Working hard to swim against the current, the regular divers look on in bemusement as they pass by hurriedly in their search for something interesting to record in their log books. Below them, the two divers tip-toe around the reef, peering into nooks, prying into the homes of fish. Since they’re not wearing fins, they can tread with precision on the sand between the delicate corals and they don’t stir up the seabed or disturb the marine life. Groupers and parrotfish stare at them, eyeball to eyeball.

Welcome to Zen diving. This fusion of yoga and diving is about to revolutionise one of the most popular holiday activities in the world (there are now about 20 million divers worldwide). They may seem like improbable bed- fellows but yoga and scuba diving have a lot in common. They both involve a sense of deep relaxation, a focus on breathing and a holistic approach to the environment.

Yoga and meditation are commonly used by freedivers to control their physiological state under water. They need to switch off the “mammalian response” (which regulates breathing) to hold their breath for long periods. But only recently have yoga, meditation and scuba diving come together to create something entirely new. The world’s largest diver training organisation, Padi (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors), gave its stamp of approval last year to a Mind, Body, Spirit scuba course which involves creative visualisation, yoga, stretching and meditation.

Steve Schultz, the instructor who designed the course, claims that fish can sense the difference. “Changes that occur when you are in a higher state of consciousness include slower, smoother breathing, slower heart rate, lower blood pressure, enhanced alpha brain wave patterns and less muscle tension.”

At the British-run Reef 2000 dive centre in the Egyptian resort of Dahab on the Gulf of Aqaba, yoga diving is taught by Monica Farrell, a technical instructor who has spent more than 3,000 hours under water. “For me, diving is a meditation,” she says. “When you’re relaxed, diving takes you to another place inside yourself. My yoga and my diving have always been naturally intertwined.”

Her course makes these connections more explicit, allowing yoga to enhance diving and vice versa.

Divers have a great advantage — being in water already, “flow” is much more achievable. In addition, weightlessness helps you to arrive at that state of joy with relative ease. This is the goal of Zen diving.

“My experience is that your ability to stay in the moment — the blue, the colours, the fish, the feeling of floating, your own breathing — can be heightened,” says Farrell. “You’re usually automatically in the present when you’re diving and yoga helps to strengthen that by opening your mind to a wider consciousness, focusing on being close to nature and being an aquatic animal.” Divers are often so busy ticking off depth records, or time records, or playing with their underwater gadgets that they fail to notice the interesting fish behaviour on the reef.

In Zen diving the idea is to build some “down-time” into your dive — not just five minutes at the end where you de-gas while toodling around a shallow reef, but a more substantial chunk of time where you can find a safe, sheltered spot near the reef and sit on a sandy patch to watch what’s happening. It’s shifting the balance to let the marine life come to you rather than chasing around after it. Try to relax by sitting on the seabed, slowing down your breathing and observe what’s going on.

What has all this got to do with jumping around on the seabed like a demented astronaut? Essentially, this is also about breaking away from the linear model of diving and cultivating a “playful mind” that is at ease in the marine world. You don’t have to swim madly around — you can walk, you can sit still, you can just hover and “be” in the water.

Once people try this they are surprised how much they enjoy it. Recently, I went diving with someone I had just met who knew nothing about Zen diving. We had a perfectly normal dive until I spotted a sand patch and, unable to resist, slipped my fins under a nearby rock and did a few somersaults. Before I knew it, my buddy had taken off her fins and was space- hopping all over the place. “God, that was so much fun,” she said when we surfaced. “At first I thought you’d gone nuts — but then I thought, ooh, I want to do that.”

In Zen philosophies, water is used to symbolize the flow of existence, the ever-changing nature of life. Water symbolises yin and yang, soft and hard: it is both gentle and supportive, yet strong and unyielding. As divers, we are in a unique position to experience this fully, to understand the “Tao of the ocean”, and by so doing to connect at a profound level with our inner selves. And hey, it’s fun too.

IN THE FLOW

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