Officially three years of learning & practicing freediving, as a traditional ancestral knowledge & embodied ecological wisdom!

My father & his father & my whole paternal lineage were pearl divers & fisherfolk off of Bantayan island, Visayan Sea, Philippines. What an incredible experience to return my body into the ocean & awaken deeply-seated embodied wisdom!

But it’s a strange juncture in time to be reviving this practice. With the rise of industrializing and modernizing forces, freediving became associated with subsistence survival & fisherfolk poverty, considered a ‘lower class’ skill (arguably, it is dangerous at extreme depths). Not to mention the reality of climate change trauma, which impacts how local islanders relate to their native ecologies. In the past decades, the practice of freediving found global revival – as a westernized recreational & competitive sport, in which one can become ‘certified’ through training. Still, for time immemorial, our sea-based ancestors have always been diving.

Grateful to have learned freediving in my ancestral home of Bantayan island through Pasiyok. We began as a diving community promoting environmental awareness for locals to experience & protect marine ecologies. Since 2022, I’ve been proud to bring many locals on their first journeys to see & clean up our coral reefs!

In the Bantayanon Bisayan language, ‘pasiyok’ means ‘to equalize’ or to release pressure from inner air cavities, accumulated with depth descent. That we have a specific word for this eco-embodied skill indicates a rich knowledge in our culture.

I will admit though, it’s not been a picture perfect process. I have struggled immensely with effective pasiyok, or equalization.

Ultimately, I am discovering how this freediving journey is about learning how to truly relax.

Getting deeper into freediving means really integrating decades of practice in Yoga, pranayama, breath work, meditation, ecotherapy, vagus nerve & somatic healing. I am learning that free diving requires us to release the gravity of fears, anxieties and worries to arrive at the depths of experience.

Excited to share where this freediving journey is going… into the premodern archives of the islands!

For the web residency »Tools for Citation« cultural, plant, and body worker Khokhoi (mary alinney villacastin) investigates archival and embodied research of Indigenous ecosystems, cultures, histories, and knowledges from the archipelago now known as the Philippines. The web project Ubos sa Dagat: The Under Sea experiments with a series of movement-based videos and spiraling »fin-notes,« to reimagine the colonial archive by uncovering histories and memories connected to Indigenous islander traditions.

Ubos Sa Dagat: The Under Sea at Akademie Schloss Solitude

More soon… To many cycles of dives, waves, swims & underwater dreamweaving 🌊 KK <3