Yoga retreats and yoga holidays - improve your yoga practice in Egypt & Morocco

Yoga and diving: more in common
than you might think

For first-time divers, the most difficult thing is often breathing underwater. Yoga can help: by learning to control the movements of the lungs, diving becomes much less stressful.

Last summer I introduced a friend to scuba diving. Each time we went underwater she would immediately pop back to the surface. We tried snorkelling, to not avail. Never in my career as a scuba instructor had I had to tell anyone they wouldn't be able to dive. I watched her breathing and realised the problem. She took very little air into her lungs - just as she did on land: fast and shallow.

I advised her to take some yoga classes. In both disciplines we pay a lot of attention to the breathing, the only bodily function that works instinctively as well as under the will.

It helped Claire get enough confidence to breathe comfortable under water and relaxed. She finished her Open Water and still dives today.

Yoga is divided into eight areas. The most popularly known are the asanas (body positions), but the next step up is breathing. Breath is life; we breathe from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Pranayama has various functions that strengthen the way we breathe. In India there are reports of expert yogis being able to hold their breath for 20 minutes or being able to stop their hearts. These are just stories - perhaps 2 yogis in a century can do this sort of thing.

What pranayama does, however, is warm cool, clean and strengthen the lungs - like a medicine; each exercise has different results - with useful "side effects" for divers.

One technique is bellow breathing- breathing heavily in and out for 30 seconds or so - a kind of push up for the lungs. Since only 4-5% of oxygen in the air is absorbed by the body, bellow breathing flexes all the lung, meaning you fully utilise the inner surfaces and so increase the absorbing surface - more oxygen goes in and more carbon dioxide can go out. It's rather like a digestive system - in effect you digest air better.

Holding the breath also produces different reactions by adjusting the exchange of gases between the lungs and the bloodstream. As you continue to hold your breath, the body starts to take sugar instead from the cells of the body (burnt sugar gives off oxygen). This heats the body temperature - and yogic thinking has it this also burns off impurities.

Other pranayama exercises relate to the yogic idea of energy. In yoga thinking, each nostril is a 'nadi' or energy channel that then runs through the brain and into the spine. A breath draws energy as well as air; so nostril breathing is stimulating the nadis and thus providing energy.

"The scuba diver dives to look around," wrote Umberto Pelizzari, "The free diver dives to look inside." Because yoga works on the mental state free divers also find it a great helpy. Yoga also develops more sensibility and awareness of body and mind, which you need to recognise symptoms of low oxygen in the body.

In a more general sense (and as every diver knows) a healthy body helps you to enjoy the scuba diving more and help to avoid deceases like DCI. With the practice of asanas - body positions -your body gets flexible; regularly practice increases your concentration and leads to mental and physical balance.

But even without paying too much attention to the philosophical background of yoga most people take the benefits of asanas and pranayama and find it helpful for their life and in their diving. This is how the old art of yoga can still benefit our modern, technical world. By Jana Czipin

KUNDALINI - HATHA - ASHTANGA - IYENGAR - SHIVANANDA