Earlier this fall I sat at Transfer Beach in Ladysmith. Sunlight on the water, a slow wind moving through the trees. I noticed a quiet ritual: people would walk to the shoreline, pause, touch the water or gaze out, then take a seat on the grass or a log. Almost all of them, without speaking, dropped into a different mode of being. Slower. Softened. Present.
There is something about certain places — ocean, forest, stillness — that helps us process what ordinary life does not allow. Therapy can be one of those places. So can sitting on the edge of the sea.
What is happening in these moments is not escape. It is a shift in orientation: away from managing the moment and toward meeting it. In depth psychology, we might call this reconnecting with the Self — the deeper center of psyche that knows how to navigate complexity without collapsing into it.
This return is often blocked by our instinct to avoid discomfort. In relationships we see this when conflict is approached as something to be prevented rather than understood. Couples may work hard to maintain calm, yet the vigilance itself fuels tension. Avoiding storms does not create safety. It prevents us from discovering that we can stand in one.
In Japanese, the word shizentai (自然体) means a natural posture: relaxed, alert, grounded, fully human. It is not a performance. It is a home position we return to. We lose contact with it constantly — in fear, in urgency, in self-protection — and then find our way back. The point is not to stay there forever. The point is that we can return.
There are simple ways to make this return visible:
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Walking — especially without a destination
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Writing what is true rather than what is polished
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Making tea and paying attention to the act
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Sitting quietly with breath or prayer
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Being in nature without trying to improve it
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Sessions where emotional truth is spoken out loud
These are not techniques for feeling good. They are ways of remembering where your feet are.
In couples work, I help partners do this in the middle of conflict. When emotions peak, they pause. The pause is not to shut anything down. It is to allow something deeper to enter — awareness, memory, care. When that shift occurs, options appear that were impossible a moment before.
Individually, the same principle holds. When you feel overwhelmed, instead of reacting, ask:
What is this feeling trying to protect? What do I know beneath the story my fear is telling?
This is the work of reconnecting: not controlling inner weather, but remembering that storms pass and the ground remains.
What Are We Returning To?
The Self is not a perfected version of you. It is the part of psyche that is not defined by the most recent crisis — the quiet center you glimpse when a truth arrives without effort, or when grief and relief coexist without contradiction. It does not erase difficulty. It gives difficulty a place to land.
The Self answers quietly, but it answers.
Three Invitations
When discomfort rises:
If I stopped managing this right now, what part of me is asking to be known?
When conflict appears:
Can I pause long enough to hear what my reaction believes it must protect?
When clarity arrives:
What did I stop doing that allowed wisdom to surface?
Every return builds trust that you are more than the wave you are riding. Clarity grows not by tightening control, but by loosening the grip of urgency. This is how we walk back into ourselves, again and again, grounded, human, and able to engage the world without losing our center.