“You’re from South Africa, you must be a good swimmer,” he said. “Have you heard of fridykning?”

I tried to translate this new word. Fridykning. I immediately thought it was a translation error. One thing I had learned after my first six months of living and studying in Sweden was that not many things are free.

Yet two days later, I’m in a squeaky borrowed drysuit, in a small fishing boat in Gullmarsfjorden in Sweden, I am about to experience freediving for the very first time.

“Just breathe deeply and slowly, then take a big breath in and dive down,” my friend said. Eager to please, I did exactly that. Deep breath in, slow breath out. Deep breath in, slow breath out. Big breath in, and I dived down.

The water got darker and colder as I kicked down. Wearing the mask I’d borrowed, I followed the rock face further and further until I found a ledge, a nondescript grey ledge and I sat down. And for the first time in my young life, I felt my heartbeat in my chest, in my arms, in my whole body.

And there, 15 metres below the surface, in a cold fjord in Sweden, my life changed forever.

Everything I knew about who I was and where I came from: Hanli, who grew up on a farm in South Africa, who loved nature, who loved horses, shifted into a state of suspension and anticipation.

I opened my eyes, looked at this familiar foreign world around me, and kicked back up to the surface to breathe. I clambered back onto the boat like a clumsy elephant seal and said to my friend, “What just happened to me? I felt something happen in my body I’ve never felt before.”

That question, that day, sparked a journey of discovery: of research, of lying on hospital beds with ultrasound machines aimed at my spleen, heart rate monitors attached to my chest while diving deep in Egypt. Holding sound recording devices while freediving with sperm whales in Sri Lanka, dolphins in Mozambique, tracking the last of the dugong along the Mozambican coast. Hours and hours observing Cape fur seals diving, twirling, playing in the kelp forest.

So, just what happened to my body that day in that Swedish fjord?

The answer is the same thing that happens to your body when you take a breath and dive down. We become aquatic mammals.

We swim back into our skin. Back into who we are. Not only do our minds, emotions and spirit feel this shift; our bodies experience the same mammalian dive responses as whales, dolphins and seals. Bradycardia, the slowing of the heart-rate. Vasoconstriction, the redirection of blood flow to the core where it’s needed. The mysterious spleen response, where our spleen constricts to allow stored haemoglobin into the bloodstream. But there is more.

I FELT MY HEART BEAT

Twenty years later, I had my version two. I heard my daughter’s heart beating inside of me. I watched her small, fish-like form swimming inside my fluid.

The ultrasound showed her squirming and moving inside of me, just like I had seen my spleen changing and morphing. Just like I had felt my own body adapting inside the ocean.

And my greatest journey into self, into blue, was the day myself and her, seven months fully formed inside of me, slipped off the boat into the crystal-blue water of the Indian Ocean.

No longer a fish-like creature swimming around, but the shape of a girl inside a mother. The bottlenose dolphins I had known for twenty years noticed my entrance. They changed direction, swimming straight towards us. Their click patterns changed, their whistles shifted. They saw what we could not see. Like an aquatic onion, we are layers peeled back in this watery space.

I took a breath, like they take a breath. We dived down together. And as one, they approached my distended belly. They were not talking to me anymore. Their clicks, their echolocation, their sonar, were not aimed at me. They were looking at her.

Dolphins have names for each other, for us. They had known me a long time. And now, they saw me in this final phase of gestation. Matriarchal as they are, I was now dolphin royalty. The large, older females came close, so close – fin to hand, fluke to foot. The babies, curious began circling me, circling me, circling me, their bright eyes following mine.

They scanned my belly. Circled my body. Scanned again. Circled again. I was not only part of the pod. I was aquatic. My daughter inside my fluid. Myself suspended in blue water. We were dolphin cousins, speaking in a language maybe she could understand inside. My body going through the same ancient changes as they do as they enter the deep. We do not only see below the surface, we become.

This is how this short essay appears in the special Oceanographic publication, The Innerview