I spent a huge part of my childhood playing with fish in the blue of the Mediterranean. A little kid who wanted so much to stay swimming with them, that stretched his breath more and more, sometimes wholly forgetting about it. I still remember the quietness, the sounds, the pure contact both with the whole world underneath and with my feelings within, my changing heartbeat, and the taste of the air as I resurfaced. Freediving has been my first experience of breathing as a door to an unknown world.

I’ve kept cultivating my freediving capabilities for decades and, in the meanwhile, at the age of 15 I’ve begun practicing Qi Gong in the lineage of Master Li Rong Mei and her own Master Fu Zhong Wen. Within my practice of Wu Shu - which still continues - I lived an unforgettable adventure in China in 1997 at the Shanghai Ti Yu Xue Yuan, the University of Sport of Shanghai. Or at least, this is what I thought I was experiencing. In fact, what I had earned in 20 years of careful and variegate breathing is an incommensurable treasure, that I began understanding only when I lost it.

We take breathing for granted. When we look at sea creatures we notice how water is all around and enters their body nurturing them with life. But when we are back out, we never think that just the same happens to us. We too inhale a fluid that embraces us carrying life in an incredible amount of forms, and that enters our body and merges with it. The Bible says God breathed life into us. The most ancient human healing practices bear breathing as the carrier of life force: qi in China, prana in India, and much, much more. The physiology of breathing is astonishing. It renews us, relaxes us, focuses us, expands us. I had all of this, purely and naturally, without knowing, and I lost it.

It took me more than a decade to get it back. This time at a whole new level of maturity, of conscious care. And then, I lost it again. So many things in our lives take us far from what simply matters most. We get distracted away from the depth of what we can live, of what we really are. An endless journey. Mind-blowing, quite literally. Finally, I’ve recently earned it again, through careful practice at all the levels of my life.
This time, as my perception of myself has evolved, it does not make much sense to me if I do not share it and co-live it. This is what this series is about, no theories, no new-age cheap chat: a few hours together just breathing.