1. The Song of Openness

Over the summer, I harbored myself by an ocean. I felt the need to be liberated. I felt the need to be cleansed. Have you ever asked the ocean to help you? The ocean in your imagination? The ocean you visited or have lived in real time? What about the one you have read by, or walked alongside, or swam with, or sailed upon? The ocean is a sea of lovely answers as I ask. I ask.

I have hummed a quiet longing to reunite with the ocean for some time now. Has it been close to three years? During my sojourn to meet her again, I greeted eighteen magical sunrises and eighteen sweet sunsets. I watched, impressed. The ocean consistently hugged all times of day. One morning, I found a dove in the sun in the instant that the sunrise kissed ocean. I saw fish flying in clouds. Under a full moon sunrise, I spotted a turtle who tried to lay eggs in spite of beach chairs getting in her way, albeit unsuccessfully —. I ran to her sand tracks and followed. Her path had written a story that she just went back to the water, in trust of the next perfect time.

Turtle prints of a belly and the breadth of ocean eclipsed my human footprints walking the shore to the morning song. The ocean line was a dewy skein, a soft mirror, a sweet veil of paper thin shimmers. I touched joy. I touched tears. The waters flickered like hope. What can I learn from you? What can you teach me? The ocean never let up. It didn’t matter I didn’t immediately understand. The ocean held me anyway and demystified my insecurities and doubts. Slowly, yet surely, Nature’s vessel has given me beautiful and loving crystal answers. Thank you! The Ocean still gives.

“Oh!
In this great natural world full of energy and emotion
I feel calm and peaceful as never before:
At rest.”
– Ou, Wen Wei, “Pattaya, I Am Here on Vacation,” My Hometown.

2.  The Song of Compassion

The ocean is a story about the beauty of movement and the power of stillness. The ocean is about balance. Grief often meets freedom. These two existences are in the ocean at all times. It is healing to talk to the ocean in your heart. She helps. Even when you can’t manage to find love and beauty in your own path or trust the work.

An ocean is at harmony with itself. It is like a melodious instrument that never asks of itself to give more than it can. Look at the waves and how they move like an extension of an ocean’s thoughts; they extend from a Source that balances limits and limitlessness. An ocean is also to move courageously with a belly as free as a heart empty of opinions. No matter the day, an ocean moves free from an internal weight. The all of her body is freed from what is often heavy with prejudices and fears. The waves are a teacher of how to adjust. The waves play. It holds you. It lets go. The ocean frees away self-doubt as the waves try to restore whatever hurts and is no longer needed. The sands are a cushion and the sun shines on the body to add harmony. Sun clouds balance life to a whole.

Like a wave, I slowly become my own trajectory of finding my strength and learning to trust my soul’s journey while here. As each wave advances and retreats, I can make peace that I control my own happiness no matter what is around me. This includes matters of destiny, things I can’t control, and what I can. It includes releasing the injustices, too. It takes courage when your heart deeply agrees to let it all go. It’s still a grief when you do. Life often has us meet too much for our hearts to embrace or understand at times. There’s a sunrise and a sunset that’s constant. And if anything, says the ocean, you and I can at least hold on to that.

“Silently reciprocating with the ocean’s running waves
Ah the surging ocean:
I like,
I like your openness and generosity;
Opening my heart after many tribulations,
Silently,
Silently contributing countless emotions:
Deep affection
Rich intent.
Let me,
Let me spontaneously open my arms
And embrace the future.”
– Ou, Wen Wei, “Conveying the Sentiment of Bali Bay,” My Hometown.

3. The Song of Excellence

 A sea can look flat or uninviting some days. Still, it has many layers underneath and it knows itself. Some days, the ocean is clear, crystal, straight and balanced. Other days, it curls with more flexibility and color. Either way it knows its vulnerability and its force. Nothing about the ocean hides. Its energies are tied to the raw elements of unpredictability that it must also learn to wear and bear. It moves with serenity and conviction.

The ocean is a vessel of knowing and self-love. It knows its own character and respects its special qualities. Restlessness often meets it, but the ocean has a courage to meet its insecurity and what agitates anyway. The harmony that speaks to us is its elegance.  It is not false or artificial. The ocean rids all the superfluous so only the beautiful is left. The ocean teaches: Serenity comes from the heart.

Can I learn to live like the ocean, ever-changing and moving with natural grace? It is rhythmic and joyful in the shifting colors of teal, purple, cobalt, cerulean, turquoise, and green. How can I be vast and stable in my solidity yet at peace with my sensitivity and power? The ocean waits. No matter the pain or lost hopes— it has you meet that unselfish brave spirit within.

The waves collectively hold what a heart can make manifest, like a good friend with a hug. Eventually, a bit of courage helps you touch the experience with more courage and clearer answers, enough so that you can claim and work on what’s yours. In the Universe there is great love. How I wish the world a deep compassionate well of an ocean’s embrace.

“Decidedly restless, static, dynamic…
all things in the universe have embodied
the relationship between opposition and unity.”
– Ou, Wen Wei, The Path of Life, Vol. 2.

4. The Song of Acceptance

An ocean is an empress with a beating heart. She has a focus and intention that carries it a long  way. She works with the gravity of moon and the force of wind. We feel her calm because the ocean is a master of self-love. To behold a sea is to keep going.

The ocean is a space of responsibility and respect. She lives to a journey that is its own joy and that has no end. Each wave has lots of energy. It breathes with its intensity and its serenity, tranquil and confident. As each wave reaches back into a greater loving force, it seems to thankfully look at where it came from. As each wave pushes itself forward, it is at ease with the path to where it is headed. Along the way, it playfully divides and unites to its own best answer of peaceful giving. Along the way, a wave doesn’t stop being a wave because of outside elements. It is still a singular wave working with what the elements bring to it. I have never seen a wave stop midway because it was afraid to make a mistake. Have you? It just kept going, trusting sands, trusting the imprint of memory it makes, and at peace with itself as it gathers back to evolve into a new shape, each shape lovelier and livelier. This is sincere and noble love.

The waves move beyond repetition and routine. Each wave frees itself from whatever is swirled in. Each moves with a song and freedom from the soul. At every measure, it lets go. It trusts the letting go. Just watch a wave. The letting go is always a bit different— as if perfecting its faith and its instinct to meet a new inspiration each time. Can I be as spirited and as lovingly calm with the compass of my emotions? The waves are a family giving meaning to the ocean’s existence by just breathing in intuition and intelligence every step of the way.

To admire  an ocean is to be part of life itself.  This is why an ocean is something and someone and at one all at the same time. Can I appreciate the beauty of my body and my soul as deeply and fully? Sometimes an ocean trembles. Sometimes an ocean is more serene. But no matter the day, the good or the bad, it keeps on aiming for its own road of courage and pathway of peace. Its heart is open, broad and wide. Its commitment is to the journey. An ocean trusts in the destiny.

“Whatever kind of wind that’s blowing in heaven,
the same kind of waves surge in the sea.”
– Ou, Wen Wei, The Path of Life, Vol. 1

5. The Song of Noble Love

To contemplate an ocean is to be freed. The ocean never holds on to pain or attaches to the sword of sadness or complaint as its shield. Instead, it chooses to spread out a curative energy that is healing to all shores of the world. The ocean comforts our tides of pain by being more expansive than our pain itself. It shows us how to serve ourselves more greatly than that which tries to pull us down. In giving to others, like an ocean to a mother turtle birthing herself under the moonlight, we learn to give back and serve others, too. The human heart becomes an ocean when we choose to let the world know that our pains do not overtake us and when we invite what we have learned to help ourselves and help others grow more elegantly, too.

How blessed we are that we can touch her restorative universality in our imagination. We can breathe in her embrace and her wellspring of compassion. We are eased by the peaceful power in her heart. We understand more life to hear an ocean harnessing its body with an energy of courage and optimism. Her breaths connect us to more thankfulness and greater harmony. The language of defeatism doesn’t live here either. Instead, our breath mysteriously follows the gentle loll of the waves without effort. Something in our heart grows softer and stronger. We find stasis in the beauty of great movement. We feel the consciousness of strong love. This is where truth lies. It is why we feel so much kinship with the waters. We feel belonging by a shore.

A good teacher of the soul inspires by example and without much to say. No pain is any greater or more profound than any other, the ocean says. To notice this is to see and sense something familiar in her language and in the same moment something vastly different from our own. Patience, compassion, perseverance, honesty, faith in a personal excellence, the willingness to let go— all these are covered by the ocean teacher. She sends out waves of love, joy, self-compassion, knowing, forgiveness, confidence, playfulness and gladness. The seas are presence. She roots us in a beingness, enough that we can hear our own heart, embrace our own innate intelligence and intuition, breathe in beauty, touch stillness, honor balance. Above all, the ocean comes to say your teacher is life; and more, your greatest teacher is your own life—so respect it; you know the way home.

” I am running to the ocean at the end of the world
Running to greet earth’s deep spaces,
Letting everything be nourished,
Letting life be full of spirit and vigor—
This is my ideal, my ideal.”
– Ou, Wen Wei, “Asking the Running Water,” My Hometown.

Photography by Marina Mashaal

The healing songs of Master Ou are as strongly healing poems. My beloved teacher, who, like an ocean, inspires by example, offers this beautiful poem, also a song, for my readers to enjoy and contemplate quietly into the heart. Feel free to close your eyes and breathe deeply and calmly into your heart three times before and after reading to amplify the healing properties extended to you through this song.

The Sentiment and Poetry of the Ocean
by Ou, Wen Wei

Facing a sea as quiet and smooth as a mirror
Feeling the beauty and harmony of nature—
If our hearts could be as broad as the ocean,
Surely the different worlds on either side would be connected!
The azure ocean waters contain the colors of all people harmoniously,
Washing away manmade discrimination that should never have been;
Originally, this world had no impurities.
I deeply believe
This is the ocean’s sentiment,
The ocean’s charm,
The ocean’s poetry.
Oceans naturally have no borders between them;
Among peoples, however, are many barriers.
Why not enter the ocean’s bosom,
Enjoy the freedom of no separation?
I deeply believe
This is the ocean’s sentiment,
The ocean’s charm,
The ocean’s poetry.
Oceans naturally have no borders between them;
Among peoples, however, are many barriers.
Why not enter the ocean’s bosom,
Enjoy the freedom of no separation?
I deeply believe
This is the ocean’s sentiment,
The ocean’s charm,
The ocean’s poetry.
The ocean’s sentiment.
The ocean’s charm,
The ocean’s poetry.