By Student Alexandra Velickovic

Over the last year or so I have been guided to spend time by the ocean. At first I didn’t understand why, other than it would be relaxing for me to just chill at the beach, but eventually the intention would start to reveal itself and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to share a bit of the process here.

My schedule had been overly busy and I had let myself become grossly overworked during the pandemic. So at first I took on this piece of guidance as something ‘to do’ and upon going to the beach I’d start asking myself, ‘What’s this about?’, ‘How long should I sit here?’, “Is this like a healing?’ and ‘Did I bring sunscreen?’. I’ve had a strong and steady daily meditation practice for a long time, but on these days I would notice my mind wildly and impulsively try to make sense of my ocean time and prematurely extract some nugget of information it anticipated I was going to receive, logically decipher it and file it off somewhere in the multistoried chambers of my intelligence. My mind would project the takeaway before I could even have the experience. How efficient! It really would take some time, much prayer and breaking down on these days, before I could really rest and release my mind and have it surrender and submit to the truth that it actually held no such role during my ocean days. In fact, I was shown how much my mind actually needed to disengage from its sense of ultra-importance and hyperactive control, generally and altogether. This cognizance in itself was a great next step in my awareness.

So after arriving at the beach, staring out at the horizon and wrestling my mind away from the foreground of my space, time after time, only then could I start to tune in to the Holy Spirit in a much truer way than I thought I already could. It’s all I could pray for and then I would wait. I had to be very still and I had to listen. I had to let myself listen until there was nothing to hear. I had to breathe the breath of the ocean and let it be. I was being asked to tune into something much bigger and much deeper and with that would come a very broad beingness. Thankfully there was no way to label this spaciousness, nor could I describe how the ocean was supporting me, but there was no doubt that it was. This was the turf I was lead to and the mystic in me was here for it. My senses would be engaged yet not interfere. There was peace without parameters. There was a certain quality of buoyancy to this state and it felt like the Holy Spirit was somehow holding an unseen platform for me to have a broad next awakening, although there were no instructions and there was no plan. Only the Presence and its glorious, infinite, spacious fullness. Nothing I could say here would do it justice.

The kind of gratitude I would feel after one of these ocean days would permeate everything else in my life. That was part of the greater gift of this timeless time I’d find myself in. There was no regular schedule for my ocean days and I would go as I was called. I still go and it’s always different. My ocean days have since played an essential part in many life changes I’ve made. Hallelujah!