About a couple of weeks ago Robby from FatGirl vs World wrote this amazing blog post about feeling under water and not being able to get above surface of the water. It’s really a hard, terrifying, and frustrating place to be. In Robbys’ words, “it’s like wanting to climb a mountain but first having to dig your way out of a cavern with your bare hands. You exhaust yourself even before even getting to the point where you feel like you can once again take up fight.” After I wrote it’s hard and I received a boat load of responses letting me know that I’m not alone in the water struggling. The crazy thing about feeling under water is that you feel so helpless that no matter what you do, and who talk to you, you just can’t break the surface. I imagine this is what purgatory feels like and since we are in rough water and the fear of drowning is imminent so we kick, we scream, we scratch, and we claw but get nowhere and we wasted so much energy flailing in the water.
What if there was a technique that helps conserve energy when you are in rough water? It is…It ’s called the Survival Float. The thing about the survival float is that you have to put your face in the water. Even though it’s suppose to help us get through the rough water, most of us are afraid of putting our face in the water. We fear that the water it going to go in our nose or we don’t like the feeling of the water in our ears. I’m here to tell you that until the boat come you have to put your face in the water; you have to go through some uncomfortable things to make it through the rough water. Yea you don’t like the feeling but would you rather drown instead? Thinking of this example I wondered how could I apply this to life? Yea this works for water but how can we make this applicable when life gets overwhelming and we feel like we are under water? The point I’m making is that when things get overwhelming sometimes you have to stay calm and ride it out… To get a different result you have to do something different…
Lately I’ve been slowly turning it around… I’m in the boat for a lack of better words but I’m still wet and I feel like I could fall back in the water anytime now. But while I’m in the boat I’ve been working out, blogging, mediating, and doing yoga. There is still a chance that I might get knock back into rough water but at least I know about the survival float.
Until next time.
Photo by David Nagy /CC BY-NC 2.0
