mindfulness freediving
About
My name is Alexandre Latour and I am fascinated by what can be achieved with the breath. Originally from Mauritius I travel the world teaching people how to breathe properly and how to hold their breath.
I first became aware of the importance of breathing properly when I started practicing hatha yoga more than a decade ago. As I progressed with my yoga practice I came across pranayama, an ancient yogic practice where the breath is voluntarily stopped. I realized that there was a lot of physical and mental benefits to gain from holding the breath, and I was eventually brought into the world of freediving.
my personal story
Born in Mauritius to a primary school teacher mother and a spearfisherman father whom I lost at the age of 5, I was raised by my single mother who lulled me with stories from the Mahabharata and exposed me to yoga from an early age.
From the loss of my father, I grew up an introvert who was more interested in knowledge regarding the meaning of life and death than in earning a university degree. I dropped out of high school, started studying and practicing yoga rigorously, and started teaching it at the age of 21.
I was lucky or fated to find my path in life from a young age, that of a teacher. I chose to dedicate my life fully to teaching, putting aside the idea of having a normal family life. My students became my family.
Yoga for me has always been more than just doing some physical postures on a mat. While I have studied intensively many modern approaches to yoga like the ones of Krishnamacharya, BKS Iyengar, K Pattabhi Jois, and Sivananda, the main essence of my studies and teachings remained deeply rooted in the classical ancient texts of yoga like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali and the Yoga Upanishads.
For 8 years I went on to travel the world, teaching to an international audience of mixed levels and backgrounds accumulating more than 10000 hours of teaching experience along the way together with respectable knowledge of other topics like history, astrology, psychology, and lucid dreaming.
the story of mindfulness freediving
After 8 years of teaching yoga internationally and after going through a short-lived existential crisis, I took a break from teaching yoga mid-2017 to study freediving more seriously.
Under the guidance of three elite freedivers, I completed my freediving courses with AIDA in Bali before crossing over to become a PADI-certified freediving instructor in Thailand.
Beginning of 2018 I returned to my native country of Mauritius to pioneer the development of freediving there with the intention to teach people that freediving can be a powerful tool for the mind, and not just some form of underwater activity.
During 2020, Mauritius also got hit by the Covid-19 pandemic followed by an oil disaster from a shipwreck in the region of the island where I was living. That kept many freedivers including myself out of the ocean for around a year. It was during that time that I started reflecting on what it meant to be “free” as a freediver.
After a couple of months spent in India in 2022, living and freediving in a very minimalist way, I returned to Mauritius with a change of heart regarding my freediving practice. India reminded me that there were more important things in life than chasing longer breath holds or depths, and that it was possible to find peace of mind in a breath hold without the need to freedive to 10 m or 100 m, to wear expensive wetsuits or long fins or without having to spend thousands of dollars to travel to exotic destinations.
Around that same time, I started to have people approaching me who were more interested to learn freediving for the mental benefits or to complement their meditation practice than for the freediving certification card or to freedive deep in the ocean. That was how the intention to systematize Mindfulness Freediving came to.
After almost 15 years of combined teaching experience in yoga, pranayama and freediving, I knew I had the knowledge and experience to offer a more mindful approach to freediving. Life gave me the motivation to put everything together.