Learning to Float

 I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I have a close friend going through a tough time and we have spent quite a bit of time this week talking about the struggles in the mind. Our thoughts can run away with us and take us to some very scary places– and sometimes fighting ourselves makes it even worse. That inspired me to share this reading by Mark Nepo with students this week. 

Learning How to Float

When we stop struggling, we float. 

When first learning how to swim, I didn’t trust the deep. No matter how many assuring voices I heard from shore, I strained and flapped to keep my chin above the surface. It exhausted me, and only when exhausted did I relax enough to immerse myself to the point that I could feel the cradle of the deep keep me afloat. 
I have come to understand that this is the struggle we all replay between doubt and faith. When thrust into any situation over our head, our reflex is to fight with all our might the terrible feeling that we are sinking. Yet the more we resist, the more we feel our own weight and wear ourselves out. 
At times like this, I remember learning to float. Mysteriously, it required letting almost all of me rest below the surface before the deep would hold me up. It seems to me that the practice of finding our faith is very much like that– we need to rest enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves upheld. 
This is very hard to do. But the essence of trust is believing you will be held up if you let go. And though we can practice relaxing our fear and meeting the deep, there is no real way to prepare for letting to go other than just to let go. 

On the mat we can find ourselves discovering resistance “and the more we resist, the more we feel our own weight and wear ourselves out.”  When we relax and soften, we can experience a letting go and release.

There are so many synergies between the mind and body- we hold tightness and struggle in the body and when we surrender we feel lighter, like we are floating. In the mind it can be the same; the tightness wrapped around the worries in the mind can make us feel like we are drowning.  When we can soften that clenching we have the gift of letting go. At times this is incredibly challenging and those are the times that we have to trust.

Most of my conversations with my friend this past week have been about trust; reminding her of who she is and encouraging her to trust that she will find her way back to herself. As the quote says- this is the struggle between doubt and faith and the practice helps us lean in to faith and truly learn how to float.