“When I’m diving, I am unconditionally in the here and now.”
I am surrounded by the buzz of a vegan café in Graz, but it is Alex, sitting across from me, who has my full attention. From the moment she walked in, my perception shifted; she entered the room like she was supposed to be there, and the spark in her eyes embedded me in a coat of fascination and thrill while she talked to me about her passion in raw transparency and vulnerability.
Alexandra Benharkou, a diving instructor and consciousness, breath, and embodiment coach, encapsulates the profound presence that scuba- and freediving demand. As time dissolves in the embrace of the deep, diving, for her, is not a break from reality – it is the most radical form of presence.
This perception of presence has been with her since childhood. As a kid, she would pretend to be a research diver inspecting air bubbles under water as if they carried messages from the deep, and she simply had to encode them. The ocean was always calling, she just did not know yet how fully it would shape her life.
She has never feared the ocean, but the more time she spent under the surface, the deeper her respect for the element grew. The kind of respect that grows from knowing you are not in control. If you make a mistake underwater, the consequences will be twice as severe as on land. “Down there,” she said, “you become someone else.” Everything you bring from the surface magnifies, gets potentially more intense. Your primitive brain – which wants only safety – stirs, tries to reclaim its ancestral memory of the womb. Maybe that is why the ocean feels holy to her. Sacred. Like home. It is more than a metaphor; the water helps her to reconnect with her body – a reconnection that, on land, is often too easy to lose. “I’m usually fidgety,” she laughs, “but under the surface, I am calm. Completely focused. That is where I am myself.” This intimacy with the body, with emotion, with silence, is radical.
“How relaxed can you be?” she asks. That’s the real question. Physically, yes – diving requires endurance, strength, and training. But mentally, that’s where the real work lies. You can’t force stillness. You must become it. You meet your fears in their rawest form. And you learn how to control them. In scuba diving, we find ourselves in a strange, unknown and also unnatural situation: to be able to breathe under water. It demands us to let go of control. Alex accompanies people through this stage and shows people what can be revealed about themselves once they push past these barriers and discover their strength, courage and inner peace. When it comes to freediving, breathwork, breathing techniques following O₂ and CO₂ tables, and interval training are an essential basis. But it is the emotional regulation and the building of trust in oneself that matters the most, that decides if you are able to experience the free fall into the deep, into your mind, and into your body. “If I can hold my breath for three minutes on land,” she adds, “then I can do it down there, too, even if my brain wants me to panic and to breathe.”
Diving does not let you escape yourself: It strips away everything nonessential, holds up a mirror. As you descend into the ocean, you descend into your own subconscious. Every thought echoes louder there. When she dives into the ocean, she also dives into her mind and body, and she does not try to rid herself of fear; she learns to sit with it. By accepting the fear, she can transcend it, shifting from a place of anxiety to one of deep self-awareness and calm. This is the key psychological advantage that divers hold: the ability to regulate their emotions, override the body’s natural fight-or-flight response, and enter a state of profound mental clarity. Divers develop a special relationship with their bodies. In the depths, the body’s discomfort — the urge to breathe normally, the feeling of pressure — becomes a guide rather than a threat. Alex has felt this herself: as she descends, the sensation of her body is heightened, amplified by the silence of the water. There, she finds not fear, but an opportunity to feel deeply, to be fully present with every breath, every pulse, every heartbeat. This connection to the body, to the underwater world, to the present moment, allows her to access a deeper layer of consciousness, a state of being that many divers describe as meditative, or even spiritual. For Alex, diving is a practice of radical presence. It is about finding stillness in a world that demands constant movement and distraction. Freedivers in particular develop heightened interoceptive awareness, the ability to sense and interpret internal bodily signals like the urge to breathe, the feeling of pressure, or even subtle shifts in heart rate. This awareness is about listening – truly listening – to the body, and learning to distinguish between real danger and simply the discomfort of pushing past mental barriers.
Diving, she says, is now her life philosophy. Not something she does – something she lives. As a consciousness coach, her approach cuts past the mind’s chatter. She wants to go to the root, where emotion lives. “It’s not about digging through the past,” she explains. “It is about accessing the emotion that is still stored there, and letting it move.” She guides others through breathwork, through the discomfort, not to fix them, but to help them feel. “Many people are afraid of what they’ll find,” she says. “So, I’ll go with them.” Intense breathing, slow diving — both journeys to the same place: the core. And from that place, change becomes not just possible, but inevitable. Like the ocean, the body holds memory. And like the ocean, it asks to descend, and trust what you find.
As the café’s buzz slowly fades into the early evening calm, everything inside me begins to stir, somewhat shifting. Alex’s words struck a chord deep within me. There’s a thrill now, a strange pull, a subtle urge to dive inward, to explore the buried. My eyes welled up, with emotion, but more so with recognition — her words slipped past my defences with disarming grace. “When I see your eyes watering, I know that I touched some part of you, and that’s what it’s all about, about moving, about breaking free; from here we go and dive.”
An Article by Carolina Leiter with Alexandra Benharkou http://www.alexandra-berharkou.com @mental.deep.dive_coaching