{"id":17457,"date":"2023-07-31T21:55:23","date_gmt":"2023-07-31T21:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yogajournal.com\/?p=112931"},"modified":"2023-07-31T21:55:23","modified_gmt":"2023-07-31T21:55:23","slug":"why-i-think-of-free-diving-as-underwater-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/31\/why-i-think-of-free-diving-as-underwater-yoga\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Think of Free Diving as Underwater Yoga"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! <a href="https:\/\/outsideapp.onelink.me\/wOhi\/6wh1kbvw" class="o-content-cta-link" data-analytics-event="click" data-analytics-data="{"name":"Element Clicked","props":{"destination_url":"https:\/\/outsideapp.onelink.me\/wOhi\/6wh1kbvw","domain":"<>","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}”>Download the app<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m sinking. This is my favorite part of free diving, a sport I came to Hawaii\u2019s Big Island a dozen years ago to learn, before I had any idea that I\u2019d make the island my home. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s complexity\u2014its life and its currents, its songs and its depths.<\/p>\n

But it was only when I learned to relinquish most of my equipment\u2014keeping just a mask, snorkel, and fins\u2014that 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\u2019s a freedom I feel when I\u2019m underwater, not just with the fish and the corals, but with the fluid itself\u2014a oneness with the water, as it presses against me on all sides, against all my human crevices, all the way to my heart.<\/p>\n

Free divers sometimes talk about how their sport is underwater yoga, and rely on land-based yoga skills to help them improve: Asanas<\/em><\/a> for developing strength and flexibility; pranayama<\/em><\/a> for breath control; bhandas<\/em><\/a> for specific finning techniques; and even a super-advanced khechari mudra<\/em> <\/a>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\u2019s also the mental strength that yoga forges, useful for just about everything on both sides of the ocean\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019s Underjungle<\/em>, a tale of love, loss, family, and war\u2014set entirely underwater. So War and Peace,<\/em> but three-thousand feet deeper. And considerably shorter. And maybe a little funnier, too. But it\u2019s also a book about the sea. Not just the marine life, but what it\u2019s like to live in the water\u2014in the sense that that\u2019s where you\u2019d find your reality, everything you know and everything you need, your minerals, food, mates, stories, and ideas.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a womb, a sheath. And you\u2019d depend on it for everything, because it\u2019s a place you\u2019d never leave.<\/p>\n

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\u2014it\u2019s like being an astronaut, sealed up in a suit, unable to enter the ocean\u2019s enormity because of all the equipment, your eyes persistently fixed on your gauges. Or as the free diver Kirk Krack,<\/a> who served as underwater advisor for Avatar: The Way of Water<\/em><\/a>, once told me, scuba diving is \u201ctearing through a forest in a Hummer with the AC on and the windows up.\u201d<\/p>\n

But free diving is intimacy. Both with yourself and the life that suddenly isn\u2019t 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\u2019s off all our coasts.<\/p>\n

If yoga is about stillness and mindfulness, free diving<\/a> is its underwater version. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

Which returns me to where I started this story: Off Hawaii Island\u2019s Pu\u02bbuhonoa o Honaunau, or \u201cPlace of Refuge,\u201d a sanctuary that generations of Hawaiians would flee to if they broke a kapu<\/em>, or taboo, and I\u2019m sinking. If you\u2019re 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\u2014but not just any world. An impossibly rich one of movement and currents and slapping tails and flitting and scuttling and shimmering fish. Where there\u2019s always some of that mystery, too.<\/p>\n

Not long ago, I spoke with Wallace J. Nichols, who wrote the best-selling Blue Mind<\/a><\/em>, about how we interact with water. He\u2019s a free diver, too. \u201cWater stimulates all our senses<\/a> simultaneously,\u201d he reminded me. \u201cYou smell it and taste it and hear it and touch it. The sight of water can be sparkly, and often it\u2019s mesmerizing, but it doesn\u2019t demand interpretation. It\u2019s restorative and transcendent, and maybe even mildly hypnotic.\u201d Everything in the ocean comes at you all at once, and that\u2019s how we perceive it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that world I sink through, a place where ideas lose their hard edges and thoughts become directionless, as I enter the \u201cflow.\u201d Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi<\/a> first developed the term in 1990 to describe the state where you\u2019re so fully immersed in what you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s time to start kicking toward the surface. I can\u2019t stay underwater forever. There\u2019s a world up there, with currents in the air. They\u2019re also what let us fly.<\/p>\n

About Our Contributor<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Sturz is author of the novel <\/em>Underjungle<\/a>, out August 1, and set entirely underwater.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Book
(Photo: Courtesy of Unnamed Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\"Why<\/figure>\n

A diver explores how he cultivates mindfulness 80 feet below the surface of the sea.<\/p>\n

The post Why I Think of Free Diving as Underwater Yoga<\/a> appeared first on Yoga Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[37,35,36],"class_list":["post-17457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ayurveda","tag-blogs","tag-yoga","tag-yogacourseware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogacourseware.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}