First Step: Feeling Your Ballast

First step in swimming effortlessly is to have faith or trust the water- slowly, gradually feel it support you.
How? Surrender your weight to the water. You will know it when you feel it, can’t think it.
Feeling your ballast. This is balance.
I cannot teach you to feel, but can point at techniques that can take you to the edge, the rest is for you to feel. Quiet your thinking mind. By quieting the thinking, it opens up the ability to move deeper into the sensations of the body. By going deeper into the body a greater awareness that you have tension is possible. Surrender to it, let go.
Merriam-Webster defines ballast as a heavy substance such as rocks or water placed in such a way as to improve stability and control. Another definition I found: ballast is something that provides security and balance.
If you place your body in such a way-like leaning on your lungs, imagine they are the heavy rocks- you can be in a better position-literally to create your ballast and thus feel you are balanced in the water.
You will know it when you feel it, it can’t be thought but felt.
Then swimming can become effortless.