Comments on: Guest Post: What Terry Laughlin Taught me about Swimming and Mastery

By: Sasha Dichter

Sasha Dichter — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 12:40:00 +0000

Danny there is so much beauty in what you write, thank you for sharing it. It is indeed how we respond that defines our experience. My swimming still is not effortless, but I keep chipping away…and, more important, I keep working on my response when I’m in the water. The irony of course is that my frustration is surely part of the source of the strain that is causing effort in the first place. (That and the fact that I’m just not floating on my left side as well as I float on my right

By: Sheila Sekhar

Sheila Sekhar — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 06:07:00 +0000

That is what i want to achieve too- 2 minutes per 100 mts

By: Arina Thomsen

Arina Thomsen — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:10:00 +0000

Thank you!

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 15:56:00 +0000

I enjoyed reading this, and it stimulated a lot of thoughts about how we learn and why. I gather from your post that you have taught yourself to swim, but you are not an effortless swimmer, which is what you aspire to. I think this type of frustration plagues many of us who study TI, even though the level at which the frustration starts varies from person to person. In my case, I would like to be able to swim distance at a pace of under 2 min/100 m, and many swimmers claim that they don’t know how to swim that slowly! When I step back and look at this, the same thing seems to happen to a lot of us, which is that our aspirations exceed our capabilities. The question here is not only whether to keep working at getting better, but also how you will feel while you are working on it. In the end, we may all be programmed to aspire to things we can’t attain and, if we take this as a given, the question becomes what kind of life we will have while struggling to improve. Do you feel like you are lost in a world of unending beauty and discovery or are you dreading the next time you get ready to do battle in the pool? There is, of course, a whole spectrum of responses in between, but life is short. I hope you will find the things you are looking for, even if you never succeed in effortless swimming!

By: Andrew Kessler

Andrew Kessler — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 14:49:00 +0000

Very nicely stated. Thank you so much.