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I’m sinking. That is my favorite a part of free diving, a sport I got here to Hawaii’s Big Island a dozen years ago to learn, before I had any concept that I’d make the island my home. I’ve been a water person for so long as I can remember. I became a scuba diver in college in upstate Latest York (we saw trout), an ice diver in Latest Hampshire (oh, the freshwater icicles hanging just beneath the surface), after which a divemaster in Florida, once I first began to understand the ocean’s complexity—its life and its currents, its songs and its depths.

However it was only once I learned to relinquish most of my equipment—keeping only a mask, snorkel, and fins—that I began to know the water itself. Its thickness and cohesion, its rhythms and surges and its moans, every part that adds as much as its movement. There’s a freedom I feel once I’m underwater, not only with the fish and the corals, but with the fluid itself—a oneness with the water, because it presses against me on all sides, against all my human crevices, all of the solution to my heart.

Free divers sometimes speak about how their sport is underwater yoga, and depend on land-based yoga skills to assist them improve: Asanas for developing strength and suppleness; pranayama for breath control; bhandas for specific finning techniques; and even a super-advanced khechari mudra to slip their tongues into their nasopharynges to open or close their eustachian tubes and flood their sinuses on very deep dives, to bring them to a better state of consciousness, or simply to scale back stress (all of it way out of my league). Then there’s also the mental strength that yoga forges, useful for nearly every part on either side of the ocean’s surface.

I’ve spent the last several years pondering so much concerning the water because I spent much of it writing a book set within the ocean. It’s Underjungle, a tale of affection, loss, family, and war—set entirely underwater. So War and Peace, but three-thousand feet deeper. And considerably shorter. And perhaps just a little funnier, too. However it’s also a book concerning the sea. Not only the marine life, but what it’s prefer to live within the water—within the sense that that’s where you’d find your reality, every part you realize and every part you would like, your minerals, food, mates, stories, and concepts.

We human beings live within the air with only our feet on the bottom. But within the ocean, the environment is throughout you. It’s a womb, a sheath. And also you’d depend upon it for every part, since it’s a spot you’d never leave.

To research the book, I turned to free diving and yoga, two disciplines that will be as intertwined as blades of kelp. Traditional scuba diving only takes you to date—it’s like being an astronaut, sealed up in a suit, unable to enter the ocean’s enormity due to all of the equipment, your eyes persistently fixed in your gauges. Or because the free diver Kirk Krack, who served as underwater advisor for Avatar: The Way of Water, once told me, scuba diving is “tearing through a forest in a Hummer with the AC on and the windows up.”

But free diving is intimacy. Each with yourself and the life that suddenly isn’t frightened away by your bubbles. Imagine it as breath-holding meditation, but in an isolation tank large enough to cover 70 percent of the globe, of which only five percent has been mapped. We all know there are no less than 240,000 species in our oceans, and doubtless 500,000 to 10 million more. The ocean is our mysterious world, and it’s off all our coasts.

If yoga is about stillness and mindfulness, free diving is its underwater version. I’ve learned that I can sit within the sand before I enter the water, stretch the intercostal muscles in my chest to maximise the space for my lungs, and begin my deep respiration there. And I can lazily stretch my other muscles and loosen up, while I bring my heartbeat down.

Which returns me to where I began this story: Off Hawaii Island’s Puʻuhonoa o Honaunau, or “Place of Refuge,” a sanctuary that generations of Hawaiians would flee to in the event that they broke a kapu, or taboo, and I’m sinking. For those who’re perfectly weighted in free diving, you now not have to kick when you descend past 66 feet. You conserve your energy and oxygen, and also you let gravity take you. It feels just a little like giving in to the world and entering its vastness—but not only any world. An impossibly wealthy considered one of movement and currents and slapping tails and flitting and scuttling and shimmering fish. Where there’s at all times a few of that mystery, too.

Not way back, I spoke with Wallace J. Nichols, who wrote the best-selling Blue Mind, about how we interact with water. He’s a free diver, too. “Water stimulates all our senses concurrently,” he jogged my memory. “You smell it and taste it and listen to it and touch it. The sight of water will be sparkly, and sometimes it’s mesmerizing, however it doesn’t demand interpretation. It’s restorative and transcendent, and perhaps even mildly hypnotic.” Every part within the ocean comes at you unexpectedly, and that’s how we perceive it.

It’s that world I sink through, a spot where ideas lose their hard edges and thoughts change into directionless, as I enter the “flow.” Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first developed the term in 1990 to explain the state where you’re so fully immersed in what you’re doing that nothing else matters. You lose each your sense of self and any awareness of the passage of time (although feeling I want to breathe normally jogs my memory). It’s much like what athletes call being within the zone, when world records are broken. Yet the incontrovertible fact that the flow happens in your head could make it feel boundless.

That’s what I’m desirous about as I begin to kick slowly and explore 60 after which 70 after which 80 feet underwater, past cuttlefish and coral and outcroppings and schools of trevallies and vibrant yellow tangs. Within the novel, I created a species who live on this world and embrace the life that the water and currents bring them. It’s a world of straightforward beauty, interconnectedness, and families, but additionally of heartbreak, conflict, undertows, and gradations of depths. My hope is that if I could make their world seem real, then readers would fall in love with it and need to guard it.

However it’s time to begin kicking toward the surface. I can’t stay underwater perpetually. There’s a world up there, with currents within the air. They’re also what allow us to fly.

About Our Contributor

James Sturz is creator of the novel Underjungle, out August 1, and set entirely underwater.

(Photo: Courtesy of Unnamed Press)