Meditating on the Ocean
How nature teaches us
In the Plum Village Zen tradition we use nature to understand our deeper truths about the nature of reality, and one of my favourites is the ocean.
I am also a year round swimmer so I relate strongly to the waves and ocean. I can lose my sense of self when swimming in the coldest water I can stand, down to sometimes around 4–6 C.
The teachings are about impermanence, non-self, interconnectedness, interbeing. A wave is a wave, but not for all the time, just briefly. But the wave is always part of the ocean, and the water in the wave does not begin or end. In its form as H2O molecules, it continues and may transform into clouds or rain or rivers etc. It encourages you to think of yourself in a similar way. All the molecules in your body once existed in something else, as the food substances you ate yesterday as a tree, a plant, an animal etc.
No single molecule of water will exist for very long alone. It continues as part of the entire water, sea, river, rain, cloud etc. It exists continuously in so many different forms. So humans are only humans for part of our existence. We are also trees and plants and rocks and metals, and these component parts make up our bodies, all the time shedding and recycling cells and molecules, developing new ones, growing and repairing the structures of our…
