LEARNING HOW TO FLOAT

“When we stop struggling we float.”
~ Anonymous

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’ve 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, almost forty years later, 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 go other than to just let go.

Once immersed, once below the surface, it is not by chance that things slow down, go clear, feel weightless. Perhaps faith is nothing more than taking the risk to rest below the surface.

That we can’t stay there only affirms that we must choose the deep again and again in order to live fully. That we must through the sense of sinking before being upheld is what trusting the Universe is all about.

~ Fill your bathtub with warm water.

~ Hold your hand open, palm up, with the back of your hand on the surface of the water. Feel the effort required to keep your hand on the surface.

~ Breathe slowly and relax, letting your hand enter the water. As your hand relaxes, feel yourself meeting the deep.

~ While breathing slowly, keep placing your hand in the water, and practice entering the deep and resting below the surface.

~ Practice moving beyond the sense of sinking.

~ Practice the soft attention needed to realize when you are beginning to be upheld.

The Book of Awakening

~ Mark Nepo