The Ebb Tides:

During a sailing trip I took with friends through a portion of the Inside Passage a few years ago, we had to prepare for a couple locations of rapids. Rapids are fun, and, they can be very dangerous, tearing a boat apart if you don’t time it right with the flood tides or correct route. 

The captains, my friends, prepared our timing, calculating from the tide tables. I was excited. It was fun moving through the rapids, passing by the whirlpools, the rocks and shallow areas, feeling the tumultuous water under our 50-foot sailboat and moving right through it.
 
The flood tides usually get the credit in our vernacular. They carry us over the bar, the rapids, and life’s potential treacheries or stagnations in time with the flows, while navigating our vessel of consciousness and body.
 
But let’s take a look at the ebb tides. During an ebb, water moves away from the shore leaving behind the shells for gathering, driftwood for fires, warm tidepools for splashing, rocks for climbing, starfish, urchins and crabs.
 
Flood tides bring in the resources, they are forward ho, all hands on deck, and focus. Ebbs give us the opportunity to wander the shore that was invisible in the flood tide, to ponder, to harvest, to expand our focus. Neither are stagnant. Both are moving.
 
The ebbs are not a, “now I have it now I don’t.” Like the tides, ebbs are movement for all creatures. They give us opportunity to prepare for change, to determine our course through the flood, to gather what the flood tides brought in, because the next flood tide will come in.
 
Endings are beginnings. Ebbs and Floods are part of the same tide. The same ocean. The same river. An empty nester is in the ebb of child rearing, marriage the ebb of singlehood, wealth an ebb of scarcity, a retiree is in the ebb of a career, a junior higher graduating is in the ebb of adolescence, disease an ebb of who you used to be, healing the ebb of a phase of transformation.
 
Each of these examples, or any moment in your life, is a perfect time to query the quantum Field, the Universe, Source energy, about your next step, the next move, the shape your business, relationship, income, health, world or other intention is to take next, the shape you want to give it. 
 
Trust in the flood tide because it is always there. The difference when we’re talking about it as consciousness instead of water, is that the way you think and feel consciously and subconsciously, and what you’re surrounded by, changes when, how and how much flood tide you experience. Whereas, the tides of the bodies of water simply are.
 
Try this. Whatever it is you envision next for your life: publishing a book, a Greek Island tour, meeting your soul mate, an audacious income or networth goal, perfect health, sending your kids to college, peace, bliss, the contours of your business or project… practice this.
 

1. Feel the “flood tide,” whatever that is for you. Close your eyes and feel what a flood tide feels like in your desires. Your business, project, relationship, health, and wealth.
2. What does it feel like to release or have no fear of the flood tide?
3. What does it feel like to have no doubt that it is coming in?
4. Now imagine you’ve been in a flood tide or your desired goal and an ebb tide comes in.
5. Do you react with fear? Feel that you’ve lost what you had?
6. Can you relax, celebrate, walk the shore that’s now visible, play in the tidepools, and climb rocks, transform what you couldn’t see before?
7. Now imagine that you are the tide. Flood and Ebb. This life force is your true nature. 
8. What does it feel like to trust it? To know that it is constant and unlimited? To know that both are movement?
9. What does it feel like to experience the Ebb as unlimited as well as the Flood?
10. Practice this. Move the feeling into your day until it is with you all day long.
11. From here, what is your next step in your unlimited life?

Here’s to more of You in this world, 

Shelley