The Real Depth: What Freediving Taught Me About Surrender

The Real Depth: What Freediving Taught Me About Surrender

A fellow diver recently asked me, "What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from freediving?"

The question stuck with me. I’ve thought about it a lot, but I hadn’t really tried to say it out loud. The answer isn’t about breath-hold times or depth. It’s about trust and letting go.

At first, freediving seems like a physical discipline. How long can you hold your breath? How deep can you go? But that’s just the surface. The real work happens in the stillness, in the silence, where it’s just you and whatever fear you’ve brought with you.

That lesson came early in my training. In 2018, I was working with my instructor, Sara Campbell. She helped me realize I had a hard time letting go of control. That resistance kept me from fully trusting the process and my own body. It showed up as stress and anxiety, and it held me back.

In the deep, you start to feel what you're still holding onto. Ego. Expectations. The need to prove something. But the ocean doesn’t care what you want or think you deserve. It reflects back what’s actually there in that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

The longer you spend in that space, the more it follows you to the surface. You speak more slowly. You react with more intention. You breathe through discomfort instead of trying to avoid it. You stop needing to be in control of everything, because you’ve learned how to stay calm in uncertainty.

Freediving isn’t really about holding your breath. It’s about creating space for discomfort, for quiet, for growth. That’s the real depth.

Over time, that mindset has shaped more than just my diving. It’s helped me notice when I’m trying to grip too tightly in everyday life. I still fall into that habit, but now I catch it more quickly. Letting go softens the stress. It helps me reset when things start to feel overwhelming.

This is what freediving has given me. Not just a way to go deeper underwater, but a way to see where I’m holding too tight in life. What would it feel like to let go, just a little? To trust yourself more fully? To surrender not as defeat, but as quiet strength?


Where in your life are you still holding on too tightly?
Maybe the next deep breath isn’t about diving it’s about letting go