The Body Underwater: Diving into Life, Depth, and Selfhood

The Embodied Relationship between Diving and the Self

“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.”
— Jacques Cousteau

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Breathing is predominantly a subconscious act, but it can come to the forefront of the mind in times of extreme emotion, exertion, or deep calm. There is a notion of control when attention is turned towards breathing, both in gaining or losing control over it, but it is otherwise a background action — simple, yet vital. Its physical effects can be seen if you pay close enough attention: from the rise and fall of the chest to shifting limbs, breath reverberates throughout the body.

What changes when a body enters a space where breath is no longer subconscious, but instead requires directed intent? What happens to the body underwater, a place where it can no longer find the air to breathe?

“Diving is a way to experience the world in a more profound and meaningful way, where every breath is a reminder of the miracle of life.”
— Jonathan Bird

In my recent experience obtaining my Open Water Scuba Diving Certification, I carried over sixty pounds of gear on my body for the antithetical act of breathing underwater. In the sea, I heard each inhale I took and I watched each exhale travel back to the surface in air bubbles — back to where my breath was meant to be. The number one rule of scuba diving echoed through my mind: “Never stop breathing.” If a scuba diver holds their breath, the air inside their lungs will expand or contract as they change depth, risking serious injuries such as lung-overexpansion [13]. My slow and rhythmic breathing worked to calm me while simultaneously keeping me alive at depths of up to 60 feet. In learning what is physiologically required to survive as a human beneath the surface, I felt what most amateur divers feel: invigorating excitement, consuming fear, and the pure uncertainty that comes with diving into the unknown.

I discovered a new dimension of myself that I had never known before: how I exist underwater — how I move, how I observe, how I communicate in a space limited to physical gestures. My understanding of myself has shifted to now include my ability to live underwater, wholly feeling the simultaneous freedom and limitation in diving where movement is multidimensional, but constrained by the ticking clock that governs how long the body can be in the ocean before succumbing to it.

It is therefore constructive to examine this experience, to investigate how humankind’s relationship to the water has evolved within us, physiologically and philosophically.

The ocean embodies the fascinating and frightening nature of the unknown, and diving is a means to confront its mysteries with bravery and curiosity. People are not adapted to live in the water, but that doesn’t preclude us from feeling an innate desire to be near it and within it, seeking the calming, meditative state that it elicits. To quench this desire to be underwater for extended periods of time, human beings had to figure out how to successfully manage air in the water. Through scuba diving, a person carries their own source of air that they must continuously breathe to maintain the pressure in their lungs [12]. Otherwise, a diver can freedive, relying on a single breath for the entirety of their time underwater. Freediving is an astounding example of how far one can push their physiological limits. With training, a diver can learn to resist one of the body’s strongest instincts: the urge to breathe. Though scuba divers and freedivers manage air differently in the water, they are united by the psycho-physical process of diving in which the body and mind have to work in concert to ensure survival underwater.

Considered an extreme sport in some of its forms, diving is an embodied act that renegotiates the physical and metaphysical limits of the self. In an environment that is hostile to human nature, able to sustain life or assist in death, diving facilitates a shift of selfhood that isn’t possible in everyday life, enabling divers to look into themselves through a lens that can only be unlocked underwater.

I. The Descent

Why do we dive?

“The scuba diver dives to look around. The freediver dives to look inside.”
— Umberto Pelizzari

American author and activist Rebecca Solnit characterizes ocean blue as “the color of an emotion, the color of that distance is the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go” [14]. In this, one finds the directional relationship between human desire and distance: to have what we can’t have, to discover the unknown in diving…but is this the only reason people dive?

There is a common belief that people who choose to do extreme sports such as freediving are simply adrenaline junkies, thrill-seekers with no care for their own safety or life. However, behavioral scientist Dr. Brymer finds that adept participants don’t engage in extreme sports for the thrill of the risk, but to experience the deep and profound relationship with nature they have developed through their sport [2]. They describe it like a dance with a partner, learning to adapt to one another’s dynamic movements with awareness and grace.

Participants view their extreme sports as a means to transcend to an “ineffable” state of mind [2]. Languages are constructed to relay common experiences to one another, and this is precisely why language fails to describe such extreme experiences — they are felt by few and thus understood by even fewer. There is a moment of shifting between worlds, whether it is paddling over the waterfall or taking the dive, during which the body is reconfigured “in a way that feels like being alive” [2]. In this sense, extreme sports are a branch of the human experience that go beyond the boundaries of the normal world.

However, where other extreme sports are characterized by acceleration and adrenaline rushes, like mountain biking or cliff jumping, freedivers must work to avoid adrenaline since it consumes their oxygen and inhibits their performance, contrary to the enhancement effect it has in other sports [15]. Instead, freedivers focus on maintaining a calm, meditative state throughout their dive, often closing their eyes to focus entirely on regulating their body into an almost sleep-like state.

In this sense, freedivers travel into themselves in the water, bodily meditating in a space governed entirely by the sensations of the self, for the duration of a single breath. Freedivers speak of the silence and calm the sport brings into their life, when they are immersed in a space in which the only person that’s there for you is yourself. It requires a bone-deep knowledge of your capabilities that extend beyond the mental, where intuition and listening to your body can mean the difference between life and death. The mind is opened up to perceive with a clarity that cannot be found amidst the hecticness of everyday life. Participants put their lives on the line to push their personal limits — this is what freedom is. This is what divers look for in the water: the silence to hear their own voices, to sense their true being away from everything familiar.

What happens when we dive?

To understand how divers enter a new state of being underwater, one must examine what happens to the body during a dive. Once submerged, the body immediately adjusts in the water to compensate for its inability to live in it. Within seconds, the human body’s heart rate slows, lungs compress, blood vessels tighten in extremities, thereby diverting blood flow to vital organs [12]. The spleen constricts, expelling oxygenated red blood cells into the bloodstream. This bodily response, known as the mammalian diving reflex, extends the period that a person can go without gasping for air [13]. This reflex essentially optimizes the body to allow a diver to hold their breath underwater, conserving oxygen and energy by putting it in a kind of low battery mode that focuses on survival. When diving, breath is the most important thing to be cognizant of, whether it is monitoring your air supply in scuba diving or being cognizant of your physical limits in freediving. In fact, experienced divers have mastered how to use their breath to control their motion, slightly rising with each inhale and sinking with each exhale [12].

The lungs act as an interface between the surface and water. Physiologically, human lungs absorb the oxygen that they come into contact with, passing it into the bloodstream [13]. Through the lungs’ semipermeable membranes, the interior and exterior of the self fold together in the flesh of the body as properties of the water it is immersed in are absorbed [9]. The higher the air pressure, the more gas is absorbed through the lungs, and thus the environment becomes a part of the self. In this way, diving becomes a literal form of human openness, a vulnerability of the physical self at the depths of the ocean.

Managing this vulnerability is as much of a mental task as it is physical. Amateur divers have enormous levels of uncertainty about their physiological limits [9]. Thus, they risk both underestimating and overestimating themselves, whether it is giving up on a dive earlier than necessary because of panic or uncertainty, or ignoring bodily cues to try and break personal records. Fulfillment is found at the midpoint of the two, but only experience can teach a diver how it feels to be at the edge of themselves [11]. The ability to know when to walk away from a dive that doesn’t feel right is as crucial as the skills to dive themself.

Human beings are not physiologically excluded from the water, but we are required to understand it in order to be a part of it. The crux of diving is finding the right balance of pressure between the world and the interior of the self, with precision, humility, and hyper self-awareness.

Where scuba diving is more often a telic activity, a way for the average person to see and experience the wonders of the aquatic world, freediving is therefore an autotelic activity, an end in and of itself. Diving is thought to bring humans closer to our true nature, giving one the space and capacity to embody a state of calm in the water, a relief from the tension, pull, and complexity of life above the surface — that’s why we take the dive.

II. Being at Depth

How do you experience life underwater?

“To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea, we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place.”
— Rachel Carson

Once a diver has entered the water and descended their intended depth, what do they see? How does you experience life underwater? Water is 800 times denser than air, meaning the ocean and other aquatic environments have entirely different conditions than terrestrial ones [12]. Divers experience three-dimensional movement, light refraction plays tricks on the eyes by magnifying objects, more color is lost as you go deeper, and sound travels four times faster in the water than in air, making it difficult to determine the direction of sounds — to describe just a few of the phenomenological changes [9].

To characterize the changing of our senses, Dr. Stephanie Merchant introduces the concept of a “sensual phenomenology” in which the ratios of how your individual senses contribute to your holistic perception are redistributed underwater [11]. For instance, on land, a person gets about 90% of their information from sight and hearing [11]. So, what happens when these senses are no longer trustworthy underwater?

By recording the sensual relations of novice divers to underwater spaces in Koh Tao, Merchant argues that, particularly for novice divers, adapting to the unfamiliar equipment and environment of ocean depths unlocks the ability to understand different parts of themselves [11]. There exists a paradox of where our senses are less reliable, but simultaneously heightened through this almost alien experience, allowing divers to notice parts of themselves that may have been otherwise ignored above water. In a greater sense, diving illustrates how doing new things requires exiting your comfort zone, as diving can be rewarding and punishing simultaneously as it rearranges our reality; change is often uncomfortable.

Most divers live by the philosophy that all of us are capable of accomplishing more than we believe possible, mentally and physically . Stories of freediving are united by the theme of surprising yourself with your own abilities, surmounting fear and uncertainty with self-belief. This can especially be observed in newcomers who, from the moment they enter the water for their first dive, have surpassed what they thought possible.

In her autoethnography from a beginning freediving class and interviews with 24 of the most experienced freedivers in the world, Strandvad underlines the philosophy of self-cultivation crucial to the sport [15]. Willpower is what shapes the developing self, especially in endurance athletes. Strandvad claims that diving deep into the ocean is a sort of otherworldly encounter that alters the sense of self, both for novices and experts. Novices in both scuba diving and freediving dominantly felt a state of mind of relaxation and calmness, in what felt like harmony with the water. Though beginners’ first freedives were characterized by more extreme emotion, anxiety and ecstatic joy in diving deeper, for longer durations, diving ultimately felt like personal meditation given the focus on deep concentration and calm to conserve energy and regulate adrenaline.

Accessing this deep internal calm is a trainable skill for the sport. Born in Shanghai, French diver Jacque Mayol — the first to reach 100 meters underwater — brought Eastern techniques of yoga and meditation to the freediving mainstream in the 1960s. These techniques are now central to the sport, enhancing both the performance and safety of a diver [15]. Freedivers had previously hyperventilated before taking their dive, but now by using yoga and controlled breathing to relax the body, they are less likely to provoke hypoxic blackouts at the end of their dive — the most common cause of death in freediving [15]. Being in tune with their body and mind simultaneously is the key to unlocking the deepest potential of a freediver, allowing them to reach and return from depths they never have accessed before.

In scuba diving, the rhythm of a dive is determined by the steady sound of your own breath, but in freediving, it is silent. There are no sensations of sound, and often sight. In the elite freediving competition Vertical Blue, most contestants close their eyes to prepare for their dive, and keep them closed for most of the dive [15]. Sight will not enhance their performance. As Merchant observes, the muting of one sense means the heightening of another, and as the diver’s perception becomes devoid of sound, sight, and color, their attention is turned within, to focus on the embodied sensations of water’s increasing pressure and the compressing breath within the body [11]. The exploration of diving deep is not visual, but haptic.

At a certain point of a freedive, the body begins its freefall towards the seafloor when it becomes negatively buoyant; this the most anticipated part of the dive [15]. It is a moment of total relaxation, where the diver no longer has to push against the pressure, fighting for each foot, but falls in silence as the body has shut down. Reaching this state induces a strange feeling of liberation in the water, as the diver has done the impossible: feeling at home in the alien aquatic world, a place where they are furthest from it. Experienced divers have trained themselves not just to control panic underwater, but to enjoy the state in which they have overcome the human instinct to breathe. Thus, they find their truest freedom in the water, free even from the constraints that each human is bound to.

Which moments induce the greatest growth: moments of comfort or challenge? Humans value experiences in which they surmount the perceived insurmountable, when they trudge forward instead of running back. Straughan claims that as in real life, potentially dangerous dives constitute the most-valued experiences for divers [16]. Learning to dive into the dark and frightening abyss of the unknown ocean is an opportunity for a person to experience their own profundity, mysterious and extraordinary.

Sociologist Stephen Lyng characterizes certain high-risk sports as exploring the edges of human capability, thereby requiring the utmost control in dangerous situations [10]. Being in control of the uncontrollable is a powerful, emotionally intense sensation that carries into your life. The most extreme depths of ourselves are uncovered in uncertain, unprecedented times during which “you meet yourself in a different way” [15]. In diving, the self is cultivated by training this ability to turn the unpleasant and scary into an opportunity of growth and pleasantness, to find fulfillment in simply being, regardless of the environment or circumstance one finds themself in.

III. The Ascent

What happens when we go back?

“The underwater world is a place of beauty, but also a place of danger, and diving requires discipline, training, and a deep respect for the natural world.”
— Philippe Cousteau Jr.

Following the free fall of the descent, the ascent back up is the most difficult part of the dive. The urge to breathe is becoming more pressing, movement is slow, and there is nothing to help a diver propel upwards but themself [15]. If the diver becomes scared, their stress causes them to spend their oxygen faster. The mental directly translates to the physical in this psychophysical sport, and the diver must know themselves wholly in order to regulate their mind. Since a diver’s feelings literally dictate their ability, any fear felt must be overcome in order to return back to the surface.

When a diver rises into lesser pressure, the gasses that accumulated in their lungs come out, and expand as they do [13]. If they ascend too quickly without stopping occasionally to let the gas come out, they risk instant death. The accumulation of gases in a diver’s tissues dictate where they belong; if they are no longer a terrestrial being, they are more and more of the sea. It is not possible to have it both ways. In this sense, diving is a conditional passport from land to sea, alienation from the land at the very moment that one becomes habituated to the water.

Acclaimed marine biologist Sylvia Earle describes gas saturation in the tissues like a “physiological barrier as effective as a brick wall” [9]. Even if the surface is within sight, a scuba diver cannot ascend without risking decompression sickness, often referred to as “the bends”. Even if they have run out of air, ascension means risking death if they do not stop to let the body release excess nitrogen. There is an analogous danger during ascension of a freedive: a phenomenon known as “freediving blackouts”. Deep-water divers can blackout as they ascend to shallower waters due to depressurization, causing the arterial oxygen saturation to drop to less than the threshold for consciousness [13]. The saturation and desaturation of gasses and the inflation and deflation of breath in the body is the bridge between life and death during diving, illustrating the connection between human physiology and how water can align with both life and death simultaneously. There is an invisible timer for every dive, and the margin of error is not forgiving. If a diver doesn’t abide by it, they must face the physiological consequences.

Diving redefines what it means to be and feel in control. A person makes the initial decision to dive, to enter an environment in which they must cede ultimate control to the water. But a diver must also maintain self-control and self-awareness, and thus becomes accustomed to the notion of control with surrender, awareness with risk, knowledge within the unknown. The question thus becomes: if diving quite literally alienates us from life as we know it, why shouldn’t we be afraid of it?

The answer lies within us. We shouldn’t be afraid because water is simply a state of matter, with no allegiance to life or to death: “as it is moist, it resembles life; as it is cold…it sides with death” [3].

In fact, human beings are similar in many ways to the water; like the ocean, we too are constantly in flux.

IV. Diving into Ourselves

“The ocean is a metaphor for life itself, it’s a journey of discovery, of self-discovery and of endless possibilities.”
— Sylvia Earle

After being alone in the deep, the returning diver often describes experiencing the oceanic feeling, the sensation of being one with the universe [5]. In opposition to most modern sports in which the body is trained to achieve external goals and metrics, so-called “post-sport physical cultures” instead value the innate spiritual, physical, and emotional human experiences found in their sport, such as diving [1]. Through this, true selfhood is achieved in realizing you are part of something greater than yourself, where the mind, body, and soul are opened and intertwined with the universe until one cannot be distinguished from the other.

Imagine a waterfall. It is made up of not just one stream of water pouring down, but multiple small streams and droplets, each finding their own way for their brief time in the sky. Though they appear to be one giant curtain from afar, the closer you gets, the more distinction is observed. At the bottom of the waterfall, the streams and droplets come together, reforming their continuous body. After seeing huge waterfalls at Yosemite, philosopher Shunryu Suzuki realized that he views human life as analogous to the droplets in these waterfalls [17].

We are each briefly finding our own way, able to express independence and feeling away from others, but eventually, we must return back to our source, the river. When one doesn’t realize they are part of the river, they feel fear of death [17]. However, when they realize that regardless of whether water is separated into drops or not, it is still water, it becomes clear that life and death are the same thing, emanating from the same source. Though each life finds its own way, independent and free from others, we are bound together by an invisible force that eventually brings us back together again. Liberation is found by feeling the relative world of the droplet, but knowing that it is part of the water, both in life or death.

Diving is an embodied way to understand this interplay between independence and connection, of human beings and universal being. On the surface, the presence of every person must be delineated precisely, fraught with required transactions and documentation to claim a spot in the world. But in the water, the cost of being disappears; the water does not believe in such stagnation or limitation. Though the ocean demands awareness and care, it doesn’t take away one’s independence. It is an open space to all who take the necessary cautions, enveloping, protecting, and binding all beings within it together by a common state of matter, both in life and death.

In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates compares the difficulty of knowing our own souls to knowing the sea god Glaucus, whose body is constantly changing and modified by his existence underwater. Glaucus’s true nature can’t easily be made out by catching brief glimpses of him, as his original parts have been broken, his whole body maimed by the waves and by the shells, seaweeds, and stones that have attached themselves to him over time. The name Glaucus itself means a greenish-gray color, as he can only be known partially and opaquely. But just because one cannot know him fully does not mean he is not there. Different people may see him differently, but their varied perception does not change who he is.

Analogously, there is a constant struggle to find ourselves, to know exactly who we are at every moment. But how can you know something that is constantly changing? You can only keep track of what you observe, and make guesses about what you might become. Like the water that makes up the majority of our being, we are in flux at every moment, both minutely and not. We are not still beings. With every breath, we move in space and time.

Diving reminds us that we are part of something greater, something ineffable — and this gives us meaning beyond life or death. We cannot be easily or exactly defined at any moment, because our potential makes us so much more than that. Diving proves that each person is capable of far more than they could conceive of on the surface.

The final question therefore remains: in a world where we so often stay on solid ground, what depths of yourself might you discover if you dare to seek the unknown?

“From this day forward we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level, with our flesh feeling what the fish scales know.”
— Jacques Cousteau

If you are interested in reading more about diving in relation to selfhood, I highly recommend checking out the following resources which I drew a lot of inspiration from in writing this!

• Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, (Melody Jue)
• “Under water and into yourself: Emotional experiences of freediving contact information.” (Sara Strandvad)

Works Cited

[1] Atkinson, Michael. “Entering scapeland: Yoga, fell and post-sport physical cultures.” Sport in Society, vol. 13, no. 7–8, Sept. 2010, pp. 1249–1267, https://doi.org/10.1080/17430431003780260.

[2] Brymer, Eric, and Robert D. Schweitzer. “Evoking the ineffable: The phenomenology of extreme sports.” Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, pp. 63–74, https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000111.

[3] Cadden, Joan. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH: WATER IN THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF ALBERTUS MAGNUS. Olschki, 1980.

[4] Chen, Angus. “‘Sea Nomads’ May Have Evolved to Be the World’s Elite Divers.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2024, www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-sea-nomads-may-have-evolved-to-be-the-worlds-elite-divers/.

[5] Dizikes | MIT News Office, Peter. “Minds Wide Open.” MIT News, 22 Mar. 2023, news.mit.edu/2023/minds-wide-open-transcendent-brain-book-0322.

[6] Griffith, Tom Ferrari, G. R. F.; Plato. Plato: “The Republic.” Cambridge University Press, 2020.

[7] Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching. Ebury Digital, 2008.

[8] Ilardo, Melissa A., et al. “Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads.” Cell, vol. 173, no. 3, Apr. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.03.054.

[9] Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater. Duke University Press Books, 2020.

[10] Lyng, Stephen. “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of voluntary risk taking.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 95, no. 4, Jan. 1990, pp. 851–886, https://doi.org/10.1086/229379.

[11] Merchant, Stephanie. “Negotiating underwater space: The sensorium, the body and the practice of scuba-diving.” Tourist Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, Dec. 2011, pp. 215–234, https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797611432040.

[12] “PADI Open Water Diver Scuba Diving Certification.” PADI, PADI, www.padi.com/courses/open-water-diver. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

[13] Patrician, Alexander, et al. “Breath-hold Diving — the Physiology of Diving Deep and Returning.” Frontiers in Physiology, vol. 12, 21 May 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.639377.

[14] Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Penguin, 2006.

[15] Strandvad, Sara Malou. “Under water and into yourself: Emotional experiences of freediving contact information.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 27, May 2018, pp. 52–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.02.007.

[16] Straughan, Elizabeth R. “Touched by water: The body in Scuba diving.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, Feb. 2012, pp. 19–26, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.10.003.

[17] Suzuki, Shunryū, and Trudy Dixon. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shambhala Publications, 2011.

Until next time! If you found this interesting, make sure to follow me to stay updated on future articles.

In the meantime, check out my other articles here! If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at apoorvapwrites@gmail.com.