Miracle Swimming Movement

What Is This Movement?

The Miracle Swimming Movement is a campaign dedicated to redefining the main goal of swimming instruction from “moving from here to there” to achieving safety in water over one’s head by knowing one’s buoyancy. Its approach was designed to help fearful adults become calm and confident in deep water. It then became apparent that all ages of swimmers need the same information.

Over the years, the movement has become an effort to encourage traditional instructional organizations to reconsider long-standing teaching methods and to recognize how a stroke-centered approach may leave many people without the confidence and skills they need to survive.

The belief at the heart of the movement is simple: adults who are afraid of the water can learn successfully when they are taught in a supportive and effective way. When the goals of the public and the goals of swimming instruction both prioritize comfort and confidence, drowning can be virtually eliminated.

The Movement’s Tenets

 

  • -The main purpose of learning to swim—first and foremost—is safety in water over one’s head
  • -Safety in water over one’s head should be specifically taught
  • -Safety should be prioritized before strokes, treading, and other advanced water skills
  • -Comfort is non-negotiable
  • -Every student is a natural, curious learner and learning can always be fun. There is no need for rushing, pressure, discomfort, or fear in learning.
  • -We can virtually end drowning around the world if we teach safety first to all people. Those who wish to learn efficiency as well—strokes—may learn it afterward.
  • -Learning to swim is learning to be peaceful in water over one’s head.
  • -Someone who can swim is not afraid in deep water. Someone who is not peaceful in deep water cannot swim.
  • -It’s essential to teach kids to swim. It’s even more important to teach adults to swim…first.
  • -All people of all ages can learn to swim unless they have a debilitating learning handicap.
  • -Every instructor and agency should guarantee learning

Be A Hero to Adult Students

You can be 100% successful with adult students who are afraid in deep water. You can be trained and qualified, prepared and confident.

  • -Learners who think they might die cannot learn arms, legs, and breathing
  • -There are essential skills you’ve never seen
  • -Change the goal of lessons from strokes to comfort
  • -Learn how to heal fear rather than managing or avoiding it
  • -Make learning easy
  • -Forget about stroke mechanics
  • -Let your heart lead
  • -Be validated for things you know but never had words for
  • -Back up your teaching with forty-plus years of new, proven explanations
  • -Succeed with every single student. Give them reason to come back. Take them to their goals.
  • -Learn a new way of seeing
  • -Teach things that make sense
  • -Take our Instructor Training
  • -Learn how to teach “afraids” correctly every time
  • -End the state of emergency in adult swimming lessons worldwide

Read CNN.com OpEd by Melon Dash

 

 

Register for Instructor Training List

See the videos at the right to watch one student’s 33-day path from fear in a pool to freedom in the ocean.

Everyone on your aquatics staff needs this information. It is the key to being 100% successful with afraid adults and any non-swimmer. An instructor who cannot bring an afraid adult to freedom in deep water is not qualified to teach afraid adults.

We believe that our teaching system is the key that unlocks all the steps to end preventable drowning worldwide.

Vernon December 5, 2022

This is what’s possible with Miracle Swimming. The surfing was learned on holiday the week after finishing 5 courses with us. No one had ever done all our Core Courses in one month before. Standing ovation, Vernon!

“What? Learn to swim without learning strokes?!”

Panic looks like this

Learning looks like this

Yes. There’s more to knowing how to swim than strokes. It turns out that the other knowledge is more important!

The other knowledge is where safety is.

What do you call someone who can do strokes in four feet of water but who won’t do them in the deep end? A non-swimmer!

A person who can swim is not afraid in deep water. Therefore, the person above can’t “swim.” S/he can stroke. She is executing a movement called “swimming” but she can’t “swim.”

Is every student who “finished lessons” at your school peaceful in deep water? Adults? Kids?

Our students from all 50 states and 19 countries took swimming lessons at home—not just once—and they were not satisfied with their progress. They went to the internet, found us, took a vacation, and got the correct ideas. They turned their swimming around.

Knowing how to swim is more than strokes. It’s peacefulness in deep water. It’s mastery of the relationship between one’s body and the water. It’s knowing how you float. And whether you float. It’s knowing what a float is. It’s not worrying about how you’ll get air.

If you teach adults who are afraid in water (half of American adults) in shallow water, and they learn freestyle but never go to deep water, and you turn them loose saying, “There you go! I’ve taught you to swim!” we believe it’s a serious error. They know they aren’t safe. And that means they can’t swim. In your heart of hearts, do you know, that, too?

It’s the same for kids. They usually learn in water over their heads, but do they learn to stop and rest indefinitely? If not, they are not yet safe. They cannot swim.

If you say, “But if it works in shallow water, it’ll work in deep water,” check again. That should be true but it’s not…because afraid students’ minds are not in synch with their bodies in deep water. They don’t “know” the water.

It’s the instructor’s job to teach them.

Who Says?

Melon (nee Mary Ellen) Dash, founder of Miracle Swimming and Miracle Swimming School for Adults has been trained by ~7,000 afraid adult students.

She’s taught afraid adult non-swimmers exclusively, full time, nonstop for over forty years. She wrote a book about what her students taught her: the solution. If there is only one solution, this is it. You will recognize it when you see it. Whereas her students used to “lose it” in deep water, now they “keep it.”

Dash is a nationally-ranked masters swimmer. She developed a new paradigm for teaching and learning in 1983: The 5 Circles Teaching Method.

Instructors worldwide have been licensed to teach this unimpeachable system.

Adults are afraid because their parents were afraid, or they were hurt by a water experience, or they were taught incorrectly.

The incorrect teaching must end.  We believe that instructors of adults must be 100% successful teaching afraid students to overcome fear.

Dash has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, NBC’s Today Show, CNN.com OpEd, CNN’s Headline News, Psychology Today, Real Simple, Elle, SNN, ABC 7 The View, Tampa Bay Times, and dozens more.

“My students are suffering from what I don’t know.”

Sharon Powers, Powers Swim School

“Melon identified something that was wrong with the way adults were being taught to swim. She developed a system to teach afraid adults that has set the bar high for every aquatic agency and/or swim instructor—to visit their methods and make some adjustments to meet the needs of adults who have fear of water.”

Sue Nelson, USA Swimming

“You said so much that’s industry-disrupting. One of them was that if we’re not comfortable in deep water, we can’t swim. That hit home.”

Eric Hill, Miracle Swimming “book graduate”

Swim Instructor Masterclass

Watch a free masterclass for instructors to learn the basics of teaching afraid adults to swim. This material has never been made public. 45 minutes. Pay special attention to the segments on “Instant Insanity” and Statue of Liberty.

(Updated video coming Fall, 2026)

Example of Incorrect Teaching

 

“You must be horizontal to float correctly.” If you tell a fit man or woman that to float correctly they must be horizontal, how do you explain it? If their feet go to the bottom in four feet of water when they lie down on the water—which is their natural float—(the water is doing all the work) and you tell them their feet have to be at the surface, you are asking them to struggle to lift their feet up. For what purpose? It pulls their chins down, causing their face to go under.

The swim team doesn’t float horizontally. Why should anyone else?

Floating is not meant to be a struggle. “Feet on the bottom and face in the air” is a perfectly good float.

An adult or child whose feet go to the bottom in shallow water is simply demonstrating physics: dense (muscular) legs don’t float. But upper bodies with lungs, fat, or breasts float just fine.

If they try to hold their feet up, they go into a V float which is uncomfortable, unbalanced, and unsustainable, often pulling the face under water. This prevents them from learning to float.

Swimming students believe teachers who have a credential. Yet the student is often misled. This causes frustration,  discouragement and failure. Distrust in traditional swimming lessons continues to grow. One woman told us, “If I failed again, I wouldn’t be able to stand it.”

Teaching misinformation prevents people from becoming safe.

You can be part of the fix.

Many instructors notice that their teaching doesn’t get through to everyone. They think it’s the student’s fault. At Miracle Swimming, we’ve concluded that this is rarely the case.

You can teach a system that reaches every afraid adult every single time and produces adults who are no longer afraid in deep water…and are ecstatic. They become safe. Then, they enroll in your advanced programs.

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Why Teach Adults?

Adults control the family budget. They decide what the family will do and which activities their kids will participate in. Adults give kids messages about swimming. If adults can swim, those messages will be one thing. If they can’t, the messages will be something else. Ninety percent of our afraid adult students had at least one parent who was afraid. It is well-documented that there’s a higher chance that kids of swimmer-parents will learn to swim than kids of non-swimmer parents—by a longshot.

We surveyed 80 instructors and 800 afraid adults, asking them to send us their two burning questions about teaching afraid adults or learning to swim, respectively. Both groups had the same questions!

How can those instructors consider themselves qualified to teach adults?

There are three times as many adults as kids in the U.S. You’d think there would be three times as many adult swim schools. Yet there are almost none. If you knew how to be successful, you could have a good business teaching afraid adults.

If instructors could teach afraid adults with 100% success, more parents could swim.

If more parents could swim, more kids would learn to swim. Fewer kids would drown. Fewer parents would drown. If all adults and kids could swim, the drowning rate would plummet.

The premise from the early 1900s that if we teach all kids to swim, all adults will eventually be able to swim never panned out: parents’ fear, lack of pool access, and instructors’ lack of knowledge prevented it.

There’s a sensible, fascinating path to teaching swimming that leads every student to success. You’ll reach this level of teaching success one step at a time. When all swim instructors have learned it, we’ll have world water safety.

Do You Ever Have These Problems?

  • Your adults quit classes
  • You don’t know how to help them
  • You don’t feel connected to them
  • Their progress is glacially slow
  • They keep checking their watches
  • They pretend they understand and feel
  • okay, but you know they don’t
  • You don’t feel successful

Holding hands made jumping in possible

What Can You Do?

Join our mailing list. Take our training.

If You Wish to Become More Confident As an Instructor in Deep Water

You can’t teach adult students to be confident in deep water unless you’re confident there, yourself. Uplevel your oneness with the water and change your life, career, and job satisfaction. Three steps:

Read CNN.com Opinion by Melon Dash

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