It's not night, yet it’s so dark down where she is that if she were to hold up her hand in front of her face, only the light of her lamp would help her recognize her palm, the line she has followed down, and not much else. It's dark, and freezing, and though the light wetsuit she wears offers little protection against the cold, she doesn't feel it. Rather, she’s not aware of the cold, nor of time, or space. She doesn’t remember, she doesn’t think, she doesn't anticipate. All she knows is the weight of water. All she feels is its vastness and the blessed respite it gives her from her life above.
As she descends, the pressure of the ocean squeezes her lungs, the corresponding lack of air in them making her body heavier. This is how the ocean pulls her into its depths. This is how she lets it, not moving a single muscle, yet flying through the water in a perfect free fall. It’s not until she turns to begin her ascent that she exerts effort. She begins a slow and graceful dolphin kick that undulates through her body all the way to the tips of her fingers stretched overhead until, just before she reaches the surface, she lowers one hand and lets the last bit of momentum propel her back into the world of air and light.
She takes a breath, her first in a while, looks around, then briefly closes her eyes, the silence below already calling to her again. Nowhere else does she know this depth of quiet. Nowhere else does she feel so irrevocably, so unquestionably right. It's only in this world between two breaths where she knows herself as she really is: indivisible from water and everything that surrounds her. It's only in this world where she knows, without question, she is perfect, and whole.
I do not free dive. Or rather, I don't free dive in the ocean, although the concept fascinates me. It's not the length of time that some of these athletes spend under water that impresses me most (over ten minutes in some cases), or the depth they reach (almost 370 feet). What draws me to this art is the necessary focus and surrender and utter commitment to stillness it requires. After all, these are the same qualities needed to execute a different kind of plunge: the dive into awakening or the realization of our true nature.
Both as a water lover and as a meditator, I well understand the allure of the depths—the place where there's no sound, no thing; where there's nothing but being, and that, only faintly. That's why, for me, the figure of the free diver so perfectly captures the "immersion" we undergo in deep meditation. But I believe the metaphor becomes truly perfect in the instant when the diver breaks the surface of the water and is held suspended for a moment in both worlds: ocean and air—and by extension land and all it contains—or, in Buddhist terms, absolute and relative. That's the moment in which we realize our buddhanature. (Read more here)
