Ocean HEALING…

From the lowest of lows and the darkest of mental spaces, multi-award-winning photographer Jacki Bruniquel shares with us her journey to finding hope, inspiration and healing through freediving.

For many people, the first lockdown of 2020 brought with it a great amount of loss – both financial and emotional – and forced them to look inwards and reassess their lives.
It was during this period that Jacki, too, started her journey towards self-awareness. A journey that led her to discovering the remarkable healing properties of the ocean – something she is now excited to share with others.

In 2020, as a highly successful wedding and portrait photographer living in her newly renovated Ballito house with Mexican tiles in the kitchen (just like she had always dreamed of), it appeared as if Jacki had it all.

“The truth is, I was in an unhappy relationship with myself. Nothing I ever did felt like it was enough and I pushed myself to a state of burnout on more than one occasion. When the pandemic started, I coped with my anxiety and fought depression by exercising obsessively, doing yoga and meditating, but, as they extended the lockdowns and my business crumbled, so I fell into a dark space and was diagnosed with clinical depression.”

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This experience, Jacki says, was possibly one of the most important shifts of her life. “It forced me into a place where I could no longer use work to avoid my feelings. It was the beginning of a journey towards self-awareness, self-love and learning to live intuitively.”

Jacki sold her house, applied to do a Masters Degree in Fine Arts and, following an intuitive itch that she needed to start taking photographs below the surface of the ocean, bought an underwater housing for her camera.

“To learn how to hold my breath underwater, I signed up for a freediving course. I was hooked immediately. It felt as if a light had been switched on in my soul the first time I descended into the sea below. Everything slowed down as my ears became infused with the cracking of the ocean and my eyes drank in the sunbeams that dance in the deep sea. My senses heightened, but my mind stopped chattering.

“Freediving became a medicine for me over the year that followed and I found myself healing in the vast expansive ocean spaces that I travelled to to dive. My art work now is looking at the ocean as a healing space. “I am particularly interested in how using embodiment practice in the sea, when we put on a mask and open our eyes underwater after breathing up slowly and calmly, can evoke the flow state. Our senses can come alive in this other worldly space, allowing us to fully engage in the present moment when we concentrate on the sights, sounds, sensations, taste and smells of the sea. This act of returning fully to the body, but also to the breath, disengages us from the chatter of the mind and so it becomes deeply meditative and calming.”

Flow state, she says, is a term coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the 70s to describe the mental space where we go into complete focus uninterrupted by the inner critic.

“If you watch children play, you will see a sense of flow state in their games. Artists, musicians, surfers, snowboarders and even coders slip into this space. I have personally experienced it while freediving on the line, diving with dolphins and also being engaged in creative practice.”

Now Jacki is sharing this wonderful ‘ocean gift’ she’s been given with others through immersive three-day workshops in Sodwana for people who want to shift their lives and discover their creative potential.

Called Art of Ocean Flow, Jacki says the workshops are a way of using the ocean as a tool to get you out of your head and into your body to shift into a creative flow state. The aim, she says, is to help people use: breathing to relax and connect with themselves, mindfulness meditation to silence the inner critic and find inspiration, the senses to become completely embodied in the present moment to shift negative thought patterns and journaling practice to connect with the subconscious and encourage self-awareness.

During Jacki’s workshops, you’ll learn how to breath more effectively (on land), use your breath to ease anxiety, hold your breath in the ocean, use a mask and snorkel and equalise ears and go below the surface to up five meters.

“There is inspiration to be found everywhere but we have to open our eyes, listen with our ears and truly feel the world around us to tap into this.”

Details: Find out more about Jacki’s workshops by emailing her: [email protected]

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