In Ahangama, on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, where salt spray mingles with the scent of frangipani, something elemental unfolds between two bodies. Run by You Are The Sea, the experience is part dance, part unravelling – a visceral, deeply intimate bodywork practice shaped by the tides, memory, physicality and breath.
Photographed by Issy Croker, the encounter appears almost mythic. Twisting limbs. Water-glossed skin. A quiet trust between souls. Franco Rebagliati and Emilie de la Chapelle, both long-time surfers and somatic explorers, have co-created this sensorial ritual. To call it “massage” is like calling the ocean a swimming pool – this is bodywork as poetry.
“It’s not about fixing,” says Rebagliati, an Argentinian who has spent the last 20 years refining his work. Rooted in SLN massage – a form born in 1950s California, one imbued with creativity and compassion, using long, intuitive physical strokes – the experience centres on listening and reconnecting. “It’s playfulness. I can inspire that in you. It’s about returning to the soft space you may have forgotten.”
Before anything physical begins, the practitioners invite the client to have a conversation with them. It’s a slow landing: they speak of breath, of how emotions travel between bodies, of how the nervous system, like a "frightened dog”, requires gentleness. Sometimes, emotions surface. Sometimes, silence. Always, a loosening.
People arrive through word of mouth, through the ache of something unspoken, or through the quiet need to feel the emotions they struggle to articulate.
Croker’s lens captures the slow unwinding: a moment of stillness mid-stroke; a body arched like a wave about to break. “It’s a lot of listening,” Rebagliati explains. “It’s a lot of stopping. Sometimes we just pause, and the nervous system wonders, ‘Why has he stopped?’”
What unfolds is both primal and artistic. Rebagliati, also a musician, likens the process to improvisation. “Massage is like absorbing an artistic experience through your touch. You bring in elements, push and pull, stay and flow, using different textures and rhythms.”
After a number of sessions, the ocean itself becomes the massage table. Rebagliati and de la Chapelle weave their fluency in the water as surfers into the practice. This isn't performance or spectacle. And it’s certainly not another fleeting wellness trend wrapped in a packaged promise of transformation. It’s slow, careful work. An invitation to come home to yourself. To feel. And be held.
The Lowdown
