Why I Consider Free Diving To Be Underwater Yoga
This article originally appeared on Yoga Journal
I'm sinking. This is my favorite part of free diving, a sport I came to Hawaii's Big Island a dozen years ago to learn, before I had any idea that I'd make the island my home. I've been a water person for as long as I can remember. I became a scuba diver in college in upstate New York (we saw trout), an ice diver in New Hampshire (oh, the freshwater icicles hanging just beneath the surface), and then a divemaster in Florida, when I first began to appreciate the ocean's complexity--its life and its currents, its songs and its depths.
But it was only when I learned to relinquish most of my equipment--keeping just a mask, snorkel, and fins--that I started to understand the water itself. Its thickness and cohesion, its rhythms and surges and its moans, everything that adds up to its movement. There's a freedom I feel when I'm underwater, not just with the fish and the corals, but with the fluid itself--a oneness with the water, as it presses against me on all sides, against all my human crevices, all the way to my heart.
Free divers sometimes talk about how their sport is underwater yoga, and rely on land-based yoga skills to help them improve: Asanas for developing strength and flexibility; pranayama for breath control; bhandas for specific finning techniques; and even a super-advanced khechari mudra to slide their tongues into their nasopharynges to open or close their eustachian tubes and flood their sinuses on very deep dives, to bring them to a higher state of consciousness, or just to reduce stress (all of it way out of my league). Then there's also the mental strength that yoga forges, useful for just about everything on both sides of the ocean's surface.
I've spent the last several years thinking a lot about the water because I spent much of it writing a book set in the ocean. It's Underjungle, a tale of love, loss, family, and war--set entirely underwater. So War and Peace, but three-thousand feet deeper. And considerably shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. But it's also a book about the sea. Not just the marine life, but what it's like to live in the water--in the sense that that's where you'd find your reality, everything you know and everything you need, your minerals, food, mates, stories, and ideas.
We human beings live in the air with only our feet on the ground. But in the ocean, the environment is all around you. It's a womb, a sheath. And you'd depend on it for everything, because it's a place you'd never leave.
To research the book, I turned to free diving and yoga, two disciplines that can be as intertwined as blades of kelp. Traditional scuba diving only takes you so far--it's like being an astronaut, sealed up in a suit, unable to enter the ocean's enormity because of all the equipment, your eyes persistently fixed on your gauges. Or as the free diver Kirk Krack, who served as underwater advisor for Avatar: The Way of Water, once told me, scuba diving is "tearing through a forest in a Hummer with the AC on and the windows up."
But free diving is intimacy. Both with yourself and the life that suddenly isn't frightened away by your bubbles. Imagine it as breath-holding meditation, but in an isolation tank large enough to cover 70 percent of the globe, of which only five percent has been mapped. We know there are at least 240,000 species in our oceans, and probably 500,000 to 10 million more. The ocean is our mysterious world, and it's off all our coasts.
If yoga is about stillness and mindfulness, free diving is its underwater version. I've learned that I can sit in the sand before I enter the water, stretch the intercostal muscles in my chest to maximize the space for my lungs, and start my deep breathing there. And I can lazily stretch my other muscles and relax, while I bring my heartbeat down.
Which returns me to where I started this story: Off Hawaii Island's Pu`uhonoa o Honaunau, or "Place of Refuge," a sanctuary that generations of Hawaiians would flee to if they broke a kapu, or taboo, and I'm sinking. If you're perfectly weighted in free diving, you no longer need to kick once you descend past 66 feet. You conserve your energy and oxygen, and you let gravity take you. It feels a little like giving in to the world and entering its vastness--but not just any world. An impossibly rich one of movement and currents and slapping tails and flitting and scuttling and shimmering fish. Where there's always some of that mystery, too.
Not long ago, I spoke with Wallace J. Nichols, who wrote the best-selling Blue Mind, about how we interact with water. He's a free diver, too. "Water stimulates all our senses simultaneously," he reminded me. "You smell it and taste it and hear it and touch it. The sight of water can be sparkly, and often it's mesmerizing, but it doesn't demand interpretation. It's restorative and transcendent, and maybe even mildly hypnotic." Everything in the ocean comes at you all at once, and that's how we perceive it.
It's that world I sink through, a place where ideas lose their hard edges and thoughts become directionless, as I enter the "flow." Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first developed the term in 1990 to describe the state where you're so fully immersed in what you're doing that nothing else matters. You lose both your sense of self and any awareness of the passage of time (although feeling I need to breathe usually reminds me). It's similar to what athletes call being in the zone, when world records are broken. Yet the fact that the flow happens in your head can make it feel boundless.
That's what I'm thinking about as I start to kick slowly and explore 60 and then 70 and then 80 feet underwater, past cuttlefish and coral and outcroppings and schools of trevallies and bright yellow tangs. In the novel, I created a species who live in this world and embrace the life that the water and currents bring them. It's a world of simple beauty, interconnectedness, and families, but also of heartbreak, conflict, undertows, and gradations of depths. My hope is that if I could make their world seem real, then readers would fall in love with it and want to protect it.
But it's time to start kicking toward the surface. I can't stay underwater forever. There's a world up there, with currents in the air. They're also what let us fly.
About Our Contributor
James Sturz is author of the novel Underjungle, out August 1, and set entirely underwater.
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