Getting closer to the sea is pleasant and refreshing. Contemplating its blue immensity is a fascinating spectacle: the constant movement of the water, the evanescent foam of the waves as they reach the coast, the breeze loaded with a brackish and vitalizing aroma that fills the lungs.

Enjoying the sea is more than just leisureits regenerative effect on the body is accompanied by a balsamic action on a psychological level. Everything marine seems to evoke in us an atavistic memory, a strange nostalgia.

By the sea, the body and mind seem to renew themselves. We even regain a certain joy of living, since we spontaneously tend to play and laugh.

It’s like a return to childhood or paradise lostwhich in our imagination usually presents itself in the form of a quiet beach of golden sand and shade of palm trees where we can hear the ancient murmur of the sea resonating in the conch shell of our heart.

The sea seems to have no limits, neither on the horizon nor below. Only the sky is bigger than him.

The symbolism of the sea: the primordial mother

If the sun is the «father» of life through its light and heat, the sea is the «mother»since it represents –symbolically and really– a large matrix. In fact, we remain in the womb for several months, floating in the amniotic fluid.

At birth, we are placed in a cradle, which once had the shape of a small boat and even allowed us to perform a back and forth movement that calmed the little one simulating marine undulations.

Significantly, the Latin words mare (sea) and mater (mother) are very close, the same happens in Romance languages. For both the Egyptian language and Indo-European Sanskrit, the phoneme «MA» evokes the maternal and primordial under the sign of water.

That is why sailors, intuitive and accurate, like to talk about «the sea», emphasizing her feminine condition. In Spain, women whose name is Concepción are often called Concha, which evokes the symbolic relationship of fertility with the sea.

Marine salinity and body salinity

For biologists, life arises from sea waters. The oceans and seas cover 70% of the Earth’s surface – curiously the same proportion of water as our body – with an average depth of 4 km.

These waters represent an enormous fluid mass in contact with light and cosmotelluric energies. In continuous movement by the action of the air, They become oxygenated and energized energetically.

However, the composition of seawater is always the same, only the amount of dissolved salts varies depending on the environment and climate, but maintaining the degree of salinity that allows the life of the animals it houses.

It is made up of 96.5% pure water, which forms a sodium chloride solution (10 g/liter) that gives it its salty flavor. Also contains magnesium sulphate –which gives it its typical bitterness–, as well as all the minerals and trace elements that make up the Earth’s crust and all the gases in the atmosphere.

In this sense, it is important to highlight how The composition of our internal environment resembles the marine environment. Proportionally, the components of seawater and blood plasma are very similar.

The so-called «Quinton plasma», in memory of the French scientist who investigated it, it is a natural medicine that basically consists of sea water and has a restorative effect on the body.

Thalassotherapy is a medical branch that takes advantage of the healing virtues of marine water and climate.

The sea not only originates life but maintains it. Phytoplankton create more oxygen than the planet’s jungles. The waters evaporate daily in the oceans, thus renewing their purity and causing the rains that fertilize the earth.

Marine reserves of fish and algae are a food store for humans. That is why it is sad and incomprehensible to see how the marine environment is increasingly being degraded with all kinds of abuses and pollutants.

Salt as quintessence

Sea water is salty, as is our blood serum and tears. Salt, in all cultures, symbolizes life and rebirth. It is, in effect, necessary for the biochemical processes of the body and also one of the oldest conservation systems.

The word salary derives from the Romans’ custom of paying with a certain amount of salt. Within Christianity, the baptismal font contains salt water, symbol of purification, and in its first versions it had the shape of a seashell.

Why does looking at the sea make us feel good?

The sea and sailing can symbolize the course of lifetheir worries and anxieties. From birth, with the departure of the maternal cloister – port to shelter – each one of us is similar to a small ship in the ocean of existence.

We learn to navigate, to find good anchorages where to rest or «fortunate islands». The wind of our passions blows the sails; the gaze, aided by the sextant of intelligence, calculates positions; and the compass of the heart allows us to orient ourselves.

In the midst of that samsaric wave, as Buddhism would say, the light of the sun during the day and the stars at night help us advance through that desert of water. Avoiding obstacles, reefs and reefs, there can also be shipwrecks.

That’s why the story of Ulyssessung by Homer in the Odyssey, It is also ours: a journey full of dangers in the form of gods, giants and songs of sirens who want to prevent our return home, to Ithaca that symbolizes our essential being, a place of peace on dry land.

The depth of the sea also represents the subconscious or abyssalthat which is not illuminated by the light of consciousness. They are places of concern, with possible ghostly presences or unexpected monsters.

For the same reason that provokes fear sailing at night on the sea, when the waters are dark or dimly illuminated by the silver rays of the moon. But the depths also hold hidden treasures.

In the words of the poet Saadi of Shiraz: «At the bottom of the sea lie untold riches; but if you seek safety, stay on the coast.»

Numerous literary worksin addition to the Odyssey, They describe with marine metaphors the dangers and wonders of life. Let us remember the obsessive chase of a white whale narrated in the Moby Dick by Melville, Hemingway’s reflection on survival in The old man and the seathe magical adventures of Sinbad the sailor in the tales of Arabian Nightsthe stories of pirates in the South Seas told by Stevenson or the mysterious adventures of the Arthur Gordon Pym by Poe.

The aquatic world: a kingdom of changes

The dream world is also related to the aquatic, As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard highlighted in Water and dreams. If the psychic or emotional dimension – as opposed to the spirit in an active and conscious sense –, especially emotionalis related to the watery, daydreams even more so if possible.

Dreams, perfectly clear when lived, are very quickly forgotten in the waking state. When you wake up in the morning, your images fade like water escapes through your fingers. In that sense, remembering a dream is equivalent to being able to «catch» it. It could be stated that the sea represents transformations in a general sense.

And like every symbol, it has two apparently opposing aspects: on the one hand, life, on the other, death. Hence, many riverside towns and in different latitudes – from Galicia to Bali – prefer to maintain a certain distance from the sea, a kind of respect not without fear.

Because the sea, which gives life, can also take it away: it is possible to be shipwrecked and drown, or the enemy may land on the coast. Just like the sun – its masculine symbolic counterpart – can enliven or burn with its rays.

In addition, The sea evokes constant change, the impermanence of things, using Buddhist language again. It is always in motion, whether gentle or stormy, like our thoughts and emotions.

But it is also true that the agitation of the sea decreases as it deepensjust as the mind calmed by meditation becomes broad and calm like a calm sea.

The eternal return of the waves

As we have seen, The sea is a source of life but it also necessarily harbors death.

Venus is represented by Botticelli being born from a shell on the foam of the sea in the middle of a sunrise. The ancient Vikings placed their dead on a boat that they released into the sea, believing that they were thus facilitating a rebirth on some green paradise island. In both examples, the sea can symbolize life.

«Our lives are the rivers that go to the sea, which is dying,» is remembered in the couplets of Jorge Manrique. But this return to the sea as an origin can also be understood in a spiritual sense.

Thus, in the ancient Hindu text of the Chandogya Upanishadwe read: «Emerging from the ocean, rivers return to it and become the ocean itself. And in the same way that they do not remember having been this or that river, so all the creatures here below, although they arise from Being, do not know that they come from Being: tiger or lion, worm or butterfly, fly or mosquito, whatever their condition, all creatures are identical to that Being that is their subtle essence«.

In the symbolism of the elements, The sea (Water) occupies an intermediate position between the subtle or informal (Air) and the dense or formal (Earth). Hence it can be considered a place of passage between life and death, the visible and the invisible. Its horizons of mist and mystery attest to this.

In any casethe sea always exerts an attraction on us because a kind of identification occurs: we feel its waves within us and its pulse in our blood, it could be stated.

Our sorrows and melancholies have – like the sea – a bitter taste. But our joys are also those of a child who builds sand castles on its shores and jumps with fun when the waves touch his feet. The whisper of the sea, like a maternal lullaby, often has the gift of calming us.

Meditations by the sea

Sea water can be a good meditation support. To do this it is necessary to abstract oneself for a time from anything other than its presence.

Tune in to your breathing

The sea air It is abundant in oxygen, as well as negative ions that increase the production of serotonin, with sedative effect on the nervous system.

Sitting by the sea We will concentrate on the coming and going of the waves… which little by little we will synchronize with our own breathing but without trying to make them go in unison. The eyes remain closed or half-open. Finally, the sound of the waves and breathing are the same thing.

The swaying of the water and the crashing of the waves create an enveloping rhythm which causes slower brain waves to oscillate around the alpha frequency, as in deep relaxation. We feel a lot of peace. We stay like this for as long as we want.

Purify

Sea water, combined with solar rays, favors purifying processes. You can take advantage of its purifying qualities on a mental level by eliminating thoughts or emotions from…