Buoyancy control: Balancing highs and lows as an end in itself
In scuba diving, “buoyancy control” refers (generally) to the skill of maintaining “neutral buoyancy” while underwater. That is, through regulating your breath, you keep an internal density that’s equal to the density of the water around you. Meaning, it’s your ability to float while immersed, rather than getting pushed around by the always changing currents.
When we’re feeling balanced in our lives, we are experiencing the all-around sense that we get physically when we’re amongst the kelp. Things are happening, changes are occurring, the boss did that thing again, and Uncle Harry has the politics of 1955, but we don’t internally feel upset, thrown, or imbalanced. We’re buoyant. It has the qualities of feeling grounded, often pleasant, but primarily safe and under control (without being overly controlling).
So here are some thoughts about this state to help you spot it in yourself when it spontaneously happens, in order to back engineer an understanding of how to make it happen. I’ll give a vignette at the end to flesh out the points.
1) Buoyancy is not dominance. Try to dominate the ocean and see what happens. I had a brief dalliance with surfing some years back, and if there’s one sport or practice that teaches you balance, it’s surfing. To the degree that you think you’re in control of the waves, you lose touch with what it’s actually requiring of you, and it smacks you-hard-for the hubris. It’s the same with balancing the forces of one’s dryland life. If you made a list of life factors in your control, and those not, you’d have a much longer list of the latter that you have to contend with. Balance comes with an acceptance of the nature of those factors, with surrendering to the fact of not controlling them, and then a creative participation with them to find the elegant balance point. You have to engage them, not control them.
2) Buoyancy is integrative. Integration is where different things, or factors, or forces, are held together such that they all work synergistically. This is a low-stress condition, rather than one where all the factors are banging up against each other, or vying for power. A family holiday dinner that goes off the rails is an example of “not integrated”, both in functioning, and in pain. When we are buoyant, the different elements or participants are working together.
3) Buoyancy is relaxed. I did a dive in Monterey once, when relatively new to the sport, and new to cold water diving. My weights were not calibrated properly, I wasn’t familiar with the location, and was just generally stressed out. Instead of controlling my buoyancy, the ocean did it for me. I.e., I got thrashed around, got more stressed out, and less relaxed…and then even less floaty. Relaxation is the subjective state, and objective physical state, both precondition and result, of buoyancy.
4) Buoyancy is not ruminative. This is more about depression and anxiety, than diving, because an internal, self-focused, and dog-chasing-its-own-tail thought pattern define the experience of these moods. When we are feeling relaxed, safe, balanced, not controlling, and integrated, then we are not ruminating. We are paying attention to our relationship to the other players and factors, while not losing our sense of ourselves. We are engaged with life as it’s playing out, rather than trying to strategized in our minds how to control it.
5) Buoyancy is often joyful. Maybe not fizzy Champaign joy, or first dates joy, or won-the-Lotto joy, but it has an inherent lightness, playfulness, sense of “ok-ness”, and a basic permission to experience life—ours and that around us that we’re relating to—with pleasure and joy.
6) Buoyancy is not every “achieved”. That is, buoyancy is an ongoing process and practice which requires constant engagement and skillful relationship to the “different stuff” of our lives. We don’t “attain” or “master” balance; rather, we keep getting more and more skillful about noticing when we’re out of whack, and then more and more elegant about coming back into whack.
An Example: So, those are the major qualities of “buoyancy”, and here’s a brief example of what it does and doesn’t feel like. Here’s Dave unbalanced, and finding his way back into buoyancy.
At 37, Dave’s career in academia was stable and trending upward in a fairly predictable way. He has been married to Sarah for 10 years, and has an 8-year-old girl. Though he’s had a history with depression, he hasn’t had an episode for a few years, after having done several periods of psychotherapy, and paying more attention to basics like diet and sleep. On a recent Monday, though, after a weekend of stressful solo kid duties (Sarah was away for work), he arrived at work to find that a project had been derailed by the dean of his department, when he thought it was on track. The first out-of-the-gate response from his mind was an old depressive saw: “I knew it wouldn’t work, and shouldn’t have gotten excited about it.” On a normal day, he could have absorbed the blow and not wobbled, but on that day, being underslept and without much time to himself, he had little buffer against a sudden disappointment. His physical energy sank-depression’s helpful way of trying to defend against shock-and he became sullen towards his dean. He completely forgot about the lunch he brought, and stayed glued to his computer trying to fix the situation, even though it was unfixable. He left work feeling awful, overwhelmed, out of balance, not buoyant.
On the drive back home, though, the commute gave him some enforced reflection time to consider (reflection being the opposite of “rumination”) what had happened, and to get some perspective on his situation. He realized that he’d gotten blindsided and instead of accepting the facts at hand, latched onto trying to find some kind of control. In seeing this, he could relax a bit into more surrender, into a, “Well, I don’t like it but this is how it is,” attitude that turned down the control impulses, allowed his body to calm down, and let his mind ease open to consider various options that otherwise were shut out. He started to recognize the sense of calm and settled-into-things quality that in his work with depression he’d experienced many times before, which helped him remember his developed sense of faith in things working out ok. By the time he got home, he didn’t exactly feel joy, but he felt a sense of being plugged back into his life, which came with a modest sense of “goodness.”
So, that’s buoyancy in a nutshell. The key practice is both to accept that buoyancy is ongoing, something that gets refined but not controlled, and that it is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Enjoy.
