Last Christmas, my family ended our trip to the Philippines on a remote island—a lush crescent of sand, trees, and sky, where time moved with the wind and the rhythm of the sea shaped our days. In front of our beach cottage, the sea usually came right up to the palms. But one morning after the full moon, we woke to something strange: the tide had pulled so far back that we could walk out nearly 200 meters across the ocean floor. What had once been ocean was now a vast plain of seaweed, coral, starfish, and wet sand, stretching toward the horizon.

It was beautiful. And unsettling.

Where had all the water gone?

If we hadn’t known better—if we didn’t trust the tide to return—it might have felt like the world had gone terribly wrong. How would the boats make their way back out to sea? Were we trapped? But the people who lived there, who have fished and harvested from those waters for generations, weren’t alarmed. They smiled. This was normal. This was the rhythm. The tide goes out. The tide comes back in. Sometimes it shifts with phases of the moon. By afternoon, the water would rise again and boats would come and go once more.

Something in me softened as I allowed myself to enjoy the wonderful strangeness of the sea’s retreat. In its absence, I felt an invitation into a deeper trust of all life’s tides.

It made me think about how many moments in life feel like low tides—moments when intimacy, clarity, warmth, or goodness seem to vanish. Those tender stretches of waiting, where what once felt full is suddenly empty, when experience is dominated by confusion and pain, and what once was flowing has receded into mystery. If we don’t recognize the rhythm, we might think something’s broken. But if we do, we can meet the low tide not with fear, but with awe. With curiosity. With surrender.

The body knows this rhythm. The breath flows in, and then it flows out. Muscles tense, then release. We feel discomfort, then safety and ease. In Somatic Experiencing (SE), the primary healing modality I work in, we call this pendulation: the nervous system’s natural movement between contraction and expansion, overwhelm and regulation, pain and pleasure. It’s a rhythm of healing. And it only works when we trust it.

The danger isn’t the low tide itself—it’s our resistance to it. Life can’t flow when we cling to the inhale, refuse the exhale, try to hold onto connection, clarity, or joy without letting the waves of disconnect, confusion, and sadness pass through us. But healing asks us to let go. To soften into the contraction. To feel the edges of discomfort. To trust that even in moments when the breath is shallow, the heart races, and the body aches with heaviness or pain, something deeper is holding us. Something wiser is at work.

In a recent SE session, I opened to a deep well of grief over my father’s recent passing—grief so vast it felt like dying just to touch it. As I let myself feel it fully, I wept. My body trembled. Waves of heat and heaviness pulsed through me like a storm. It hurt to stay with it. But I knew I could trust the tide. I let it move through. And when it did—when the wave had passed—what remained was space. Silence. Stillness. And in that stillness, something new began to bubble up: ease, lightness, joy. I could feel the possibility of even more love, not in spite of the grief, but because of it. The sorrow had carved out a place for joy to flow in. The death had made room for life. In that moment, I could feel my body held inside something larger—a rhythm not of my making, but one I could surrender to. A sacred pattern carrying me, even through impossible heartbreak.

Sometimes the only way out is through. The only way forward is down. When a traumatic experience overwhelms us, part of our system can get stuck, looping in a fight/flight state or freezing in shutdown. And the only way to complete that cycle, to return to flow, is to move through it. Gently. Slowly. But fully. In somatic work, we sometimes speak of it like a descent into layered wells. You can’t skip to the calm at the bottom without moving through the turbulence above it. To reach deeper regulation, we have to be willing to feel the fear, the panic, the stillness, the ache. The very states we try to avoid are the ones we must soften into—because that’s where the wave finishes its arc. That’s how the tide returns.

Of course, the tide doesn’t always return in the way we hope—or on the timeline we imagined. Sometimes the tide returns gently, gradually. Sometimes it rushes in quickly, with wild jubilant force. Other times it lingers in stillness. Sometimes we don’t even recognize the way life is flowing back in until it washes over our feet again. But that’s the nature of these rhythms. They aren’t ours to control—only to trust, and to meet with presence when they arrive.

I’ve learned this in quieter ways too—like with the inner rhythm of my womb. Each month, a few days before bleeding, I enter a low tide of sensitivity and sorrow. Everything feels off. But I’ve come to recognize it as part of the pattern. A temporary descent. When I let myself feel it fully — the physical pain, the emotional rawness—without resisting or fixing, it passes. What returns is clarity, ease, and a renewed sense of wholeness. Every month, the tide teaches me.

Even in relationships—those dances of presence and distance, closeness and spaciousness—I’ve begun to see the same truth. There are moments when the warmth recedes, when communication stalls, when it feels like something is stuck or missing. The instinct is often to avoid it, to smooth it over or wait for it to pass. But real intimacy isn’t built on avoidance—it’s built on the willingness to descend.

Like low tide, relational rupture reveals what’s usually hidden beneath the surface. The raw sea floor of our hearts. The places we protect. The patterns we didn’t know were shaping us. These aren’t things we can see when everything’s flowing smoothly. But in love, as in the ocean, sometimes it takes an ebb for truth to emerge.

In healthy relationships, love deepens not in the absence of rupture, but through the courage to repair. Secure attachment is formed, not because there’s never pain or misunderstanding, but because there’s a shared willingness to move through the pain—to name it, feel it, and stay present inside it. That process of rupture and repair is the tidal rhythm of trust. It’s how bonds grow stronger.

It can hurt to touch the places where we’ve missed each other, to feel the shame of how we may have hurt someone, or the grief of being unseen ourselves. But if we can stay—if we can open to the discomfort—those very moments become gateways. Like wading out across the sand at low tide, we can explore what’s been exposed, gently, with curiosity and love, without forcing anything. And as the water returns, the descent into rupture makes space for even greater trust and love. A deeper exhale that prepares the way for the next breath of connection.

The same tidal pattern shows up not just in our bodies and relationships, but in the sacred stories that shape us.

Today, I’m thinking of the mirror here in Good Friday - this sacred wound at the heart of the Christian mystery.

The ultimate low tide.

Jesus nailed to the cross, crying out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The one who embodied divine intimacy now abandoned. The one called Living Water now thirsty. The one who healed others now wounded. He doesn’t just die—he descends. Into the deepest sorrow, the deepest emptiness. The ultimate exhale.

And yet, this descent is what makes resurrection possible.

This isn’t just symbolic. It’s cosmic. In that descent, Jesus enters the fullness of human experience—not just physically, but spiritually, emotionally, somatically. He goes all the way into forsakenness. And somehow, in doing so, he opens a path back—not just for himself, but for all of us. His exhale makes our inhale possible. The crucifixion makes resurrection inevitable. In that surrender, he speaks: Tetelestai, a Greek phrase meaning, “it is finished”.

It’s a mysterious phrase—not just a declaration of ending, but of completion, the fulfilment that is necessarily implied by his descent. It is the sealing of a cycle. There’s something about it that collapses time. It’s as if in that final moment of breath, Jesus speaks not just of the present pain but of what must come next. The tide has gone all the way out—so of course it must return. Tetelestai doesn’t just mark an ending. It marks inevitability. A cause has been completed, so a result must unfold.

When we trust the rhythms of life itself—the seasons, the breath, the tide—we begin to live in trusting alignment with that inevitability. Winter does not last forever. Exile does not last forever. Pain does not last forever. Perhaps even death does not last forever. If we know we’re held inside a pattern that is larger than our personal suffering, we can breathe through the in-between. We can wait on the shore of the low tide without despair, because we understand: the water is already on its way back.

Jesus’ final words—Into your hands I commit my spirit—are the ultimate act of trusting that pattern, even in the silence and dark. He surrenders himself into the rhythm of death and rebirth. And in doing so, he opens the way—not just for himself, but for all of us—to trust that nothing is wasted. No pain is final. The exhale prepares the way for the inhale. The tomb becomes the womb.

Every time I feel lost in a low tide—when joy disappears, or love feels far, or the body aches with grief—I remember this story. I speak to Jesus, and I know he knows. He’s been to the bottom. And he came back. The tide always returns.

So — can you trust the tide?

Or, if not yet, can you stay long enough to see what returns?

Can you trust your relationships to survive moments of disconnect?
Can you trust your nervous system to return to safety after pain?
Can you trust your soul to come back after loss?
Can you trust God—even in the absence of God?

Because the invitation isn’t to avoid low tide.

The invitation is to walk barefoot across the exposed ocean floor with curiosity, with courage, and with trust, knowing: the water will return.