A Brief Meditation on Free-diving as Meditation

For me, free-diving has become more than just sport or a past-time.  It’s an addiction. A space in my life that calms me down and makes me feel peaceful. Free-diving is meditation.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, I cannot call free-diving “mediation” without invoking cliched image after cliched image, so before moving forward, I feel I must parse what I mean by “meditation”.  For the last… oh, I don’t know how many years, the word holds hands with the adamant San Francisco yogi, cross legged in their Upper Haight apartment in Lulu Lemon pants, a fresh cleanse waiting for them on the kitchen counter to quaff before they hop into their Prius. It has acquired the baggage of a life-style and an accompanying fashion, as well as a”sort” of person.  A sincere sort of person.  Now I am not a particularly sincere sort of person. I’d argue, in fact, that I am simply a product of my time, and currently, in our time, there’s a pervasive distrust of earnestness.  In a present faced with the failures of earnest believers of the past, we cannot help but feel the futility of sincerity.  Cynicism insulates us from making bold statements that later prove misguided.  But meditation, or at least the Lulu Lemon version of it, is earnest.  Is serious about solving all of your life problems and “finding yourself” through, yes, frequent meditation.  So before I allow myself an earnest swan dive into the benefits of free-diving as a form of meditation, I must hedge that word to my own satisfaction (being, after all, a product of this cultural moment, I can barely escape my own cynicism).  Briefly, then, what I mean by “meditation” is simply a state of calm gifted the mind by quieting it, a calm that lets the brain appreciate the world around it without needing to impose one’s self upon it. It’s the senses awake and the mind quiet that allows a kind of letting go of control and a resulting peace.

Now, to contradict myself, free-diving isn’t at all about letting go of control.  In fact, I’ve found that it requires an absolute control of mind and body.  Body has to move as little as possible but in an extremely intentional way.  Mind is two-fold: not only does it have to shut itself down to minimal function in order to conserve oxygen (blank out, I guess is the way to say it), it also has to rise to the challenge of maintaining a perfectly controlled calm.  If your brain starts to freak out 50, 60, 150 feet under water, how much oxygen you have left doesn’t really matter.  Your fear response will be a contracting of muscles, a speeding up of your heart, all things necessary for flight mode (get me out of here now!) and you will use it all up immediately. You might drown.  The quieting of your brain allows you to resist these physical reactions, reassess (carefully) certain body signals, and, ultimately, to push your limits.

Personally, I love pushing my limits.  I think its incredibly rewarding as well as unequivocally exciting to dance around what you think you can do, and then do better.  The excitement, though, comes before and after, not during the activity.  I learned this long ago with my first love, rock climbing.  It’s a similar brain game: get stoked to try a route, talk about it alot, and drink beers and be ecstatic post-send.  But during, maintain calm or else pump out (flood your fear-clenched muscles with blood) and lose your grip.  The perpetual promise of progress goads us and enhances the sport, but it isn’t something that you experience or think about while actually pursuing the sport.  That’s something else entirely. That’s the space of focus. And in free-diving, it’s such a trained focus that it transcends to an empty-minded singularity of focus.

 

 

All of these methods of control, obviously, require training.  When we think of training to be underwater for a long time, we think of practicing holding our breath or practicing the motions necessary for minimal movement.  But the brain training is equally, if not more, important.

While I have been scaling rock walls for years, I only just started free-diving. I poo-pooed it a bit at first, I’m used to pushing my physical limits by using my muscles until they fail me.  But at the time, in the middle of the South Pacific, I had few options for outdoor activity, so it seemed better than nothing.  I didn’t fall in love instantly.  Aside from the “a-giant-shark-is-going-to-sneak-up-on-me” feeling, there was also the “only girl” syndrome.  All of my free-diving experience for the past year (which comprises my free-diving career, by the way, full disclosure) has all been in the company of 2 other addicts–both male– smack in the middle of the Pacific ocean, hopping from tiny island to tiny island via sailboat.  Through no fault of theirs, the level of jocular competition stressed me out.  I went off alone (which is a terrible idea if you’re pushing your limits, never do this). Alone, without distraction, I could quietly face my own demons, and I realized that what I liked about being in the water was blending in, becoming part of the scenery.  I wanted to get better at staying down so that I could blend in even better.  In order to do so, I knew I had to focus my attention on breathing, on slowing my heart-rate, on being still.  It turned out to be my own little training session.  I thought I was just practicing holding my breath, which I was, but more importantly I stumbled upon my own way of quieting my mind. It happens sort of naturally when you couple focusing on your breathing with voyeurism.  That’s what they teach you in proper meditation, isn’t it?  Focus on your breathing.  Let your mind flutter around, only sort of noticing things in a disconnected way, then letting them go.

Eventually I started diving with the boys again, fortified by my own process for getting calm, and we all began pushing the limits together.  And that’s what’s so cool.  The challenge, the push, doesn’t disrupt the calm.  It NEEDS the calm, the blank mind. There is no checking out once you’ve reached a certain depth or a certain time down (not that kind at least), you must stay tuned in to a blank mind, keep yourself always quiet.  And because you MUST stay calm, the water world takes on a reciprocal feeling of calm.

The alienness of the underwater helps in this, I think, an eerie landscape, a suspended and silent facsimile of our dry earth, growing other-worldly plants that sway and mock and inhabited by creatures with their own rhythm of movement that is not like your own. And the monotony of the water is awe-some, in its original sense, and that awe adds to quiet-minded silence and absorption.  Couple this awe of a foreign terrain with partial sensory deprivation and a feeling of flying/weightlessness (as you get deep enough, you begin to sink without moving), it would be ecstasy were it not for a trained mind and body.  As it is, it is the deepest quiet, unhindered by much stimulation, and fortified as it is by the surreal of an alien world.  You are there, but it’s almost as if you aren’t, as if your semi-detached mind could be hallucinating.

 

 

And that’s the heart of it, the golden by-product.  Because the sport necessitates the same mental and physical space as meditation, by default, you do it.   I don’t like to meditate.  I should have said that off the bat.  I can’t sit still for that long, it feels contrived.  But when the meditation is a by-product of pursuing something else, you realize that other people who can sit down and meditate probably just care more about their own happiness.  Because the calm is worth it.  But since I apparently don’t care enough, stumbling upon free-diving has been a real gift.  I cherish the calm spots in my day.  So much so that they’ve become an addiction.  The thing that keeps me wanting to brave cold ass water and embark on dive sessions 2 or 3 times a day.  There’s this lack of words I have when I talk about it, an inability to relay the feeling that saying  “blue” and “empty” and “alien” and “quiet” and “peace” and “weightless” and “calm” doesn’t fully cover.  But meditation while submerged 100 feet down provides me with the singular most heart-filling feelings I’ve ever had.  Like there is no such thing as sorrow in the world and my insides are smiling.  And there are pretty creatures and swaying seaweeds. And unicorns and rainbows, definitely. Underwater ones. I swear.