I’ve been suspended in open water that is crystal clear. The kind of ocean environment that pixelates the collective idea of the perfect underwater scene on Pinterest and Instagram.

This was nearly it, but not exactly.

The water below me was blue, bright blue, but murky. Visibility only 3 or 4 meters, if that. No fish for company, only the dive line that stretched down from the float just off my right shoulder, ahead of me as I looked downward for as far as I could see, before it disappeared into the haze.

It’s also true that I have carried images of freediving (apnea, or breath-hold diving) in my mind for years without ever having tried it until that is, I met Maria Teresa (MT) Solomons in LaPaz, Baja California Sur, Mexico.

The Bay of LaPaz

Freediving entered my consciousness the same way it did for many of my generation–via the Luc Besson feature film Le Grand Bleu. The movie depicts fictionalized versions of the sport’s early protagonists, including legendary freediver Jaques Mayol in a story that pits competitive urges, a fatal fascination with the ocean, and the attractions of a normal life against each other, punctuated by painstakingly captured sequences of freedivers seeing how deep they can go on a single breath. The movie is long, and divides opinion to this day, inspiring some by depicting a deep spiritual connection to the ocean, boring others to distraction. It’s one of those films–you either connect with it or you don’t.

At that time, freediving was poorly understood in physiological terms and ferociously dangerous in its most extreme competitive form. No-limits freediving, where divers use a weighted sled to propel them downwards along a line, to depths of 100 meters or more (the current world record is 214 meters), and rely on a balloon that they inflate at depth to overcome the water pressure pushing them downwards and begin their ascent to the surface, was and is still the sport’s maximum expression of the desire to dive as deep as possible.

This form of freediving still exists but only for world record attempts. As a sport freediving has become more diversified and more focused on human physical and mental prowess than outright bravery. These days like many other sports, freediving is also embraced as a non-competitive pastime and has become more accessible and lifestyle oriented with proponents focusing on their connection to the ocean and the creatures that live there.

MT is a former competitive freediver and a freediving instructor trainer–one of only two people in Mexico certified to train other freediving instructors.

A member of the Association Internationale pour le Dévelopment de l’Apnée (AIDA), MT introduces novices to freediving with a mixture of theory, yogic breathing technique and in-water experience that often begins in a pool and moves to open water very quickly. Pool training is a big part of freediving at any level, particularly for trainees who don’t have easy access to deep open water. It was after one dry training session in MT’s yoga studio that I found myself breathing through a snorkel and staring straight down in the bay of LaPaz.

The water where we were was murky, but the bay of LaPaz is not without some amazing natural attractions. Whale sharks make their way through on a daily basis at some times of the year, and a booming ecotourism business has sprung up to take snorkeling tourists to them for a close encounter.

MT is very much connected with just about every aspect of what goes on in the ocean around LaPaz. Born in the UK, her early career focused on the Mediterranean, before moving to Baja with her husband at the time.  These days she makes her living via her freediving and yoga training practices and gets involved in ocean conservation issues wherever she can. She also has her ticket to act as a guide on the whale shark tourism boats but has given that up.

MT has had many experiences that she regards as positive when it comes to guiding visitors on whale shark encounters (serene hangouts with the giant creatures occurring serendipitously with her freedive students en-route from a training session), but the current incarnation of the business is something she finds difficult to support.

“I’m becoming saddened by what I see in ecotourism.” She says.

“They’ve got limits, but all the time [the situation with the whale sharks] is fluctuating.”

According to guidelines set by PROFEPA, Mexico’s Federal Agency for the Protection of the Environment, 14 tourist boats are permitted in the area designated for whale shark observation at one time, and each must wait in line to put its guests in the water–a maximum of six per boat (plus one guide)–with only one boatload of tourists allowed per whale shark every twenty minutes. This may sound reasonable, except that viewing may begin at nine am and end at 4pm, meaning that each whale shark has a line-up of boats circling it all day with a new boat-plus-tourist impact occurring once every half hour.

She contrasted the experience of spending time in the water with a whale shark accompanied by trained freedivers, observing the animal in its natural habitat in a calm and respectful way, with the experience taking inexperienced snorkelers who often have to be prodded into the water and then splash around in a frenzy.

She also tells me that it’s clear that whale sharks are sustaining boat damage, but it’s unclear specifically what kind of boat traffic is causing it.

The Mind-Body-Ocean Connection

For many who do it, freediving is about achieving a deeper connection to the ocean as a result of having to focus on a high level of awareness of the environment your body is in, and how it is reacting to it.

We talked about the sense of vulnerability that comes from being just one organism in the abyss with only one breath of air on which to survive, and the sense of personal empowerment in overcoming the body’s psychological limitations in order to stay immersed for longer and longer periods of time.

Freediving has become a teachable skill. The psychological and physiological factors at play are much better understood these days and it comes down to this–your body can survive a lot longer without taking a breath than you think it can. Tricks like hyperventilation for fooling your senses into thinking that you don’t need to breathe are extremely dangerous and should never be used. Today’s freedivers learn to listen to their body and reinterpret the signals they receive from it–you’re going to need to take a breath at some point, but that point is further off than you think. To begin with, your body wants to panic but you learn to take control and tell it, no thanks. Muscle spasms scream at you but you calm yourself and say “a few seconds more”. You take a special kind of breath-called a hook breath–when you hit the surface and feel like a superhero.

This simultaneous exploration of personal limits and the natural wonders of the ocean, requiring as it does a high level of focus on what is happening regarding your body and your surroundings on a moment to moment basis, helps to make freedivers feel more attuned to all of it–themselves, the ocean, everything.

This state of mind is illustrated by the freediving pictures you find on Instagram–beautiful people suspended serenely in inner-space, sometimes interacting–appropriately or inappropriately as the case may be–with sea life. Not all of the content is thought-provoking or even defensible from a conservation standpoint, but it does at least speak to a love of the ocean and a desire to elevate our appreciation of it. “You might not be this beautiful but you can feel this beautiful,“ it says, “get out there and get in touch“. In this way, freediving is out there with surfing and rock climbing–one of the most natural, and one of the highest, of natural highs.

As you would expect, there are freedivers who include foraging for food in their activities. Spearfishing is by-and-large conducted by breath-hold divers who use a device that looks part crossbow, part slingshot to spear their prey.

As fishing techniques go, spearfishing is about as sustainable as it gets if done responsibly. There is no more targeted form of fishing, with fewer issues in terms of bycatch, abandoned gear or damage to the underwater environment, and if you’re going to eat fish, then swimming after and hunting each one individually has got to be the way to do it that is most responsible.

MT is not impressed. She became a vegetarian a long time ago and stopped eating fish–a practice that is for her an everyday reminder of the state of the oceans and the destruction wrought by humans on the natural world.

“I don’t think I see anything in spearfishing that inspires me,” she says. It’s not my philosophy, I see it [the existence of spearfishing as a part of freediving] and I discard it”.

“How hungry am I, ” she asks, “ that the two minutes that it takes to eat [a fish] is more important to me than watching [it] go through the water.”

As in any community, there are various interpretations of what it means to respect your environment. Prominent competitive freedivers have been exposed in poaching scandals, and as with all sport fishing, there is an element of trophyism that some think ok and others find counterproductive.

The Other Meaning of Awareness

MT’s philosophy of conservation is to bring individuals to a new place in terms of their personal priorities by allowing them to experience the natural environment directly and in a way that promotes maximum respect. For her freediving doesn’t just get people out there, it provides an opportunity to show people how to ‘be’ in the water, in their environment in such a way that they understand the level of respect that the living world should command and are confronted by what they can decide to preserve or destroy. Plenty of us talk about creating awareness, few of us do it in as direct and personal a way as Maria Teresa Solomons.

Her fervent wish? That people with power over policy should be forced to make their decisions in the immediate context of the environment they are impacting–that no-one should make a decision affecting an ecosystem without having experienced it first hand, and in the case of the ocean without having been literally immersed in it and forced to contend with their own humanity in relationship to it’s splendor and fragility in the same way that she and her students aim to do every single day.

“Decisions are being made at desks.” She tells me with focused exasperation.

Only when this changes, she believes, will people in power get their priorities straight.