Why Letting Go Is the Key to Regaining Lift
If you don’t want to drown you have to let yourself sink.
“Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward. If you want to fly, you have to give up what weighs you down.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Drown-Proofing
When it comes to our psychology what’s happened is this. Our hands and arms have been bound together, and we’ve been thrown into the deep end.
The more we struggle, the faster we sink. The more we panic, the more oxygen we burn, the quicker we drown.
As it happens, this is something navy SEALs do as part of their bat-sh*t-crazy survival training. It’s called drown-proofing.
The trick to surviving drown-proofing is to let go. You must surrender in the face of death and allow yourself to sink to the bottom of the pool. From there, you lightly push off the pool floor to rise back to the surface.
Finally, you take a big gulp of air before repeating the whole process over again.
The problem with drown-proofing (the reason so many cadets fail at it) is it’s completely counter-intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive for two major reasons.
