Elementary Backstroke: Practice Your Glide
“This could save your life,” my father told me, teaching me how to roll over onto my back in the ocean and effortlessly glide through the water using a simple frog kick with arms to match. “You can’t fight the water. You’ll exhaust yourself. The trick is to relax and let the water support you.”
As a child messing around in the water at Jones Beach, I had no idea my father’s water safety tips applied to life, or that I’d revisit this lesson countless times when life became turbulent and I felt like I might go under.
It’s futile to fight strong currents. Yet, when challenges arise in life, I do just that. I crank into high gear and execute the equivalent of swimming head-on into the waves. I do this by thinking, I’ve got to fix this. I then make up, and ruminate over, scary scenarios of what will happen next. I do this habitually, which means it not only feels familiar but also oddly comforting in its familiarity. This makes me cling to my position. I don’t want to budge. After all, I’m accustomed to my uncomfortable feelings. They’re predictable. The known is better than the unknown, right?
Not necessarily.
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I want growth. I want freedom. I want these things even more than I want my cozy, painful (and yes, sometimes pitiful) habits, which innocently create my suffering.
So I bring on life’s elementary backstroke equivalent: I relax and allow myself to be held by a force greater than me. I quit judging myself and nix my allegiance to anxiety, as I acknowledge that tension, stress, and resistance won’t help me deal with my problems, but will likely exacerbate them. I realize that acceptance is the only helpful response to things I can’t control, and contrary to my wishful illusions, I don’t control life.
Once I’m “on my back,” it’s time to practice the glide, which means finding an effortless way to work with what I’ve got. I do this by slowing down, taking a step back, quieting my mind, and trusting that I don’t have to do so much heavy lifting in life. I can chill. I’m much more likely to solve my problems when I’m clear-headed and calm.
The “glide” — the path of no effort — is tantamount to a commitment not to fight your own mind. It’s about cultivating a zero-resistance policy to what is — when your challenge is beyond your control. It also means not judging or bashing yourself. This requires the ability to see what you’re doing when these (often unconscious) behaviors kick into gear, and a commitment to ask yourself questions, such as: Where’s the joy here? What’s my lesson or opportunity? How can I love this, too?
This path also invites patience. Let others be who they are. Let yourself be who you are. Forgive. These are hard times. We are all doing our best. Perhaps now more than ever, we stumble. We fall. We fear. We tighten. We constrict. But we also have the capacity to open, release, relax, allow, trust, grow, and transform.
Try letting the water hold you up — and keep practicing your glide!
The VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH for my new book, Where Do You Hang Your Hammock? Finding Peace of Mind While You Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book is Thursday, June 3rd at 4:00 p.m. PST. (7:00 p.m. ET). This online event is free and open to the public, but your must register. I’d be honored it you’d celebrate with us! I’ll be in conversation with author advocate and publisher, Brooke Warner, and we’re raffling off books and a hammock!
Bella Mahaya Carter is a creative writing teacher, coach, speaker, and author of an award-winning memoir, Raw: My Journey from Anxiety to Joy, and Secrets of My Sex, a collection of narrative poems. She has worked with hundreds of writers over the past eleven years and has degrees in literature, film, and spiritual psychology. Her work has appeared in Mind, Body, Green; The Sun; Lilith; Fearless Soul; Writer’s Bone; Women Writers, Women’s Books; Chic Vegan; Bad Yogi Magazine; Jane Friedman’s Blog; Pick The Brain; Spiritual Medial Blog; Literary Mama; several anthologies, and elsewhere. Visit her online: www.BellaMahayaCarter.com.
Bella’s new book, Where Do You Hang Your Hammock? Finding Peace of Mind While You Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book, is an invaluable resource for writers that debunks the myth that anxiety is the price of admission to a creative life. Inspiring and practical, this guidebook is divided into five parts — Dream, Nourish, Write, Publish, and Promote — that show writers how to use their present-moment circumstances as stepping-stones to a successful and meaningful writing life, navigated from the inside out.
