach, the footprints, the waves.

…and let them do their job without building the walls of resistance.

🦋

I'll see you next Thursday,

Ashi

(this is me on LinkedIn)