Shared Breath - Dive Reflex - Our Enduring Connection to Water

Shared Breath is a visual storytelling project set in Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne, that explores a remarkable reflex triggered the moment we’re submerged in water—a biological response we share with seals, seabirds, and dolphins. This ancient adaptation slows the heart, conserves oxygen, and calms the nervous system.

By weaving together underwater imagery, soundscapes, and lived experience, the project invites us to reflect on our evolutionary connection to water—and how that connection can offer healing, regulation, and a quiet return to ourselves. It’s a story about remembering what the body already knows: how to breathe, how to adapt, and how to belong to the world around us

Shared Breath explores a quiet, instinctive reflex triggered the moment we are submerged in water. This dive response—an ancient adaptation shared by humans, seals, seabirds, and other marine species—slows the heart, conserves oxygen, and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It shifts the body from stress into stillness, offering both a biological and symbolic bridge back to our aquatic origins.

Set within Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne—one of Australia’s most accessible yet ecologically rich marine ecosystems—Shared Breath uses visual storytelling to illuminate this reflex not only as science, but as a metaphor for regulation, reconnection, and resilience.

These questions echo across cultural knowledge systems. For First Nations communities, water is a resource, spirit, memory, and Country. In the Port Phillip Bay region, the Bunurong, Wurundjeri, and Wadawurrung peoples have long practiced cultural and ecological care for marine environments. Waterways are ancestral beings, sites of ceremony and renewal. Water has long offered healing to land and community alike.

While Shared Breath is anchored in Port Phillip Bay, the biological and emotional truths it explores are universal. The dive reflex is a shared human capacity, found across cultures and species, and this project is designed to scale beyond a single location. Its immersive and modular format can be adapted for educational use, public science programming, or cultural exhibitions around the world.

This project is grounded in both scientific research and lived experience. Studies show that cold-water immersion and breath-hold techniques stimulate vagal tone, reduce heart rate, and support recovery from trauma. These mechanisms are now being explored for therapeutic use in treating anxiety, panic, and PTSD. The dive reflex is not just evolutionary—it is medicinal. It offers a rare physiological reset in an overstimulated world, reminding us how to soften, regulate, and stay present in the body.

Shared Breath also tells a story of kinship—defined not by ancestry, but by adaptation. Across species lines, we are linked by breath, biology, and the water that holds us. This reflex lives in all of us, waiting to be remembered. Through underwater imagery, soundscapes, and written reflections, this project invites audiences into a sensory experience of stillness—offering not just information, but immersion.

The project builds on scientific research into the dive response and marine adaptation, while layering it with personal narrative, ecological knowledge, and emotional storytelling. Across generations and geographies, water has shaped not only bodies, but communities—serving as a site of regulation, memory, and collective resilience. From traditional cultural practices to modern freediving and therapeutic immersion, the breath we hold underwater becomes a way of holding place, pain, and each other.
This project asks: What can our shared breath with the ocean teach us—about memory, nature, belonging, and what it means to be human?In an overwhelming world, Shared Breath offers an alternative narrative—a quiet reconnection. Through breath, we remember that we are still part of something vast, adaptive, and alive.

This framing is especially timely. As climate disruption, urbanisation, and chronic illness reshape both ecological systems and our internal landscapes, many people experience profound disconnection—from their environments, their bodies, and each other. What happens when we lose access to the spaces that regulate us? And how do we continue to belong to them—across illness, distance, or change?

Sea Within asks: What happens when

we lose access to the environments that ground us? And how do we continue to belong to them?