Day 13 – WED - 26/9/12 – Dahab, Egypt
Second day of yoga with a few more breathing exercises and different stretches to create flexibility. Sun Salutations were also introduced to assist with core strength building for holding up your dive kit when you're outside the water as well as learning postures for meditation. It was great to do a full stretch.
I had an omelette, crepe with fresh lime and honey and baked potato pieces, falafel, lentils and grilled tomato with parmesan cheese melted on it – delicious!
We headed to dive again at Lighthouse and set up in the cafe again as it was quite rough this morning in the Sea. The diving briefing was to increase our dive depth and skills like loosing your mask and loosing your regulator – as long as you keep breathing then all is fine. It was also focused on buoyancy and reef diving.
The yoga briefing was related to being aware of your breath to again control buoyancy and in turn allows you to maintain neutral buoyancy and just become like the fish and be weightless and observe the environment, coral and other fish.
Dive 1 was over Lighthouse Reef - The dive was fantastic over that part of the reef and I felt relaxed, weightless and the effect was very calming and at times was just able to observe but still struggled at times with background mind chatter.
At lunchtime it was discussed regarding how the release effects your life to enable you to get out of your head and just experience as you are at the moment, rather than projecting into the future. Instead appreciating where you are, not thinking about what you need to do at work, the never ending list of jobs around the house and comparing this with the calmness of presence.
Relating this to yoga that morning and the meditation part we had experienced; it became clear that the reason for practising the postures is to achieve stillness during meditation so the body can remain motionless to enable the mind to follow suit.
The next dive was used to focus on this and with my buoyancy now being controlled at neutral, it allowed me to be still at many points during the dive and increased the capacity of my mind to become still as at lunchtime I had shared that even with seemingly no responsibilities – no job, no house – ie. To most people I would seem I have nothing to worry about, I still had a 'To Do' list rolling around in the back of my head – book accommodation for Kenya pre-tour, tickets for the train for India, measurements for my swarma for India, food shopping list after diving, getting my blog up to date.
Pressure s of the future tense – My 'To Do' list was interrupting my mind during the dive, instead of blanking them all and just observing where I was and appreciating the fish and coral. So in the second dive I focused my mind on the now, let the rest go and with observation, this meant I saw more sea life, the coral colours became clearer and popped out more and I appreciated the whole experience so much more.
After the dive we headed back to the hotel and I had a great nights sleep!
