Shared Breath - The Dive Reflex

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.

The 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 rooted in Port Phillip Bay, the themes of Shared Breath are global. The dive reflex is a universal 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.

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 free diving and therapeutic immersion, the breath we hold underwater becomes a way of holding place, pain, and each other.

The project builds on scientific research into the dive response, layering it with personal narrative, ecological knowledge, and emotional storytelling. For me, it’s not only a subject of intellectual curiosity—it’s also deeply personal.

Living with chronic pain and illness has shaped how I move through the world - how I inhabit my body, how I seek relief. For years, I felt estranged from myself, disconnected from the body I lived in. Then I found water. At first, it was simply the surreal feeling of weightlessness, an escape from gravity and strain. But over time, water became a place to slow down, to listen and to feel.

The dive reflex is something I now carry intimately as a lived practice. It’s become a way of finding calm and clarity when everything else feels overwhelming. This is why this story matters to me. It’s about what the ocean can teach us as a scientific phenomenon - and equally, what it reveals about being human.

My first freedive training in 2014 wasn’t about depth—it was about learning to be still inside my own body. Each breath hold grew longer: 0:37, 1:36, 2:10, 2:17, 2:38. I was learning to let go. All humans carry the dive reflex. It doesn’t belong only to elite athletes or ocean dwellers. It belongs to all of us. It’s a quiet bridge back to regulation, to memory, to the breath we all share—between selves, between species, between the body and the sea.

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.