Written by Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn. Dr. Elizabeth Kathryn is an Intuitive Coach and Energy Healer who combines her background in clinical psychology with intuitive guidance, energy healing, and transformational coaching. She helps conscious, spiritual women release emotional and energetic blocks, deepen their intuition, and create more aligned, confident, and soul-led lives.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to hold yourself up in water.
I know this intimately. I have spent most of my life doing exactly that in the water: gripping, tensing, and propelling myself forward through sheer effort and will, never quite able to relax into the thing that was always perfectly willing to hold me.
I have had a phobia of water for as long as I can remember. Recently, in the middle of a swimming lesson with my husband, I finally understood why and what it had been trying to teach me about life all along.
The Imprint Beneath the Surface
Like many fears that take root early, my fear of water traces back to some frightening experiences in water as a child, experiences my young nervous system had no framework to process or make sense of at the time.
What I understand now is that when we encounter something frightening before we have the capacity to contextualize it, the nervous system can encode a simple and absolute message.
In my case, that message was:
Water is not safe.
Being submerged means danger.
You cannot trust what is beneath the surface to hold you.
That imprint traveled with me for decades. Every swimming pool, every large body of water, and every attempt to learn to swim met with the same response.
Body tightening.
Breath shortening.
An inability to relax, no matter how much I consciously wanted to.
Propelling Without Floating
Over the last couple of summers, my husband has patiently and gently been teaching me to swim.
Slowly, I have made progress. I can propel myself forward and backward in the water, manage my anxiety well enough to stay in the pool, and keep myself moving.
But here is what I came to understand recently: you can propel yourself through water without ever truly learning to float.
You can keep moving without ever letting the water actually hold you.
And that works. Sort of.
But it is exhausting.
It is anxiety-provoking.
And it means working so much harder than necessary because you are doing alone what the water was always perfectly willing to do for you.
This, I have come to realize, is not just a lesson about swimming.
Two Things That Changed Everything
Our most recent lesson was different.
We did not focus on strokes or technique. We focused entirely on one thing:
Could I relax my body enough to let the water hold me?
In that process, my husband taught me two things I had never understood before.
Movement in Water Happens Slowly
Every previous attempt to reorient myself in the water had ended in panic because it did not happen immediately.
I would feel myself tilting, sense the water shifting around me, and my nervous system would interpret the delay as evidence that something was wrong.
So I would thrash and fight and make everything infinitely worse.
What I had not understood was that if you simply move slowly and trust the water to carry you where you want to be, it does.
Organically.
Gently.
Without force.
The water was always going to take me there.
I kept interrupting it by panicking.
Bobbing Under Is Part of the Process
My husband told me in advance:
This is going to happen, and it is normal.
As you reorient in the water, you will bob beneath the surface for a moment before you rise back up.
Every time I had experienced that before, I had interpreted it as drowning. As confirmation that something had gone terribly wrong.
So I would fight my way back to the surface in a state of fear.
But when he named it for me and told me to anticipate it, lean into it, hold my breath, and trust that I would naturally rise, everything changed.
We practiced it over and over.
Bob under, rise up.
Bob under, rise up.
Slowly, my nervous system began to receive a different message:
This is not danger.
This is simply part of how it works.
You will come back up.
Then something shifted entirely.
It started getting fun.
I was floating, flipping, and moving through the water with an ease I had never experienced before.
I did not want the lesson to end, something that would have been unthinkable even a few months ago.
What the Water Was Actually Teaching Me
On the drive home, I found myself turning the experience over and over in my mind.
Because what had just happened in that pool was not really about swimming.
It was about surrender.
How many times in life do we propel ourselves forward, working hard, pushing, striving, and doing all the things without ever pausing to let ourselves be held?
Without ever relaxing enough to trust that the current may already be moving in our favor?
We tell ourselves that if we just try harder, move faster, and control more tightly, we will get there.
And we can make progress that way.
But it is exhausting.
And it is so much harder than it needs to be.
Then there is the bob-under moment.
That disorienting place in the middle of a journey where everything feels as though it is going wrong, where you are beneath the surface and your nervous system is screaming that you are drowning.
On the path of growth and transformation, that moment is not unusual.
It appears in the middle of healing processes when things feel harder before they feel better.
In the middle of calling something in when it feels as though nothing is working.
In the middle of transitions when the old has fallen away and the new has not arrived yet.
And most of us, when we reach that moment, do exactly what I used to do in the water.
We panic.
We thrash.
We fight our way back to perceived safety.
In doing so, we may interrupt the very process that was carrying us toward where we wanted to go.
What if, instead, we could do what my husband taught me?
Anticipate it.
Name it.
Hold your breath and trust that you will rise.
In my experience, both personally and through the work I do with others, we often do.
The bob under is not necessarily the end of the story.
It may simply be part of the process.
And rising back up, when you allow it to happen naturally rather than fighting it, can be more beautiful than anything you could have forced.
What Surrender Actually Looks Like
I want to be careful here because “just surrender” is one of those pieces of advice that can feel almost maddening when you are in the thick of trying to create something and nothing seems to be happening.
I know because I have been there.
I used to hear that word and want to throw something.
So let me make it tangible.
Surrender is not simply a feeling.
It is a decision.
And it is not passive.
For me, surrender looks like making a conscious choice to stop obsessing over the outcome.
To stop mentally calculating when something is going to happen, why it has not happened yet, and what I might be doing wrong.
To redirect that anxious, grasping energy toward enjoying my life as it is, finding genuine pleasure and presence in the current moment rather than living in the future I am trying to create.
Then continuing to take aligned action from that place.
Not stopping.
Not giving up.
But shifting the internal quality of the doing.
From white-knuckling to floating.
From forcing to flowing.
From grasping to trusting.
That shift does not mean you stop caring or stop trying.
It means you stop interrupting the process with your own panic.
In my experience, that is often what allows what you have been working toward to arrive, sometimes in a way that is more elegant and better timed than anything you could have engineered on your own.
A Different Relationship With the Current
The water was always willing to hold me.
It simply took me a long time, and a very patient teacher, to finally let it.
Whatever you are navigating right now, whether it is a healing process, a transition, or something you have been working hard to create, I want to offer you this question:
Where might you be fighting to propel yourself forward when you could be floating?
Not because the effort is not valuable.
But because there may be a version of this that is lighter, easier, and, if my recent swimming lesson is any indication, much more enjoyable than the one where you are doing it all alone.
Perhaps the current is already moving in your favor.
Perhaps it has been all along.
