I’ve never done scuba diving, but I think it’s probably a lot like training.

You stand at the surface and take one last look around to get your bearings before you head down.

And then you go under.

The world changes.

The noise above you begins to disappear. Your surroundings change. Your sense of movement changes. Even your awareness of yourself changes.

You’re weightless, floating, totally free. You feel everything. You hear everything. And even though it might sound a little corny, for a while you just become one with that whole environment.

That sounds a lot like training to me.

You’re Just There

There comes a point in a good training session when you’re no longer thinking about what happened earlier in the day or what you’re going to do when you leave.

You’re just there.

The weight.

Your breathing.

Your position.

Your rhythm.

Your timing.

Your intent.

Everything else begins to recede.

That’s immersion.

And the more I’ve thought about that word, the more interesting it has become to me.

Because what exactly happens when we immerse ourselves in something?

What do we gain?

And perhaps more importantly:

What do we lose?

What We Gain

We gain focus.

We gain awareness.

We gain sensitivity to things that we ordinarily wouldn’t notice.

After enough years of training, you don’t simply perform a movement. You feel position. You feel tension. You recognize leverage. You recognize when something is slightly out of place before you could ever explain exactly what is wrong.

You become immersed deeply enough that you’re no longer simply observing the experience.

You’re inside it.

What We Lose

But immersion also means losing things.

We lose awareness of distractions.

We lose our sense of time.

Sometimes we lose self-consciousness.

We may even lose that constant internal conversation that follows us around throughout most of the day.

And maybe losing some of those things isn’t a loss at all.

That’s the Paradox

Is everything we gain through immersion necessarily good?

And…

Is everything we lose necessarily bad?

Probably not.

Immersion can give us tremendous discipline, but taken too far, discipline can become rigidity.

Focus can become tunnel vision.

The ability to tolerate discomfort can become an inability to recognize when discomfort is trying to tell us something.

We can become so immersed in what we’re doing that we lose perspective on everything outside of it.

But immersion can also allow us to lose things worth losing.

Fear.

Inhibition.

Unnecessary tension.

Distraction.

The need to consciously control every movement.

Maybe, even for a little while, the need to control everything.

Coming Back Up

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons training has remained such an important part of my life for so many years.

I can go under.

For thirty minutes.

For an hour.

However long it lasts.

I can leave everything else at the surface and completely immerse myself in what I’m doing.

But eventually, just like the diver, I have to come back up.

And maybe that’s the difference between immersion and escape.

Immersion is going deeply enough into something that when you do come back…

you come back different.

You bring a little of that place back with you every time you go.

Maybe the value of immersion isn’t simply what we find when we go under.

Maybe it’s also what we lose while we’re there…

and what we choose to bring back when we surface.

We Don’t Workout…We Train

Break the Paradigm.