Why I Think of Free Diving as Underwater Yoga

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.

Read the full article in Yoga Journal here.