Diving in The Tongue of the Ocean: How Fear Taught Me Aliveness

Nothing enhances aliveness more than when you thwart impending doom.
 I learned this while scuba diving in The Tongue of the Ocean, nauseated and terrified, convinced I was about to die. I’d chummed the ocean. Sharks were coming. My prophetic nightmare was unfolding exactly as I’d dreamed it.
 And then I went underwater.
 Let me back up.


I’ve wanted to dive for as long as I can remember. Water has always been my element. The delicious coolness against skin, the weightlessness of gliding through it, the physicality of a long swim. My mother used to tell about my first experience with the ocean when I was just a baby, not yet walking. Every time she put me down at Warm Beach, I’d crawl madly toward the water and keep going as it closed around me, until someone snatched me up. Then the cycle would start again.


So back in 2013, when my husband and I signed up for our scuba certification, I thought I was ready. I love water. I’m comfortable in water.
 Breathing under water? That was different.


I was unprepared for how panicky I felt with our first pool sessions in our diving course. Going underwater was not the problem, breathing underwater was. My chest constricted, my breaths were shallow. I thought my regulator was broken, but gradually I relaxed and learned to breath.

Living in Northern BC, we chose to do our open water dives in Seattle.

Our instructor was great. When I heard that he was a teacher who took teens to Mexico diving each year for the past 16 years, I figured he was equipped to keep me safe. We started in the pool as we were also getting our dry suit certification. The first session I had trouble staying off the bottom, which was strange for buoyant me. The reason became evident as I tried to climb out of the pool. My dry suit had a leak and was filled with water. Re-outfitted with a new drysuit, my buoyancy returned. My feet over-buoyant now. Awesome. Two more worries to add to the litany of things that could go wrong. A leaky dry-suit or floaty feet.


My brain is often my worst enemy.

During the first open water dive, all the ‘what ifs’ flooded my brain as we followed the bottom from shore, getting deceptively deeper. My floaty feet were my nemesis and I was sure I was going to shoot up to the surface feet first, missing my safety stop, resulting in an embolism. 
Yeah, none of that happened.

Although I had to turn summersaults several times to bring my feet under control, giving me small panic attacks as I lost sight of the instructor and Budd, I earned my certification without incident. That was July and we didn’t dive again until Spring vacation the following March.


Ah, the Bahamas


We flew into Nassau and booked 3 nights at Orange Hill Beach Inn while we waited for the next flight to Eleuthera. Pink sand beaches that turn golden in the setting sun.
Balmy breezes caressing the skin.
 Waves lapping at your feet.
 


Our beach house on Eleuthera

Lobster tails

The Glass Window – where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic

Our First Dive

We booked diving with Stewart’s Cove, which is a big operation. 
My husband called to book the dives and at my insistence, explained that since I was a new and nervous diver, we wanted to book a shallow, beginner dive.
 ‘Oh no problem. We have such a dive tomorrow. Just the one for you.’


We didn’t need dry suits so springing a leak wasn’t a problem, but I was still obsessing about my floaty feet. However, given the dive was shallow, at least I didn’t need to worry too much if they betrayed me and floated me feet first past my safety stop.
 I’d probably escape the bends.


Restless all night before the dive, I had a dream, not of a beginner dive, but of a wall dive where floaty feet were the least of my problems. Rather in this terrifying dream.
 I kept going

Down
          Down
                    Down

         Into the depths of the ocean

Nothing I did could interrupt my descent.


I woke up nervous but relieved knowing that we were doing a beginner dive.
 To get to Stewart’s Cove, we drove across the Glass Window Bridge where the deep Atlantic blue meets the shallow turquoise of the Caribbean.

The dive shop was bustling when we arrived. Numerous tours were going out, both snorkeling and scuba.
 We arrived at the counter, gave our names and the person said, “Oh you’re going to love this dive. It’s a wall dive and the ocean depth is 6500 ft”.
 At Those Words . . . I Lost it
! All the terror of my dreams bubbled to the surface. Usually my melt-downs are reserved for the select, aka my husband, but I couldn’t control it and I had a giant melt down right there. In front of everyone.
 Suddenly my dream was prophetic and there was only one way to thwart it.


“I’m not going.” I said emphatically.
 My husband and the lady tried to talk me down, but I couldn’t be reasoned with.
 She said it was to late to cancel and I wouldn’t get a refund.
 I said I didn’t care.
 Between gulps for breath, I repeated our request from the day before and reiterated that the person who took our reservation told us we were booked on a beginner dive.
 It wasn’t pretty.


Nightmares are Not Reliable Sources of Information


But what are the chances that I’d dream about a wall dive unless for an important reason? I didn’t even know anything about wall dives, but I was too panicked to ask clarifying questions.
 She was too experienced to know that I maybe had an information gap.
 I was a mess.
 In an effort to convince me to go on the dive, they added an extra dive master just for me.
 My dream, in which I descended unstopped into oblivion was now my reality. My kismit.

Resigned to my fate, I told my husband to tell our family how much I loved them when I didn’t return. I can be dramatic.


The Missing Information: There’s Usually Missing Information


It was a windy day as the boat turned toward The Tongue of the Ocean. The what?
 If they’d told me the name before we left shore, I would never have stepped foot on that boat.
 We were diving in that deep trench between Andros and New Providence called The Tongue of the Ocean and it was about to slurp me up and swallow me whole.


It was a large boat with about 16 divers aboard. Everything was highly efficient and the mood for everyone but me was one of excitement. By the time we finally stopped at our dive destination, the waves were large. The boat rocked back and forth making it difficult to get geared up.

The crew was in a hurry to get everyone into the water before people started to get sick. Too late for me.
 Shamefully, I lunged to the side of the boat and emptied my stomach.
 I was dizzy and nauseated and scared.
The dive master assigned to me, kept on me, hurrying me up, helping me into my gear and now I had a new fear.


“What happens if I throw up under the water?”
 “It’ll be fine”, she answered. “Just purge it through the mouthpiece, but you’ll probably feel better once your below surface”.

 Climbing into my wetsuit
, a new fear hit me. I’d Just Chummed the Ocean
. Sharks were on their way. I was miserable.
Trying to keep my stomach settled, a small glimmer of hope came out of the pre-dive talk.
We would descend about 45 feet to the ocean floor and swim around a sunken ship before we made our way to the wall and down it’s side.


And there it was.
 The missing information. 
We weren’t being dropped into the ocean where the floor was 6500 feet below us. We were being dropped where it was 45 feet below us.
My stomach was still churning relentlessly as I jumped into the waves and began my descent.


Once Underwater, I forgot about my Nightmare. 



I was in awe. The visibility was astounding. I saw creatures that I’d never seen before for the very first time and the harmony between my senses and my thoughts brought a sense of ‘aliveness. I was fully in the moment. 
Everything about that first dive is imprinted on my brain with a clarity as bright as the blue that could be seen looking up from the ocean floor.


The Tongue of the Ocean was gentle with me as I dropped over the edge of the wall.
 Looking into the black nothingness below me, I put a little burst of air into my BCD . . . just in case.
 My stomach settled while we were under the surface, but I was miserable during the decompression time spent on the boat between dives.
 I wasn’t the only one that was sick, but that was small consolation as I now longed for The Tongue of the Ocean to pull me out of my misery.


Elation Hit When we Arrived Back to Shore


But the world spun. For an hour I lay on the grass trying to stop my stomach from turning. Every time I sat up, dizziness ensued and I laid back down. 
It didn’t stop the words from tumbling out of my mouth though. I couldn’t stop reliving my experience.


Nothing enhances aliveness more then when you thwart impending doom.
 I did it! 
I outlived my nightmare.
 Outsmarted kismet.
 And entered into a whole new world filled with beauty and wonder.


My Take Away


Prescience is a type of foreknowledge. This oftentimes results in putting too much stock in our thoughts when they start running rampant.
 Asking questions to ensure you have the facts is so important in gaining control over fears.
 And thankfully, I don’t need terrifying nightmares to invade my experiences in order to feel alive.



Several years later, we dove in Hautulco, Mexico.


There was quite a lot of surge under the ocean.
 We learned to kick when the surge pushed forward, and to float rather than fight against it when it pulled back.
The puffer fish above was my teacher. It swam several feet below me and we surged forward and backwards in unison.
 When it finned, I finned. When it rested, so did I.

Swim with the surge and trust that you will keep moving forward even when life sometimes pulls you back.

I did it. I outlived my nightmare.

I entered into a whole new world filled with beauty and wonder. Prescience is the stuff of books and movies. We’re told to trust our gut, listen to our instincts, honor our intuitions. And sometimes that’s wise, but sometimes our brains are unreliable narrators.

My nightmare wasn’t prophecy, it was anxiety dressed up as foreknowledge. And if I’d trusted it completely, I would have missed one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

The real wisdom wasn’t in the dream. It was in learning how important it is to ask the right questions. In discovering the missing information. In learning that “6,500 feet of ocean” didn’t mean what I thought it meant and that diving in The Tongue of the Ocean did not mean I’d be swallowed whole.

My brain still tries to write disaster stories. But now I know to pause. To ask. To discover what’s missing before I let fear make the decision.

Aliveness isn’t about being fearless. It’s about being present enough to push past the fear to what’s real.

And what’s real is often more beautiful than we can imagine.

Want to explore what creates aliveness?

I’ve developed a framework for recognizing and cultivating it. Read more in Aliveness: A Framework for Being Fully Present. Coming soon.

What about you? Have you ever let fear nearly stop you from something transformative? I’d love to hear your story in the comments below.


P.S. May each day bring you moments of wonder.