After my first husband died by suicide I had a hard time getting to sleep at night. I’m naturally a night owl, but those nights of insomnia weren’t by choice.
I went on a trip with some family to Barbados, and night after night I would sit on the open verandah of our beach house and listen to the song of the tree frogs, and allow the therapy of the waves to wash over me. As I listened to the waves come into shore it was like they picked up a piece of my trauma and carried it out to sea. And it makes sense to me that the sound of waves would be healing. The sound of waves is what I call our home song. Let me explain.
When I was pregnant with my first child I remember going to the midwife’s office. There they did an ultrasound to listen for my baby’s heart beat, which was tricky to find under the sound of the placenta whooshing like life itself in a crescendo that covered my baby with sound. The placenta has a rhythm like a heartbeat, and is the sound of the womb. And that is why I call it out home sound. Before each one of us existed in this world we spent months in the womb, in the center of that throbbing rhythm.
If you feel trauma and are near waves perhaps this is a practice you can try.
And if you’re no wear near a body of water try listening to one of these YouTube videos. Let it wash over you, and wash some of the trauma you may be carrying back out to sea.