Diving to Heal

Healing is getting to a state of wholeness and deep understanding with yourself, your relationships and your environment. Healing always includes elements of body, mind and spirit. Our bodies are made up primarily of water. The planet is mostly water and most of that is sea water. In his books about the miraculous intelligence of water, Dr.Masuru Emoto describes how water changes it's crystallized form depending on how it is sent thought, sound and speech energy. All our thoughts are energy and if we and our planet are water then our form is changed dramatically by how we speak, think and interact with ourselves, our fellow men and our planet.

Scuba diving is one of the most direct methods of interacting with water and feeling yourself to be a water based life form. Breathing underwater has fascinated humans for centuries and exploring the oceans is as amazing as exploring outer space and has generated much recent interest in documentary films and popular culture. The scuba diving recreational industry has exploded in the past decade encouraging many of us to personally look beneath the surface of our watery planet.

Scuba diving as a sport has the potential to show people how beautiful and important our oceans, coral reefs and aquatic environment are. However, as with much of the popularization of any activity, money and it's pursuit dominates the scuba diving training and dive centers around the world and generally removes the element of healing from scuba diving. The domination of commerce in diving as with all human endeavors turns a potentially healing activity for people and a way to further understanding of our planet to an activity of mass consumption and destruction of the very magnificent we are so eager to see and experience.

After 15 years of diving in the Red Sea and more than 10 years of teaching Scuba diving full time I am looking for ways to encourage the industry to innovate and look to the future of diving and our blue planet. I ask myself daily, how can I get people in the dive industry to understand that the way they are diving is destructive to the reef ecosystem? I ask how can I create alternatives in this industry or should I abandon it altogether?

Five years ago I started experimenting with combining yoga breathing and meditation techniques with diving in order to enhance this healing effect of the sea and to teach people to diving in a more eco friendly and respectful way. This course which I called "yoga diving" for lack of a better term, has slowly gained some attention from dive magazines and the like. I haven't however been able as yet to find a way "in" to the dive industry itself and encourage significant notice and hopefully change. I liken the change I would encourage to how the health food/organic foods industry has changed a lot of the food and farming industry in recent years. Educated people nowadays generally think about issues like pesticides in food, how commercial farming damages the environment, chemicals in food etc. As our planet is much more water than earth and as the purity of water is tantamount to our health and survival I am thinking of ways to promote holistic, ecologically sound consciousness in diving in a similar way to how organic farming encourages the same with the earth.

Diving has always been a meditation for me and most experienced divers will say the same. Floating weightless in the sea, seeing fish and corals up close and intimately, the slow, rhythmic manner of breathing in scuba, all these bring a sense of stillness and peace to the diver. However the way diving is mostly conducted by the tourist industry, that sense of peace and harmony with our aquatic world is usurped by hurried, group oriented, money based superficial dive training to get as many divers on the reef as quickly as possible. The safety of the divers and more importantly the impact these poorly trained divers on the delicate reefs is backseated to "factory diving" and mass marketing. Like fast food and most of commericialized culture, profit motivates the dive centers, ironically often run by ex divers who used to connect to the serenity of the dive experience described above.

How can the dive industry make changes to encourage understanding and healing of ourselves and our blue planet? As with all healing, health of body, mind and spirit must be considered in the quest for balance. Moderation, sound ecological development obviously are global concerns as the dive industry is embedded in the grander scale of "tourism" the two are inextricably linked and healing thus more complex than changing just the way we dive.

Nevertheless those of us who dive either professionally or as a hobby can make easy, sensible changes right now. Dive centers can make their groups smaller with greater supervision by experienced dive professionals. Large groups of holiday divers on a reef are like platoons of bulldozers over a beautiful flower garden. These potentially devastating groups of divers destroy the reefs very often irreparably. Longer, more thoughtful training aimed at teaching divers proper skills and buoyancy in smaller groups (3 divers to a pro ideally for example) would enable divers to dive safer for themselves and for the reef. In my course we start our diving day with gentle yoga and meditation to enhance the ability to learn and to open up to the intelligence of the sea. In contrast most dive centers emphasize goal oriented, ego based dive attics underwater. Most of the divers who join my course do so because of dissatisfaction with the way the dive centers are run. Alternatives to factory diving and to the energy of fear and exploitation of nature (always wanting more and fear of not making enough money) are few and far between in diving although there are individuals who love nature and the sea and are genuinely concerned. These rare individuals in the dive industry don't however, have venues to promote their love of the sea. Dive centers are out for profit first and their short term goals are again, ironically, destroying the basis for their "industry" namely, the beauty of nature.

The healing power of the sea is unlimited. The healing power within each of us is unlimited. We don't need to follow "industry" as if it's the only option. Professional divers who love the reefs and would like to use diving to heal let's wake up, think globally and act locally in your own dive center! Recreational divers, question practices of your dive center, take responsibility for your training and feel the unique, privileged space your are in to experience the healing of our seas.

Monica Farrell has been teaching scuba diving for more than 10 years. She is a qualified yoga teacher and has travelled to countries including India, Egypt, Thailand, Indonesia, Spain and the USA teaching yoga and diving. She has a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from UCLA.