Egypt's Blue Odysea Teaches Underwater Meditation

Nestled on Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline for the summer, the roaming Blue Odysea community is teaching adults and kids alike the power of water meditation….
“We want to encourage mindfulness through water,” Raghda Ezz El Din, a two-time national free-diving record holder and co-founder of the Blue Odysea community, tells #SceneTraveller. “Just like regular meditation, underwater meditation helps you drown out external factors and tap into your emotions. The difference is, water is a powerful natural element that intensifies your meditation by creating sensory deprivation.”

After suffering from a lung injury due to a free diving incident, Ezz El Din abandoned the part of diving that focused on pushing oneself to the limit, and adopted the holistic approach on which Blue Odysea’s ethos is built. ”How we feel underwater, how we deal with stress, these are all central to our classes as opposed to numbers and endurance,” she says.

Blue Odysea’s classes hone in on how water possesses the power to push out toxins and stress out of the human body. Mediating underwater uses breathing, timing, and buoyancy to trigger a trance-like state where you can access your innermost workings. On dry land, we meditate using our breath first. The Ujjayi method of meditation dictates that we constrict our throats and breathe in through our noses. Taking this method into the blue, underwater meditation mirrors this practice with the help of a mask and snorkel. Without a set international curriculum to work off of, Ezz El Din and her co-founder Ahmed Soliman curated their own programmes for adults and kids to induce a state of deep relaxation.
Their classes are currently being held at the Jaz Almaza Bay Resort (a four-to-five hour drive from Cairo along the North Coast) but throughout the rest of the year you can find them at various spots across Egypt’s Red Sea coastline. They also teach water-dancing, mermaiding and free-diving. To stay up to date with their schedule and locations, follow their Instagram page @blueodysea or call 01201051478.