The first time I was in the open ocean

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

The boat was anchored somewhere off the coast of Hawaii, and everyone was jumping in. My former husband went first — he grew up near water, comfortable in it the way some people are comfortable in their own skin. He didn't look back. He just swam out.

I was one of the last ones in.

When I finally lowered myself off the side and found myself at the surface — really at the surface, nothing underneath me but open water going down and down — something happened that I was not prepared for. My heart started pumping hard. Not from the cold. Not from the effort. From the vastness. From not knowing what was living underneath me. From the sudden realization that I had no ground.

I had never been in the open ocean before. Growing up in East Germany, this was simply not part of life. And I didn't know — I genuinely did not know — that I was carrying this fear until the ocean showed it to me.

That is the thing about fears you have never been exposed to. They don't announce themselves. They wait.

Today, sitting in N-Tone practice, that same fear came back — the ocean, years ago, no ground beneath me. I hadn't thought of it in years. That is also what can happen when we chant N together — old things, put away and not looked at, find their way back up.

What was different this time is I noticed I was not immediately pulled into it. The memory came, it had some charge to it, but not the charge I remembered. It passed more like information than like an event. I was aware — this is a memory. Not now. Not here.

And then something else became clear. The N-Tone itself moves us into vastness. On purpose. No boundary, no beginning, no end — that is the field we merge with every time we chant. The very thing that terrified me in the ocean is the same thing the practice asks me to enter, again and again. The fear and the practice were pointing at the same place all along.

That is what the practice makes possible. When we are fully present in this moment and something arises — a memory, an emotion with some weight to it — we can recognize it for what it is and return quickly to the N. And the N-Tone does something then. Not by force. More like chiseling, very gently, at what is still held in that memory. As if you are swimming through something that is dissolving around you — not empty in a hollow way, but open in a way that has no threat in it.

What I have noticed is that only what I can actually handle comes up. The idea that something might arise that I cannot handle — that has not been my experience. The process is not something to be afraid of. But it does require one thing: being aware of yourself. Aware enough to notice — this is a memory — before it becomes the whole room.

Matthew Lieberman at UCLA found that simply naming what we feel begins to quiet the brain's threat response. Not resolving the feeling. Not pushing through it. Just naming it. This is fear of openness. That alone changes something in the nervous system. The alarm doesn't disappear, but it stops running the show.

The N-Tone takes this further. Coming back to the chant quickly — before the memory becomes big, before the emotion builds momentum — allows the practice itself to dissolve what is still held there. Not by analyzing it. By returning to what is more present than the memory. As if you are swimming through it, into something that is open but not empty. The charge loosens. What felt dangerous becomes simply something that was once felt, passing through.

Lao Tzu wrote, in the Tao Te Ching: "Return to the root is called stillness. Stillness is called returning to one's destiny."

He is not describing something comfortable. The root is not a cozy place. It is vast. And vast, when you first touch it, can feel exactly like falling into water with no bottom. Until it doesn't. Until the body learns that vast is not the same as dangerous.

What helped me with the ocean was not courage. It was education.

If sharks were the fear — and they were, at least partly — then I learned about sharks. The more I understood their actual nature and behavior, the less the idea of them could run me. Sometimes that was enough — just changing the information dissolved the fear completely. But sometimes information alone is not sufficient. The body needs its own experience. You might need to actually go somewhere — a touch pool at an aquarium, a controlled swim with a guide, a moment where you are genuinely in the presence of what frightened you and discover that you are still whole. The thinking has to be conquered by living, not just by knowing.

The same is true inside. Sometimes understanding what an emotion is and how it moves is enough to free you from it. And sometimes the practice has to go deeper — into the actual experience, into the charge itself — before it releases.

And here is what became clear: what works outside works inside. Exactly the same. The emotions that surface in practice, in real stillness, in a community where people are starting to actually show up — they have a nature too. They move in patterns. They come up under certain conditions and settle under others. When you know that, the fear of them loses its grip. Not because they disappear. Because you are no longer running from an idea.

Approach gradually. Educate yourself. Go only as far as you are capable at any given moment. No judgment. No comparison to the ones who swam out easily.

Five years ago, when I started organizing with Teacher Wei's community, I didn't have a plan for what would come next. I showed up. I organized. The field was large and real and doing important work. But there was something anonymous about it — for me, and probably for others too. You can be in a large group and still feel like no one knows you are there.

Two years ago something shifted. Not a strategy. A felt impulse: something smaller. Something where people actually know each other. Where Grandmaster Pang Ming's own intention could live — that real change happens person to person, heart to heart, not in the anonymity of a crowd.

So True Better You began. No blueprint for where it would go. Just one cycle, delivered. Then I looked back honestly — what worked, where I felt most alive, what people actually responded to. From that, the second cycle was built. Not from theory. From what the first cycle revealed.

Both Teacher Xu and Teacher Wei speak about this: make a plan, then commit to it fully. Don't adjust mid-cycle because it feels uncertain or slow. When the cycle completes — stop. Look back. Acknowledge what changed. Let it land in the body before building the next thing. This is not a productivity principle. It is how transformation actually moves through a person. Or a community.

The community has been quiet — careful, like someone standing at the water's edge, watching. Recently something has opened. People reaching out more. Showing up with more honesty. Not because they were pushed. Because the field relaxed enough that they could. Growth that had already happened was finally being stood in.

The Tao Te Ching says: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." This is not a motivational phrase. It is a precise description of how the nervous system works. One step. Then the next one becomes possible. Not before.

There is a question that has been sitting with me lately, and I don't have a clean answer for it. It has to do with starting points — with whether we actually know where we are standing before we begin to move. Because without that, transformation can happen and still feel like nothing changed. It stays invisible. And invisible change doesn't land in the body. It stays as a nice idea.

Every tradition has said something like this. Proverbs puts it simply: "Let your eyes look straight ahead... do not turn to the right or the left." The direct path is not about speed. It is about knowing which direction is forward.

I did go back to the ocean. Not the open water — not yet. A bay with a reef. Fish close by, colorful and unhurried. And an edge, visible from where I was, where the water deepened into open blue.

I went as far as I could that day. That was enough.

This community is something like that bay. Close enough to the edge that you can see it. Safe enough to breathe. Interesting enough that you want to go a little further.

What would it mean to know exactly where you are standing right now — not as a judgment, but as a starting point?

Enjoy the song from this teaching. Let it carry you there.
→ Listen: Right Where I Stand

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With love,
Simone