Letting Go and Learning to Float

When I was coming up I regrettably didn’t have a whole lot of opportunities to recreate in water. My family didn’t live near a beach and when vacation time came we almost always went to the mountains. I would go fishing with my father, but the aim was to stay in the boat, not out of it. So I never learned to swim as a kid.

I would occasionally be around pools, lakes, or the ocean and really wanted to get more comfortable with the water and learn to swim. But I lacked experience and confidence. Unfortunately, there were people along the way who decided the best thing for me was to just pick me up and toss me in the water, expecting me to somehow spontaneously start swimming and love it. Perhaps they were well meaning, but they were quite misguided. In case you’re wondering, don’t ever do that to somebody. What it resulted in was years of water phobia for me.

My fear of water really frustrated me, because I was drawn to it. I wanted to be in water, but I was scared. I would tentatively venture into pools occasionally, but never anywhere near the deep end and never letting go of the side. I wanted to frolic in the water like everybody else, but that’s hard to do when one hand is clinging tightly to the side of the pool. I just couldn’t get past those early experiences of being thrown in the water and feeling like I was drowning. So I resigned myself in my overwhelming fear of water for many years and just avoided it.

It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that my yearning to be in the water finally outweighed the fear and I became determined to do something about it. I was finally ready to learn to swim. So I signed up for lessons at a local gym with a young teacher. I wonder what he thought when he showed up to this first class full of children and this one 30-something-year-old woman? But he was kind and never made me feel out of place. And neither did my little classmates.

Because of my experiences of sinking when being involuntarily thrown in the water, I didn’t believe that I could float, like there was some anomaly about me that would prevent this from happening. Several folks had tried to teach me to float before and I just could not. I could not relax and I was terrified having anyone near me in the water. I was only willing to try up to this point to float by still hanging onto the side of the pool, adamantly refusing to let go. This tension, of course, will prevent someone from being able to float because floating takes a relaxing of the body.

But something about this young teacher and his guidance, patience, and gentleness finally convinced me to let go and relax into the water. And then, I was able to experience for the first time in my life that my body was actually like others and I did indeed have the capacity to float. In that class where that clicked in I did it over and over, venturing deeper and deeper in the pool, my fear steadily subsiding and my confidence growing. And from there, learning to swim was just technique and I got it.

That day changed my life, the day I learned to let go.

I had thought grasping onto the side of the pool was what was keeping me safe, but it was actually what was holding me back. That was a powerful lesson for me that I’ll never forget. Sometimes the things we rely on for “safety” are the things that are actually reinforcing the fear, making it stronger.

Letting go helped me examine this fear I had held so long. I had wrongly believed myself incapable. I had wrongly believed bodies of water were inherently dangerous. I had cut off parts of myself in order to feel safe, diminishing and depriving myself of years of water-based recreation. All of that became crystal clear as I took a deep breath, leaned back, and relaxed into the waters of this gymnasium pool, feeling the buoyancy of my body for the first time when I stopped resisting and let go.

Fear is a real experience, but the messages it sends are so often just not true. Sometimes the fear and subsequent messages outweigh the actual dangers of what we’re afraid of. Part of the reason for this is that we often don’t have full brain capacity when fear is activated. Our survival brain can take the driver’s seat, hijacking the ride, and it has only self-preservation as a focus. And when we’ve had a frightful experience in a place before, this part of the brain sends out a red alert when we encounter similar conditions again. Its aim is keeping us alive in this moment, period. The survival brain is not concerned about whether we’re diminishing ourselves or living life fully. Its messages are very black and white: “Water is dangerous,” “I’m gonna die,” “I can’t do it,” “There’s something wrong with me,” I’m a failure.”

So we naturally go into a state of avoidance, colluding with the false messages of fear. Avoidance is another of those strategies we think is keeping us safe, but it’s often also a reinforcer of the fear, making it stronger.

We have other parts of our brain that could be super helpful to us in assessing whether our fear and fear beliefs are reasonable, but these parts aren’t easily accessible when our fear is intense.

Now, when we are truly in a life or death situation, this survival brain is the best. That’s who we want to get us through the ordeal. But thankfully we’re rarely in those situations these days. I was not in a life or death situation when I would venture into a pool, but my survival brain told me I was, just like the times in my young life when I believed I was drowning.

What I needed was to be able to access these higher level parts of my brain that would help me be curious and open and see the bigger picture. A part of the brain that would notice and ask, “hey, if water is so dangerous, how is it that all of these other people are not only surviving, but having a good time in a pool?” A part of the brain that could recognize there wasn’t something broken in me but that I just hadn’t had the opportunity to learn properly how to be more comfortable in the water and learn to swim. A part of the brain that would empathetically tell me I was feeling scared because I was being reminded of the times I was terrified in the water, but that wasn’t happening now. A part of the brain that could allow me to be open to learning and trying.

And that’s the part of my brain that finally came online during that swim class so many years after those early bad experiences.

The great news is that there are practices to help this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, come online so that our survival brain doesn’t hijack everything when it doesn’t need to. These practices are mindfulness-based. When we meditate and practice mindfulness, we’re building this muscle, so to speak, that allows a greater integration of the whole brain. It’s not a one and done, but ongoing practice that helps stimulate the prefrontal cortex and build greater brain integration.

With regular mindfulness practice, we can more readily find presence in the here and now, we can see the bigger picture and understand the context of what’s actually happening, we can have more curiosity and openness, and we can have greater compassion for ourselves and others.

These days, I’m no Olympian, but I can swim good enough. It’s afforded me an opportunity to be in waters from the Pacific Ocean to the North Sea. It’s allowed me the confidence to experience nature from the seat of my kayak and volunteer doing river cleanups. It’s offered me the chance to frolic in pools with the young members of my family, making up for lost time.

Yet that old fear of water still gets activated sometimes. But now I can see it when it happens, I can name it, and I can remember that I’m remembering but that I’m in a different place now. And I can get back to enjoying the water, thanks to my prefrontal cortex disrupting my survival brain from hijacking me.

I invite you to think about your own life and whether your survival brain sometimes disrupts the show and keeps you clinging to “safety” that is actually diminishing your enjoyment of life. We’re pretty inundated with fear-based media messages that can keep our survival brain pretty activated all the time if we don’t intentionally find greater balance. Our reality can get really skewed that everything is dangerous. Do you find yourself avoidant? Do you find your world getting smaller? Do you find yourself resistant to letting go?

Consider the great liberation of letting go and learning you can float. It’s ok, the water is fine.