by Josephine Bell, Personal Assistant, Pottsville

I’ve been staying in a hotel for about a week. Above us is an elegant rooftop swimming pool with spa and sauna facilities. Early yesterday morning I found myself feeling that a swim would be nice. It’s something I very seldom do, but this time I had even packed a pair of goggles as well as my bathers, so I was well prepared and had everything I needed for an enjoyable experience.

It felt very lovely to be swimming in the dawn’s early light above the city and to watch the skyscape change at that special morning time. But it felt even more lovely to be with myself in the pool as I experimented with some simple exercises I had learned from Simone Benhayon an international swimming instructor. As I was playing with breathing through my nose and keeping my head under the water I could feel various tensions in my body and then a melting away of a feeling of driven-ness, of moving forward, which allowed me to feel my body more deeply. But more than that, I could feel the innate joy and playfulness of just being me in my body in the water. This took me back to being a child and how I used to play for hours in various friends’ swimming pools, and the simple delight of it.

I contemplated the fact that over the years I had lost much of the joy of simply swimming, of just feeling the grace of my body in the water, and had therefore stopped doing it very often. Even when I did get into the water and swim, it had become overlaid with the sense of being another thing “to do” because it was good for me, or needed the exercise, or to be more toned, or whatever mental construct was running at the time! I could feel the mental driven-ness of that approach, its narrowness and constriction, and how that way had actually become the norm in so many areas of my life – not overtly perhaps, but it was there in the background all the same. It was a beautiful moment to fully feel just how much this way of living had closed me down to the depth and richness of life pulsing within my own body. In effect I had lost touch with the symphony of me swimming through life.

As I felt all of this and how the beauty of my own symphony was beginning to emerge once again, I also felt a deep gratitude to Universal Medicine (UniMed), Serge Benhayon, and the many UniMed practitioners who have helped and inspired me to start to open those doors in myself that had long been closed and thus find myself, after so many years, inspired to take a delicious dive in a pool on a rooftop in Sydney.