Friday Five #3

Hey, good morning!

Here is my Friday 5 roundup of this week’s facts, fun and f’ups…

💭 Is freediving ‘teaching you how to think’?

• After listening to the This Is Water speech by David Foster, it got me thinking about how we learn to think!
   
• David talks about our default setting of how we think, which he calls ‘blind certainty’ – “a close mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up”
   
• He says, if you choose to do the work to alter and get free of this natural, hard-wired default setting (which is basically to be deeply and literally self-centered), you’ll not only learn how to exercise some control over how and what you think, but “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience”
   
• Well, I think that freediving has improved my understanding how to think, even more than my formal university education!
  • The improved awareness; of the mind, the body, awareness about my buddies and their safety.
  • The discipline to train consistently, to plan my trainings and competitions, to stretch in the morning (especially when I don’t like stretching or early mornings!) etc.
  • The attention and focus; regular meditation, focus on the breath, the techniques to go deep, etc.
  • The flow state – to get lost in the moment, not just in the free-fall, but the whole dive…
     
• In freediving, I really feel it provides that sense of ultimate freedom that David talks about. It’s freedom from being a slave to your head and your natural default setting. It expands your mind to truly care about the people around you and your experiences in life versus yourself and your ego.

✨ What new meditation am I trying out?

• I’ve been researching new (for me) mental training techniques for the next podcast episode I’m working on. So I’m trying out some different things, like this Qigong standing meditation!
   
• This particular meditation is a powerful and useful exercise to improve your posture, breathing and body awareness. It also helps to calm the nerves, relaxes the whole body and removes blockages in the nervous system and muscles. And it can alleviate neck and shoulder pain!
   
• Eric Fattah writes in his book, Holistic Freediving, that if you do this exercise for 30-60 minutes before an apnea performance, your performance will increase. So it can be used for both performance and recovery!
   
• I’m doing the exercise outside in the garden with my bare feet on the earth, but you can also get benefits from doing it inside, even while watching TV or you can challenge yourself and watch an entire movie!

💬 What quote I’ve been thinking about?

“If you love the process of trying to be great at something, you’re already winning”

– Anonymous

🌟 How to help motivate your buddies?

• When reading the book, Give and Take (which I highly recommend), there was a section about how asking questions can motivate people.
   
• For example if I ask you, “Out of curiosity, are you planning to vote in the next presidential election?” By asking you that one question, I’ve just increased the odds that you will actually vote by 41 percent.
   
• So an example in freediving, if I were to ask you whether you’re planning to compete in a freediving competition in the next six months, the research shows that you’ll be 18% more likely to do the competition. Note that this only works if you already feel good about the intention that the question targets. 
   
• So just by asking our buddies, students, friends, etc questions about their freediving goals and plans, we can actually increase the likelihood that they act on their plans and intentions! I think it’s a nice way to help your buddies stay motivated 🙂

✍️ Poetry is helping chronic illness, can it help improve your freediving?

• According to this interview / article on Wired, poetry is helping patients who have chronic illnesses. There’s some beginning research that show that patients who write about some of their experience of illness, like cancer or depression, etc, those patients actually have better outcomes.
   
• They don’t know exactly why exactly…the article just says “We don’t understand all of the underpinnings of what happens in our bodies when we engage creatively, but there is probably some beneficial or healing physiologic effect of writing and harnessing our imaginations in that way”
   
• As an avid poetry writer this got me thinking…I’ll betcha that writing poetry is probably AMAZING for freediving recovery and motivation. Natalia Molchanov wrote some beautiful poems which you can still find on her website.
  
  By writing poetry or even just journaling a bit after your dives, you can put into words what went on during the dives and, more importantly, what went on inside of yourself; the thoughts, the sensations, etc.
  
  It can help get a handle on anything that went wrong on the dive, or anything that was super challenging that you want to improve. And I think it can be extremely empowering and motivating, and maybe even help to combat some of the fear of depth and any limiting self beliefs that happen during the dives.
  
  Here’s a poem I wrote after one of my dives in the Blue Hole in Dahab

As always, it’s a pleasure and honor getting to spend some time with you, I hope you have a great weekend!

Renee