THE CALL from the Deep: When the Sea creatures Became Our Spirit Guides

It started in the hands.

We are two bodyworkers, drawn to the tides of breath, the intelligence of fascia, the deep, uninhabited movements of the body. We met on Narah’s Meta DNA & Ecological Bodywork Practitioner Training, where Stephanie was learning to go deeper into her movement inquiries and bodywork space-holding and somatic explorations, all in a community stronghold. But something else was being washed to the shore for both of us, something we both wanted to carry in our embryonic waters and eventually birth forth into our communities.

It was fluid. Pulsing. Ancient.

At first, it came as a feeling, a sensation of being guided rather than guiding, as if another presence moved with us. Not a voice, not an image, but a deep, undeniable knowing. We would place our hands on a client’s body, and suddenly, the motion wasn’t ours anymore. The body beneath us wasn’t just a body, it was an ocean, a shifting tide, a wave in mid-collapse.

And then the creatures came.

The Starfish and the Jellyfish

One day, as we worked side by side, we shared a strange confession.

“I keep seeing starfish,” one of us admitted.
“I think my diaphragm has become a jellyfish,” the other whispered back.

We laughed, at first. But the more we spoke, the more we realised something was unfolding. These weren’t random images. They were arriving, unbidden, from somewhere deeper than thought.

The starfish had begun appearing in moments of deep stillness, teaching the intelligence of six-limbed awareness, the art of sensing in all directions, the power of regeneration, and moving from a deep connection to our navel. It showed up in clients who had lost something, mobility, hope, connection to their own bodies. The starfish taught us how to rebuild, how to extend into new space, how to move from a center rather than from our the head. The jellyfish was different. It came in the moments of fluid surrender, in the waves of craniosacral-like work, in the letting-go of holding patterns too stubborn to be forced open. The jellyfish did not push, it pulsed. It did not force, it yielded. It reminded us that movement does not have to be muscular to be powerful. It carried us through sessions like a tide, dissolving resistance, softening into our inherent flow.

Soma-OCEAnIC Alchemy: Learning to Listen to the Sea

Once we noticed them, the ocean beings wouldn’t leave. We began moving differently, not just with our hands, but with our whole bodies.

The starfish taught us expansion. It showed us how to feel through the skin, through the fingertips, through the subtle sensing that happens beyond the edges of flesh. The jellyfish taught us yielding. It showed us how to meet resistance with presence rather than force, how to work with a body’s tides rather than against them. And then more arrived. The Octopus, the shape shifter. The Coral, teaching heart coherence, presence, and the way of filtering what is needed from what is not. The Shell & Mollusk, reminiscent of the hard body of protection and boundaries and other part - the part of soft and sensuous mollusk-like body…….

We began to understand: our spirit guides were not in the sky. They were not invisible.

They were in the sea and very tangible.

Bodywork as Oceanic inheritance

Now, we enter every session and circle like wading into water.

We move like the starfish, expanding into space, reaching through the skin, sensing through more than just the hands.
We breath like the jellyfish, pulsing, yielding, following the body’s own currents.
We hold space like the coral, anchored, steady, filtering, allowing.

And most of all, we just listen and witness it all. We listen to the water inside the body, to the waves that roll through blood and fascia, to the deep knowing that has always been there, waiting.

Because the ocean does not forget.
And neither do we.

Narah & Stephanie