Water and the Kinetic Spirit

Soul in Motion Practice this week

In the most recent Wednesday Soul in Motion practice, we didn’t just move with water. We became it. I watched as participants softened at the edges, inviting in flowing movements, letting themselves be moved by music and the water in our bodies. Water became more than symbol and became a movement practice. Some of us let tears flow, not from sadness but from some subterranean movement. Water helped us all access calm in our systems in ways other practices don’t because symbols carry healing potential and are like living bodies inside us when they are meaningful.

I offered an image of the lymphatic system as an underground river, human aquariums, a tide we rarely feel unless we get very quiet. We traced that river through our own bodies with slow spiralling movement, allowing the water in us to speak in gestures rather than words. We immersed our hands in water and then we drew from the feelings water invoked in both our material and spiritual bodies.

What moved me most was not the precision of form, but the tenderness in the letting flow happen inside us, our tissues, our spirits and our hearts. Others swayed, finding currents in their spine. We invited the movement of water into stuck or blocked areas in our bodies. But I felt the spell of it, like something magical had been touched.

This is what happens when water becomes a teacher. We stop pushing. We start listening.

We begin to understand that our resistance isn’t failure. It’s intelligence. A survival logic shaped by floods that came too fast. By griefs we weren’t ready to feel. Water shows us that flow isn’t passive. It’s the courage to follow sensation toward the source.

And in that sacred, slow movement, we begin to trust that we can find moments to flow again with the current of life, the inner wellspring of our life force: that healing isn’t a breakthrough but also an allowing. A dissolving of the hard edges.

A return to what already flows inside us if we learn to allow it.