CONQUER YOUR FEAR OF WATER

Anyone can feel confident swimming in deep water, according to this soulful beginner swimming course.

Dash, a swimming coach and founder of the Miracle Swimming School for Adults, addresses grown-ups who would love to swim but feel a primal dread of the water; her guide aims to enable phobic readers to serenely breathe and move about in the pool’s deep end. Many of the book’s 100 steps are focused on psychological preparation; Dash suggests that readers sign a swimming-goals contract with themselves, for example, and write a confessional letter to water itself. (“Write your thoughts, positive or negative, about shallow water, deep water, the drain, whatever. Write until you can write no more.”) The author bases her teachings on a somewhat mystical concept of self-control, a practice of “purposely and habitually keeping yourself, as a spirit, completely in your body”; swimmers in this “1st Circle” will be calm and confident in the pool, while those in the “5th Circle” lose control of their body, panic, and may drown. Much of Dash’s instruction is more down-to-earth: She introduces rudimentary skills in a pressure-free, self-paced manner that allows learners to edge into the shallow end, acclimate while clinging to walls, and build slowly up to the big step of submerging their faces. More advanced lessons cover front floats and back floats, arm motions and hand orientations, and frolics like underwater somersaults and handstands. Dash’s philosophizing can feel abstruse and out of place in a swimming primer: “Your body is energy, your thoughts are energy, sound and light are energy, information is energy, emotion is energy. Your chair is energy. Energy does only two things: it expands and contracts. Everything in the universe expands and contracts.” Fortunately, her swimming instruction itself is much more cogent—detailed, lucid, and eminently practical for helping newbies overcome fundamental but often overlooked barriers. Swimming programs often ignore students’ struggles with basic aquatic competency, and Dash’s book ably fills that gap in a fun and appealing way.

An insightful, warmly reassuring how-to for novice swimmers.