Conquer Your Fear of Water: A Revolutionary Way to Learn to Swim Without Ever Feeling Afraid

by Melon Dash

Overview

You can overcome your fear in water without being scared.

A swimmer needs to know more than how to go from here to there. The ability to rest in deep water saves lives. It does not result from learning strokes.

Become peaceful in shallow and deep water by understanding how water works with your body. Take it slowly.

Fear is healed by feeling safe, taking small comfortable steps, and being in control all the time.

The following teachings in the book make every last person successful:

- Overcome fear without risking your safety, control, or dignity.

- Comfort comes first. If you're comfortable, everything else in aquatics is possible. You cannot force yourself to relax. But you can allow

yourself to be where you are. There's never a need to push yourself.

- Learn how to get your safety from yourself, not the bottom or the side. Feel the incredibly simple steps of staying in control.

- It's okay if your feet touch the bottom when you float in shallow water.

- Learn to be comfortable being still in deep water.

- Say goodbye to shame.

Every single point and conversation, exercise and thought experiment covered in Dash's Miracle Swimming courses that you need to be successful is explained. Strokes are irrelevant to overcoming fear. They come later thus, they are omitted. Overcoming fear begins on land before "swimming lessons."

"The book is amazing. I am so grateful I found it because it speaks to the heart of me. I am taking swim lessons at the local rec center and while they are terrific for what they are, they are exactly as you describe. Without your book and video, I would not have the courage and confidence to speak up and tell the instructors what I need. To their credit, they listen! They help me and I think I am helping them by being the student I've become thanks to your enlightening me."--Gratefully, PW

Miracle Swimming School for Adults founder Dash's work recently appeared on Suncoast View (ABC 7 TV Sarasota), International Business Times, Sarasota Magazine, Authority Magazine, Association of Aquatic Professionals Newsletter, and The Observer (Sarasota FL).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734097306
Publisher:	Brooklyn Writers Press
Publication date:	04/08/2022
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	346
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Melon Dash is a nationally ranked masters swimmer who began teaching swimming at fourteen. She founded Miracle Swimming School for Adults in 1983 in Berkeley, California. Her books, podcast, video, courses, and patent--The Aquatic Learning Station--show that overcoming fear can happen without taking risks. She solved the biggest problem in adult-learn-to-swim: fear. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, CNN.com Opinion, NPR, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NBC's Today Show, CNN's Headline News, Psychology Today, Real Simple, Sarasota Magazine, Tampa Bay Times, and dozens more. No journalist has yet conveyed the secret sauce you find in the book. She resides in Sarasota, Florida and swims many days a week. Her innovations in adult swimming lessons have influenced water safety worldwide.

Editorial Reviews

2024-03-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews