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My dad used to go freediving every morning with his father, catching the day’s food for his family before going to school at 7am. With a brilliant mind, he became the first to go to college, breaking the generational cycle of fisherfolk survival. He is the last freediver who inherited this skill through lineage. His younger siblings never learned; some of my aunts & cousins don’t even know how to swim.
By the time of my generation, free-diving became associated as a ‘lower class’ skill by those influenced by modernizing, colonizing urban forces (arguably, it is dangerous at extreme depths). Now there is a new wave activating the treasure of this seafolk tradition.
What an incredible experience to return my body into the ocean & awaken deeply-seated embodied wisdom. I am learning how freediving incorporates principles of pranayama, breath work & meditation practice. I am learning that free diving requires us to release the gravity of fears, anxieties and worries to arrive at the depths of experience.
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