Freediving and Intuition: Go Into the Unknown

I love sitting at the bottom of the sea, experiencing the ocean’s depth through all my senses, without thinking… just being…

This was tough for me at first, because I was always looking for stuff outside myself to do (have to send an email, prepare for a course, work, go to this place, that place, etc)

But it’s the awareness here and now on the world, that’s everything!

Freediving, I feel, puts me back in touch with this natural intuition – I used to let my awareness drift… from the world around me, to the world that I made, the world of form, this was especially easy working in design, because I truly believed I was creating my world… and fully in control of it, it was a world of milestones, of strategy and endpoints…

But I forgot how to be fully aware of the world around me, the sensory data, of the dimensions of life.

Now I notice… as I sit at the bottom of the sea and by spending so much time everyday experiencing the sea first hand, how much freediving helps to develop intuition, not just by helping us sense the world around us but also, more wisely, our place in it…

It’s this awareness, of the subtle things, things that are outside of our focus of attention, things that we’re aware of subliminally and unconsciously.

I grew up in Old Lyme, Connecticut, a rural town in the modern Western world. Although I spent most afternoons after school as a kid playing in the forest behind my house, so much of my time was in school and classrooms…

And then eventually universities, workplaces and modern places…

It was so much time spent in the stance of my very focused conscious mind…

So when it came to intuition, obviously, subconsciously, I didn’t see why intuition should be so important…it didn’t seem to be very present, so it didn’t seem to matter at all…

So eventually it was easy to just cut it out…

But by doing so, I cut out most of what it is I know…

Because, in fact very little of our conscious mental processes – at least 95-99% of them!! – are not conscious at all! These processes act to alert us to things that our rather slow conscious mind may not be aware of. (Rymenant, Marc)

What Marc Van Rymenant writes about in his article titled ’95 Percent of Brain Activity Is beyond Our Conscious Awareness’ is about the 95% of the ‘unconscious’ conscious processes of the brain, which are very subtle and abstract things, but also very important…

For example, if you meet a person and you can’t quite put your finger on it… this person seems to be super friendly, gives signals that make you want to trust them – but somewhere inside of you, you feel there’s something wrong here but you can’t articulate exactly what it is…

Yes, of course you might be wrong, but likely you are picking up something very important!

Because, the thing is… when we communicate, most all of our communication is not at all subtle or abstract whatsoever. For example, you have to consider the voice, the tone, choice of words, the implied meaning, the metaphor, humor, irony and so on.

Intuition is in touch with those things.

So to rule it out is to miss most of the wise things that we could know…

So what should you do?!

Go into the unknown…

It’s so easy to do things that are easy, things that we like…

But if you take a journey and you do things that maybe you don’t like, or things you’re afraid of, or things that challenge and mystify you…

If you go into complete unknown territory, unknown depths and heights, unknown adventures far and wide, then it’s a big possibility that you go into a different pattern…

And then something else will happen…

An experience will change you…

But also there’s a big chance of failure…

I certainly fail everyday that I don’t achieve my goals.

But failure is such an important aspect of everyone’s everyday life, so we have to be ready to fail…

Because if you allow yourself to experiment, then you don’t know what is going to happen…

So the failure is part of the journey…

Freediving is my journey, my challenge, my quest into the unknown. What’s yours?

By challenging yourself and experiencing nature first-hand, you can better sense this amazing world around us and your incredible place in it. Enjoy the abridged, motivational video below.

Sources:

Rymenant, Marc Van. “95 Percent of Brain Activity Is beyond Our Conscious Awareness.” Neurosciences UX</i>, 9 Aug. 2008, http://www.simplifyinginterfaces.com/2008/08/01/95-percent-of-brain-activity-is-beyond-our-conscious-awareness/