Under my skin, under the water

Leilia Dore explains how cold water swimming has helped her and her body communicate with each other again after years of disconnect – with kindness, pride and curiosity

My body and I have never been the best of friends. I think we never really learned how to communicate, despite all the time we have spent in each other’s company.

For many years I lived with anxiety and a disregulated nervous system. Being inside my body while it did normal things that bodies are built to do made me feel unsafe. Feeling my heart beating hard and fast, or my breathing getting heavier climbing a hill, or my skin flushing hot or cold – all these sensations felt like fear, rather than signs that I was living. I became so good at looking for warnings that somewhere along the way I lost the ability to notice sensations like joy, pleasure and safety.

My body always felt too big for the space allotted to me. Clothes labels, seats with arm rests, images of other perfect bodies are just some of the signposts the world has used to tell me that my midsize form is not quite right. I learned to read those signposts very young.

I started cold water swimming two years ago while depressed and heartbroken. Under the water, my body and I have been easing our way towards a tentative truce. We have been getting to know each other better. In the cold, I find it easier to be kind.

Through that first winter of swimming, the physical feelings on and under my skin were so strong that they overrode everything that was happening in my mind. All that was available to me for the minutes I was in the water were sensations. Cold so deep that it felt like fire. Ache in the bones of each finger. Peace saturating my brain; a precious spaciousness that would stay fora few hours after each swim.

In the cold, focussing on the sensations of my body, I found some relief in my mind.

Reading sensations

In Call of the Wild, trauma educator and somatic practitioner Kimberly Ann Johnson writes: “Sensations are a powerful doorway out of habitual thinking and feeling. If words are the language of the mind, sensations are the language of the body.”

I had to relearn the ability to read sensations to understand what my body was saying. Swimming helped me translate.

Johnson talks about learning to notice and name sensations; about developing a new lexicon to make space for feelings of safety, pleasure and joy to come to the surface, to grow. As my sensation lexicon grew, I began to feel more.

Now, more than two years into my swimming journey, being underwater has taught me so much about pleasure and joy. Making space in my life for these sensations alongside the harder ones has made my body a much easier place to reside inside. And the language of sensations is a beautiful one to speak. It is poetry.

Being inside my body in the water can feel exhilarating. Often, as the water hits my knees, a sensation like a stream of bubbles starts in my toes and trickles up through me, brushing against my organs, tickling them. I find myself laughing out loud as my body sinks below the surface.

I feel graceful under water. It is not that I become light or weightless; the heft of my body remains, but takes on a different quality. I turn and twist with a leisurely intentionality. I feel full of myself, powerful, sexy. I think about how unsurprising it is that people tell stories about mermaids – it is easy to imagine being half-woman, half-fish.

I use my litheness to spin my body through the water, spiralling round and round. I play.

The way my flesh melts into the cold makes me feel invincible. As I towel myself dry, I feel like thick treacle running off a wooden spoon. Like my skeleton can’t quite hold me. Being in my body becomes luxurious in the hours after a swim, like the speed of the world has been turned down a few notches.

A kinder vision

All this lovely feeling makes space for kinder seeing, too. Focussing on how pleasurable it can feel under my skin helps me see myself as attractive, sexy, strong.

My Instagram is full of diverse, powerful bodies, throwing themselves into the cold, wide smiles splitting my phone screen. My body is one of them, curves and dimples adding to the play of light and shade. I can imagine how good those bodies feel, because I know.

Through swimming in the cold, my body and I have learned to communicate again after our years of disconnect, with kindness and pride and curiosity. Being under water has helped me live more gently under my own skin. I’ve learnt how to speak in sensations; I’m not fluent yet, but I’ll get there. My body and I are becoming friends, at last.

Leilia Dore is a wild swimmer and writer, based in Bristol. She writes about her swims on Instagram: @swimmingthroughtheseasons

This article is from the April 2023 issue of Outdoor Swimmer. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.