Mobula Mobular shot by the talented Xabi Romero.
The bubble
Every freediving retreat community has a moment when it stops feeling temporary and starts feeling real. And then, just as suddenly, it’s over.
There is a particular kind of emptiness that follows. Not the emptiness of loss exactly, more like the quiet after a song ends. The sea is still there. But the bubble has burst, and the people who filled it have scattered back to their lives in Switzerland, in the United States, in all the places they came from before they landed here, in La Ventana, and became, for one luminous nine days, something like family.
This was our fifth edition of Deep, Wild & Blue. And every time, without fail, it catches me off guard. How fast it happens. How real it becomes. How much it costs to say goodbye.
Strangers, at first
They arrived separately. A German couple and a German woman, all living in Switzerland, who came to deepen their freediving practice. A couple from the United States. Three American women coming for their very first certification. Different ages, different backgrounds, different reasons for being here.
What they shared, before they knew anything else about each other, was this: a deep and wordless connection to the ocean. To nature. To something larger than the everyday.
That is enough. That is, I have learned, always enough.
What the ocean asks of you
Freediving is not like other sports. It asks something unusual of you. It asks you to be still. To trust. To let go of the impulse to fight and control and push through. You hold your breath and you descend, and the only way to go deeper is to surrender more completely.
That kind of vulnerability is hard to fake. And it is, I have found, one of the fastest roads to real connection.
Some came with fears they carried quietly. Others arrived with health challenges or a complicated relationship with new experiences. One had never freedived at all. They each brought their own private weight.
And then they got in the water together.
We did breathwork and preparation. Static workshops on the surface. Equalization practice. Emily, my co-host, my freediving instructor, my Kapitid, created what she always creates: a learning playground. A space where trying and failing and trying again feels not just acceptable but joyful.
They cheered each other on. They played. They celebrated each other’s depths and each other’s fears with equal tenderness. By midweek, the stranger part had quietly dissolved.
The captains and the sea
One afternoon we went to meet our boat captains at their home, before heading out on the water, before they became simply the people driving the boat. We sat with them and they told us their stories.
They were fishermen for a long time. Sharks. Mobulas. Turtles. They extracted from the sea with the efficiency of people who had learned to think of it as a resource rather than a living world.
One of them said something I won’t forget. He told us that he used to take from the sea, a lot. And now, he no longer does. The ocean gave him a living for years, and at some point it gave him something else: a conscience. A responsibility. A different kind of relationship with the water.
The group sat with that for a while. Some things land quietly and then grow.
Ocean dance
On one of our days we did an ocean dance workshop with Julia, and I will admit, it is a strange thing at first. You are in the water, close to someone you have known for only a few days, moving together in a partner dance that involves touch, weight, trust. The kind of closeness that in ordinary life takes months to earn.
But the water changes things. It holds you differently.
I had one particular dance that I will carry with me for a long time. I danced with a couple, the three of us moving together in the water. And at some point, something shifted. Time and space ceased to exist. Our bodies were in complete flow, one with each other and one with the sea. I don’t know how long it lasted. It doesn’t matter. Those are the moments that remind you why you do any of this.
Emily, Kapitid
I want to say something about Emily, because a retreat like this does not exist without her.
She is smart and kind and grounded and genuinely, effortlessly funny. She makes freediving feel accessible to everyone, not by simplifying it, but by holding the learning space with such warmth that fear becomes curiosity almost without you noticing. She brings out the kid in me.
Kapitid. Sister in Tagalog. That is what she is.
When the two of us work together, something clicks into place. Five editions in, and that feeling hasn’t changed. If anything, it deepens.
Doña Estrella, Rogelio, and the ranch
On our last day we went up to the ranch, a place I have returned to many times, long before Deep, Wild & Blue existed.
Doña Estrella shows her love through work. She puts you beside her wood-burning grill and teaches you to make tortillas, flour dusting your hands, the smell of the fire, her rowdy energy filling the kitchen with laughter and warmth. It is the most generous thing, to be included in someone’s daily life, to be taught something they have been doing their whole lives.
Rogelio, his sister and father hold the land with the same pride. They have built something that feels timeless.
And then there are the fresh water pools, surrounded by enormous boulders, cool and clear and somehow completely removed from time. Magical is the only word.
Going back to that place feels like going home. Not because it belongs to me, but because it has received me, again and again, with the same unhurried warmth.
What real community feels like
I think about community a lot. I grew up between cultures, watched the Inuit and the Cree live it in ways that most of us in the modern world have forgotten. Community as survival. Community as daily practice. Community as the thing that makes life bearable and also beautiful.
A freediving retreat community is built differently than most. Strangers arrive with their own fears and histories and reasons, and choose, consciously or not, to show up for each other. To be open. To try things that feel unfamiliar or frightening. To take care of each other with a naturalness that surprises everyone, including themselves.
No one was required to do any of that. They just did.
These retreats remind me of one truth: we are one.
The emptiness after
They are gone now. Back to Switzerland, back to the United States, back to their lives.
I came home to a quieter space, the kind of quiet that only exists after something full. And I am here with this fullness in my chest that is also, somehow, an ache.
This is the fifth time I have felt this. And I know by now that the emptiness is not absence. It is the shape of what was there. The bubble doesn’t burst because it was fragile. It bursts because it was real.
I still think about all of the previous guests, the ones from every edition before this one, who also arrived as strangers and left as something more. I wonder what they are doing. Whether they are diving. Whether they still feel the ocean in their bodies the way they did that week. That community doesn’t disappear when the retreat ends. It continues to live, somewhere, in each of us. I carry their energy. I wish them well. And I hope that whatever they found here continues to fuel them, long after the water has dried.
This is what a freediving retreat community feels like from the inside.
My heart is full.
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