What is Aquatic Integration, exactly?

For this moment, let me drop the formalities of marketing and website lingo and speak directly, honestly, to you reader. I don’t want language to convince you of the validity of this technique or promote the method. I seek instead to invite you to experience.

The truth, I cannot tell you what Aquatic Integration is or would be to you. To speak directly to the surrender, the heart opening, the “letting go” would be to color your experience. While those are the comments of some, it may not be yours. If I speak of the continuous ribbons of force that unfurl through the system integrating disparate or painful actors back into wholeness, that too could be a misrepresentation of your experience. Each session is a design unique for you, on that day, that moment. The breath, the thoughts, the movement, the information that is brought into the pool informs what the experience will bring. What we can be sure of, reflection and learning are at the heart.

I could speak of the technicalities - the development of the resting body, the sumptuousness of healthy joints, the application of warm water movement on the fascial frame, the neurological reframing of movement opportunity, the somatics of inhibition and habitual emotion and the mechanics of changing the mind through posture, structure and reflecting - but what would that mean to you, my reader, the Aquatic Integration experiencer? Mere words.

We could speak of the approach revealing the effects upon symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress, Anxiety. But again these would be just words. They will pass you by in minutes. Forgotten in the deluge of daily information.

What we speak of here instead is the language of sensation. If images are 1000’s of words, what is sensation made up of? Thoughts, memory, images, beliefs, emotion, past reference and future potential? Don’t get me wrong, physical discomforts are indeed addressed. Pains diminished. But what I invite you to do is to allow yourself to experience the fullness of your human capacity. It is so much richer than just recovering from pain. Put it into your own words, or no words at all. We will let the language be your own. What will your body speak?

How would you describe what happens in your Aquatic Integration session?