Success and Failure by Sara Campbell review
How do you cultivate a mindset that allows you to improve without focusing on the numbers? How do you deal with the setbacks that inevitably come on your way to the deep? It is all in Sara's new course, Success and Failure

Success and Failure by Sara Campbell review

This review was written by Luca Malaguti.

The latest course by Sara Campbell, Success and Failure, touches on several familiar (and personal) issues that are relevant in freediving today. The idea that we are always being watched generates a polarity in people’s minds, one in which there are only two options: to succeed and break a record or to fail and be disregarded entirely. This is the mindset of many freedivers today. If they don’t break that new record, then all those personal achievements along the way, are forgotten.

There’s a beautiful old photo of Jacques Mayol standing on the edge of a small, wooden raft holding a large stone with a rope attached to the end of it. Practicing the ancient freediving art of Skandalopetra, he has no watch, almost no viewers, no judges, and no timekeepers. When I’m stressed about my performances, how good my breath-hold is, or how deep I went last time, I think of this photo and of how Jacques Mayol became a freediving role model, by increasing depth and time slowly, simply because he loved it and dove often.

Success and Failure is about the illusion that we must succeed for others and not ourselves. The illusion that we must set standards so high that anything which falls short is automatically a failure. If this means taking more time to go at a certain depth, even during a competition, then so be it. Like Aharon Solomons says, if you black out you went too deep, something went wrong and you should take a step back in your training. This is an issue in today’s freediving competitions because a lot of competitive freedivers black out several times before “succeeding” to hold up that white little card for a few seconds. Is this really success? By enforcing this mentality of “push at all costs” are we not slowly edging the sport into a world of cheating and doping?

Success and Failure
How do you cultivate a mindset that allows you to improve without focusing on the numbers? How do you deal with the setbacks that inevitably come on your way to the deep? It is all in Sara’s new course, Success and Failure

Sara’s course couldn’t come out at a better time. She makes her viewers re-think what success means, on an individual level and not on an AIDA roster. When we follow the standards set by our ego (influenced by external factors), then we are most likely to fail (or what we perceive as failure) and so this can generate, as Sara mentions, self-animosity. Grounded in fear and disappointment towards ourselves, self-animosity can kill our confidence and even our passion for freediving. No one, that I know of, has said this better than Henry Miller, “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Sara’s courses help deal with this; they re-establish a notion that of what counts by focusing on the self. You sat down on that mat, you held that breath, you ended with a smile on your face and not a frown. That joy is addictive and will motivate you to continue this practice.

Sodarshan Chakra Kriya is a challenging exercise for people, such as myself, that need the depth of a cold and dark body of water to enter a state of focus. Poolside statics are not enough for me to relax at times, whereas a hang at depth can do so. However, it’s important that we address these problems and, like Sara mentions, “clean out the closet of our subconscious”. If we’re not able to sit down on a mat and focus, or our mind runs wild with other thoughts, then this exercise can help. It’s challenging at first, to focus on repeating the phrases “wah-hey guru” in your head and staring at the tip of your nose. But after a while, your rambling thoughts will funnel into clear focus.

Success and Failure

Success and Failure is the combination of ancient practices that have been refined to perfection over thousands of years with today’s modern problems. Everything we do is under scrutiny, recorded by a camera or mentioned in a forum. This polarizes sports: you’re good enough or not. Freediving transcends this however, and requires a great deal of patience, especially with ourselves. To set standards according to others and not ourselves is a recipe for failure. Listening to our inner voice and overcoming this idea that we must be perfect in everything we do is how we succeed, even if by minute increments.

As Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha beautifully explains this, “Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish…Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught”.

Go to Yoga for Freediving (external link)

Other courses in the series:

Jaap

Jaap is a geologist by trade and a freediver by passion. Jaap wrote the book Longer and Deeper in 2018. His book teaches how to train for freediving and spearfishing on land.

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