KS&L 401 That Haunting Fear of Water by Tina Erwin

       

 Some people just love the water. They swim all the time, greatly enjoy every opportunity to go to the beach, use a swimming pool and find happiness in all that splashing all and everyone around them!

         Then there are other people who can pretty much just take it or leave it. Swim, don’t swim, not a big deal to them.

         However, there are those people who just don’t like the water. They learn how to swim grudgingly and you find that they are swept with anxiety when you ask them to directly put their face in the water.

         This fear of the water is so tremendous that some people who know they have to learn to swim, only use the side stroke or back stroke to swim so that they don’t have to get their face wet doing the Australian Crawl stroke.

         What is it about putting their face in the water that leaves them with such overwhelming fear? What is that like? If you are the person who swims like a fish, you’re thinking, what’s the big deal? But if you’re the person who will do almost anything not to get your face wet, then you know what we mean here.

         Consider the Navy Officer Candidate who could not get out of Officer Candidate School until she could demonstrate that she could swim. She really hated swimming; despised getting her face wet. In one incredibly memorable day, the school told 90 women that they had to jump off of a diving board 15’ above the edge of the pool, into the white-bottomed pool below. This was great sport for some of the women but for those who were not only terrified of water but heights as well, it looked like they were all jumping to their own watery graves. In another torturous day, all these women were told to pretend that they were leaping off a carrier deck into burning water and were then being pursued by sharks. Our intrepid officer candidate, terrified of heights (obviously another past life issue) and water in the first place just figured if the fall alone didn’t kill her, she’d be burned to a crisp in the water and eaten alive by the sharks. Not a happy prospect: really not her best day.

         Shudder. . .

         Think about it. There are those people who despise cruises, do not want to get their faces wet in a swimming pool or lake, shower instead of use bath tubs and who find excuses to get out of water sports, and would never dream of going near a pool or swimming alone.

         Whoa! There’s a pattern here!

         Maybe the issue is historical.
         Maybe the person drowned in a past life.

         If you had a past life where you were on a ship that sank, drowned as a child in a swimming pool, were drowned as a witch (a favorite method of death in New England in the 1600s) or even drowned in a bathtub or flood, that memory is now part of your very being.

         There are those people who remember drowning in some past life. If the past life was recent, say the life just before this one that fear is going to be exceptionally raw, and viciously intense. This would explain why some children are fearful of swimming or even bath time as babies. That memory lives within them. This fear is so prevalent, that you cannot just ‘get over it’ or simply erase it from your subconscious memory. It literally, functions as a type of ‘sub-routine’, operating in the background of your day-to-day life. It’s there. You feel it. It’s real for you. But the subroutine only becomes operative when the ‘water in your face’ button is emotionally pushed.

         But there’s more to it than that. When a person drowns, the last organs in the body to give up, ironically, are the kidneys. Not sure why, but this is the case. So, a person who drowned in one life may find that unless he or she is very mindful, there might be problems with their kidneys in the current life. If you don’t believe in past lives then you will never make any of these connections. But if you can bring yourself to be open to this concept, then you can begin to put all kinds of puzzle pieces together to greatly facilitate understanding yourself and/or someone close to you. You can also be perhaps a bit more mindful of how to take good care of your body.

         So back to our plucky officer candidate: why in the world would someone terrified of water, join the Navy? Really, what was she thinking? Probably she joined so that she could be around water enough to overcome that fear. (Of course, she could’ve just joined to find a cool husband, have an adventure, or see the world.) Did she ever overcome her fear of water? Yes, actually, she can now put her face in the water and she owns a swimming pool!

Did she have kidney problems? She did have two extremely serious threats to her kidneys, which she was successful in overcoming. Perhaps as she consciously healed her fear of water, faced it, (because the Navy makes you face all kinds of things about yourself), other elements of her life also healed.

         Do you have to be aware of a past life issue to heal it? No, not really, but it helps. What’s interesting is to look at your current issues and maybe you can get a hint into the past.

         Mortal life is a schoolhouse of learning about yourself and sometimes, you have to read the history books in your own life classroom!