Sri Chinmoy:
The Peace Meditation at the United Nations

A SWIMMING MARATHON: SHE NEVER GAVE UP

UN Staff Member Vijaya Claxton is also a member of the Peace Meditation Group at the UN led by Sri Chinmoy. For a number of Years she has been training to swim across the English channel. Traveling to Dover England she would acclimatize to the cold water and  train while waiting for good tide and weather conditions. On previous attempts she was sometimes also accompanied by other members of the meditation Group at the UN who served on the support crew. Below is her story

“The English Channel is like no other body of water. It has a living personality, a force. It’s like swimming in liquid power.” That’s the perspective of someone who knows this force intimately, 59-year-old Vijaya Claxton -the oldest American woman ever to swim across it.

Vijaya completed the 20-25 mile swim from Dover, England, to Wissant Beach on the French coast on Sept. 9 in just under 22 hours.

“I tried to make it a meditative experience – invoking my spiritual teacher’s presence with each stroke – and stay open to the divine Grace,” she said.

 “I also tried to keep up an inner dialogue and stay in harmony with whatever it wanted to do with me. “In one training session, when the water was really rough, I said, ‘Okay, so you’re playing with me -making me go up and down.’ And inwardly, I could almost image the Channel smiling.” But this time the Channel wasn’t smiling.

 “Right from the beginning I was nauseous and throwing up. I asked for Dramamine, but my handlers on the boat were afraid it would make me drowsy. So they gave me a placebo, and I kept on feeding the fish.

 “Finally, I got fed up and said: ‘I’m doing the best I can, but I’ve got to have a little cooperation!’ Shortly afterwards, my sea sickness went away.

” At one point she started having difficulty breathing. Inhaling too much seawater, or even mist from the waves, can affect the lungs, she explained. “First my nasal passage blocked, and then my throat started to swell, so 1 couldn’t suck in enough oxygen. Every few strokes I had to slow down or stop, gasping for air.

 “In the boat they were freaking, because the tide had started to change.” If she lost the incoming tide, she would have been swept out to sea, forced to fight ferocious currents – in the frigid water – until the tide changed again several hours later.

“But they gave me an antihistamine, and that – along with my prayers -got me breathing once more.”

 “After some time, my handlers on the boat said something rather ‘charming’: ‘Swim the next five hours hard!’ At this point, I had been swimming through much of the night and I thought, ‘Five hours hard – at this point?’

“If you’ve ever been rock bottom with everything, that’s where I was. I was swallowing water and had nothing left. Nothing about me was doing the swimming now. I was like an observer. I remember thinking, ‘This is interesting. Nothing hurts, and I’m going all out.’ I felt the divine Grace had kicked in, and that my spiritual teacher was swimming for me.

 “Much later I happened to look upward and was struck by how luminous the sky was. Then suddenly I realized it was dawn, and just ahead lay the French shore. I was filled with gratitude.

” Vijaya’s Channel crossing was the culmination of a six-year marathon that included three unsuccessful attempts. After each failure she said she learned a valuable lesson.

“The first time I learned the importance of dealing with seasickness. The second time my right shoulder went out in the middle of the swim, so I could only swim with one arm. I had a lot of trouble getting the shoulder healed and had to learn a completely new stroke -one easier on the shoulder.

“The third time I failed because 1 just didn’t have the physical strength. When the tide turned against me after I had been in the water for 18 hours, 1 was too broken to continue. 1 had never been so cold in my life, and I just wasn’t strong enough to swim for another six or seven hours. So when I got back home, I began a weightlifting program.

 

“What I love about the Channel is that it forces you to keep going back to the drawing board, and keep on getting better. It’s such a formidable presence that it makes you find your weaknesses and overcome them.

” This kind of swimming requires both personal determination and inner receptivity, Vijaya said. “I have always been a very determined person. My favorite poem by my spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoy, is: I do not give up, I never give up, for there is nothing in this entire world that is irrevocably unchangeable.”

 A few weeks ago, standing on a rocky beach in France, Vijaya Claxton proved it. Photo: Vijaya

Above excerpt is text from the final issue of Anahata Nada (August — October 10, 2007), which was never printed

 

For More about Vijayas see:  https://channel.srichinmoyraces.org/vijaya