Most practices of yoga today emphasize the importance of going deep. “Build your core,” “deepen your practice” are the promo pitches for many classes. But there is merit in staying low, going shallow, and staying on the surface. This is what I like to think of as “low tide asana.”

Recently we were walking on the Cape Cod coastline and the sun was dropping fast in the Western sky. At low tide, the shoals and mud flats get exposed like the belly of a great whale. At low tide it is like the desert where you can see for miles. There is something about being on the horizontal that brings awareness down to naught. While mountaineers seek the grand perspective, at low tide you are humbled. Something in you turns primitive. At low tide, something far below the brainstem kicks in. We found a sand bar surrounded by water on all sides. I was inspired to move like a piece of kelp or sea anemone. At low tide consciousness is simple, rudimentary. You have the mind of a crustacean—like a mollusk or a whelk.

The somatic movements we do are saline and watery. We follow patterns of aqueous flow through our arteries, vessels and cellular spaces. We are sustained by tides and currents of interior flow. But it is on the ebbing tide when you can best find stillness, a dynamic and silent stillness. It is like the pause at the end of exhalation. With everything emptied out, you are pulled back to the beginning, back to the dawn of time.

On this evening, I dropped down to the spongy and impressionable sand. I felt like the first fish that pulled out of the sea onto land 300 million years ago. How did they move? How did they breathe? They moved by the sway of the ocean inside them—swooshing their tail side to side, undulating their spine, inhaling through the gills of their lungs. My backbones all shimmery and alive, I felt what it must have been like to be the first vertebrate. And walking home in the falling light, half aquatic and half terrestrial, mind empty and heart open, I thought “ahhh” this is what it is meant by “beginner’s mind.”