Feeling stressed? Try a yoga session at the bottom of the sea

For International Yoga Day, celebrated on June 21, yogis around the world will be practising everything from goat yoga to cannabis yoga. 

But have you ever felt like a yoga session on the ground simply wasn’t enough?

Well now you can take your practice to the next level in the form of underwater yoga, a new activity created by the Windjammer Landing Hotel in Saint Lucia.

The classes take place 20 feet under the Caribbean Sea, and are designed to combat stress, promote healthy breathing and make new divers feel at ease in their underwater surroundings.

“The intent of the programme is to allow new divers to be able to relax under the water, because diving requires a lot of relaxing and getting comfortable in order to fine-tune your buoyancy and basically just be comfortable under there,” explains Abigail Brown, Dive Master at Eastern Caribbean Diving.

“For experienced divers it’s a way of just giving them another way to relax under the water, a more conscious way where they’re actually thinking of their breath.”

Once in the water, participants are encouraged to continue practising the deep breathing exercises they learned on the boat, as well as striking some underwater yoga poses.

The benefits of these exercises include slowing your heart rate and lowering your blood pressure, as well as inducing a feeling of calm – a key tool for those stranded at the bottom of the sea.

You can also try out more adventurous poses seeing as falling isn’t a danger.

“The programme is also intended to allow folks to just unwind from the whole Covid situation and everything that’s going on,” explains Brown.

“It’s an introduction to yoga. So normally if we just say we have a yoga class people might not turn up. But if we have, say we have a yoga and diving class, divers might say ‘ok I’m diving already let me just try it out’ and that can be an introduction to yoga.”

Watch the video above to find out more.