Lessons from the Water: Guidelines for Self-Paced Learning

How long do you expect it to take to overcome your fear? The following are guidelines on how to approach your overcoming fear journey. These guidelines help you to stay in your body while practicing various skills.

1. Practice comfort, control and enjoyment: To learn comfort, control, and enjoyment, practice comfort, control and enjoyment. Do not do anything you don’t want to do. Don’t do “it” if the sound of “it” makes you feel uncomfortable. Only doing what is completely comfortable allows you to bring your full presence to it. IT IS ALWAYS MORE ADVANCED TO BE COMFORTABLE THAN TO DO THE SKILL. Give yourself permission to use any item or do whatever will make you comfortable.
   
2. Don’t even get to nervous: Abort the skill once you begin to feel nervous. Ensure you are completely comfortably in your body before you resume the skill.
   
3. Do not skip steps: Do not try to learn strokes, or threading, or any movement or thing until you’ve learned how to be in control and comfortable in water. Everything else is secondary. You might think: I am too advanced for this. However, water works the same way in shallow and in deep water. If there’s some fear of deep water, something was skipped to prevent you from taking the comfort you feel from shallow to deep water. Iron it out in the shallow. Once you get it in the shallow, you will know when you’re ready to try it out in the deep.
   
4. Do not approach as a list of things to check off: Invest in your learning. Don’t be like me when I checked off the box for my university’s swim requirement, only to nearly drown 11 years later.
   
5. Go at your own pace: When a baby learns to walk, it feels itself around. It doesn’t compare. It doesn’t judge. It takes it time. It goes at its own pace. You are a natural born swimmer. You just need to figure out how your body is in water. The way a baby figures out how to walk. Today you may feel like it, tomorrow you may not. That’s ok. Feel and go slowly. If stuck, backup, regroup, go again.
   
6. Don’t compare yourself to others: You might think: I am lagging behind others. Or even the opposite: I am more advanced than others. When you compare, you’re not in your body, but examining yourself from the outside. Your attention is at their progress while your body is where it is. Bring yourself back into your body. 
   
7. Don’t judge your progress based on other people’s opinions: You might think: I must look like an idiot to them. Or someone might even have comments for you: You hang around the shallow a lot. I never see you at the deep. What is this floating and bopping thing you’re doing? When will you swim? Or someone else might be intensely staring at you. You are looking at yourself with their eyes. Your body is where it is, but your attention is in their gaze, looking back at yourself. Bring yourself back into your body. 
   
8. Discard the expectations you have of yourself: How long do you expect it to take to overcome your fear? How long do you expect it to take to master swimming? On what are you basing this timing? How long have you been afraid? So why do you expect your fear to drop overnight?  What are your expectations? Discard any expectations you have of yourself and let yourself have all the time you need.
   
9. Don’t push yourself: When you push yourself, you are outside of your body giving yourself a shove. There is a place for pushing past fear to learn, this is not the place. Pushing can lead to frustration. Just give whatever you’re trying to achieve space. It will eventually click. 
   
10. Don’t focus on the destination: It’s not about getting to the other side of the pool. It’s about how am I feeling right now, in this particular moment? If you’re focused on getting to the other side of the pool, your presence is on the other side, and not where you are. Feel every step of the journey: the arms sweeping through the water, the air in your lungs, the water holding you up, your body moving through the water. Be present at the current moment and the current spot that you are.
    
11. Re-examine what you already know: Are there skills that you already know how to do? How do you feel when you do them? Are you completely calm, at ease? Or do you rush through them? Do you do them trying to get to the other side in a hurry? If you cannot say with confidence that you are 100% at ease and enjoyment when you do the skills, then you have not quite mastered them yet. Go back and try to do the same skill as slowly and as comfortably as possible, feeling every movement. Remember comfort and enjoyment is the key on which anything else is built.  
    
12. Go slowly: If you go quickly, you may complete a skill, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you were in your body for it. It takes true mastery and comfort to do a skill in the slowest manner possible. Do everything slowly, taking time to experience every single step. Going slowly allows you to stay in your body for all of the skill.
    
13. Go backward to go forward: If you are stuck on a skill, go back to the last skill that was comfortable and spend some time mastering it. The next step will come naturally. 
    
14. Your learning path may not be straight and that’s ok: Segways are normal. While learning to change position, you may realize that you are uncomfortable because you keep getting water up your nose. Taking time to learn to protect your nose before coming back to changing positions is perfectly fine.
    
15. When you do the incredible, go back to fill in the gaps: You may find yourself doing a skill that you never imagined that you could do. It just came to you. WHOA! Cool! That’s not the time to take on more advanced skills. Go back and learn all the things that came before so that you can do that new skill with complete presence, slowly, and on demand. Then you won’t need to “luck” into it in the future. When you go slowly, don’t focus on whether it happens like it did before. Just be present to feel and let your body guide you into it.  
    
16. Practice more versus new step? Practice more! If you’re not sure whether you are ready for the next step, then you should practice more until you have mastered the previous step. When you’re ready, you will know. 
    
17. FEEL. Feeling gives you the opportunity to bring your full attention to the part of your body that is working. For instance, feeling the water against your hand and arm allows you to know whether it feels like you are moving efficiently or if it is too much work. How does this position feel versus the other position? Is my body moving through the water as well when my hand is like this or like that? Feeling allows you to build on “muscle memory” and not brain memory. Once you lock on something that feels right, and you have practiced it enough that it feels like 2^nd nature, it becomes 2^nd nature and you can now bring your full attention to the next step. You’re not stuck on trying to memorize and recall the steps (step 1, step 2, step 3). Instead direct your attention to your body. How is my arm feeling? My legs? My breath?
    
18. Focus on one thing at a time: When you are present for one skill, your full attention is on that skill. This is why it is helpful to use some tools to assist until you have mastered a skill. For instance, it is useful to use a nose clip to protect your nose when you are learning that the water holds you up on your back. That way, you aren’t trying to protect your nose at the same time that you have your full attention feeling the water holding you up. When you have laid on your back in the water so many times that you feel like you can do it in your sleep, then your attention is freed up to focus on something else. You may now take off your nose clip or start working on hand movements. Focus on one thing at a time. Only after you embody one thing, then you can add the other.
    
19. Learn comfort before learning skills: If you don’t feel that you know what you need to survive, your attention will remain on what it takes to not die. Your attention will not be available to learn or apply anything—not floating, not strokes, not skills. To free your attention up to learn anything, you need to know that you know how to keep yourself alive. You need to learn how to stop and rest if that skill falls apart. You want to learn first how to be so in control that you have attention to spare to focus on moving.
    
20. Anytime you feel tense or doubt, let the tension be there: Tension are your beliefs telling you that something isn’t safe. Let your body know that you’re listening so that it can trust you. Acknowledge tension wherever it is in your body. If you feel your neck or back or arm or leg or eyes or any part of your BODY being tense, bring your attention to the tightness/tension where it is in your body. Bringing your attention to the tension lets your body know that you are listening to it. Do not proceed with the skill until the tension has had the chance to dissipate. Or not. Just wait it out. Give it the time and space it needs. Let yourself be the way you are. Do not resist tension. Don’t tell yourself to relax. You want to learn to be in control even if you are in a frightening situation where you cannot relax.
    
21. Learn to change the channel: If you are practicing something and you feel stuck or are getting frustrated, give yourself permission to stop and practice something else. Or stop and go back to the preceding step that you can do in comfort and ease.

Staying in your body allows you to choose your next action. To keep yourself alive in deep water, you need to learn to stay in your body. When you are in your body, you can experience what the water is doing for you: if it’s holding you up, if you need air, if you’re close enough to a wall, if you’re in shallow and can stand up. You can make choices.