What is your life’s purpose?
Using the ocean and the teachings and technology of Kundalini Yoga to help people transform and become the most expansive version of themselves that they can.

How are you living your purpose?
Having experienced some profound truths about life and living through my personal practice and freediving, I am now focusing on teaching and coaching. I create programs and tools to help people share some of these experiences and expand their own lives. I look to serve anyone who comes to me, whether it is through meditation and yoga, grief recovery work, or falling in love with the ocean.

Everything that I teach is based on spiritual teachings from a range of sources. My primary source is Kundalini Yoga, but I also lean heavily towards Buddhism, and ultimately gained huge insights into ultimate truth through my experiences in the ocean. I try to take these teachings and transplant them onto daily life, to ensure they remain real and alive within me, rather than just concepts of something that I experienced at an earlier stage in my life.

My whole freediving experience was based upon my yoga practice, so even though divers may come to me looking to increase their depths or times in the water, ultimately they learn a whole lot more. I use the experience of being in the ocean to help people understand what beliefs are holding them back in life, and once they can access this in the water, they can hopefully take this with them and unravel some of the other issues they may have been experiencing.

I teach yoga twice a week, often as “Journeys”—themed series of classes to take people on a journey deeper into themselves. At the moment, we are looking at creativity as the life force within all of us; last year we looked at how to integrate Ayurvedic practices into daily life to bring the body back into harmony and balance.

Outside of Dahab, I run workshops, primarily for freedivers, but sometimes for the general practitioner. In these workshops, I once again take people on a journey to understand themselves better and to get more out of their lives. I combine yoga, meditation, and Pranayama, and occasionally there is a water element included too, although this is harder to integrate in Europe due to the weather and logistics.

In Dahab, I run training camps but most of my work is private bespoke coaching, where I take one to four people on an intense program of yoga and freediving. I always include time in the desert and plenty of time to rest and play as these are essential aspects of life, which often get neglected, but are crucial for our growth.

I also coach people online for both personal matters (to develop a spiritual/meditation practice) and for specific help with a freediving goal. Ultimately, one thing leads into another and nothing can be truly isolated, so I often start working with someone on one thing and it ends up incorporating the other stuff too.

The Grief Recovery stands apart from my core yoga and freediving work, but it’s something that I am really passionate about. After my mum died over nine years ago, I found myself frozen and unable to process much of the situation. After seven years, I guess I had a kind of breakdown and found my way to the Grief Recovery training and decided to train so that I could help other people who were also struggling to come to terms with loss of any kind. We’re really not educated or trained to deal with loss in any really productive way, so I feel it’s important to offer people a space where they can understand their feelings, realize they’re not “faulty,” and help them get back to living really amazing, exciting, joyful lives again.

How did you find your purpose?
A one-week holiday over 12 years ago brought me to the sleepy holiday town of Dahab, on the Red Sea. I was already committed to a spiritual path and had received many blessings in terms of guidance and new directions, but that one-week holiday completely changed everything. A voice in my heart (whether you call it intuition or the voice of my soul) told me, “You’re home.”

I stayed, and since then life has unfolded to allow me to experience complete trust and surrender in the ocean, as well as face my darkest times and take precious teachings from those also. I never had any goals or expectations of setting world records in freediving, but somehow feel that I have been guided to do so, not to “be the best” but to make the connection between the ocean and spiritual truths of our Universe and our lives, in order to share these with the world.

What advice do you have for purpose seekers?
It’s hard to give advice on this one. I think the biggest shifts have come for me when, after I had been looking for a solution for a long time, I surrendered and just did something that made me happy, without expectation or the need for it to be “the answer.” This has happened again and again, in my yoga practice, my freediving, and my life (which of course is all one!). I also see it happening in every walk of life, to people all around me (for example, women trying for a baby for years and the moment they finally accept things as they are—childless or going ahead with adoption—boom they get pregnant!).

So I think there is great value to be had from looking for the joy in the moment, rather than striving for an end result. After all, we don’t know what the end result needs to be for us to fulfill our higher purpose and often we find ourselves in situations which were totally unplanned and unexpected, but which introduce us to a person or situation that ends up being a key and fundamental game-changer in our life. I think it’s about expanding our desires beyond the limited capacity of our mind and saying, “God, bring me what I need” without needing to define what that it.

It’s scary, it’s about taking a leap into the dark, and trusting that we will land exactly where we need to—which may not necessarily be where we thought we wanted to!

What resources do you recommend?
TED Talks are a great resource for inspiration and energy pick-ups.
Amrit Nam Sarovar  – the yoga school that I am affiliated with and teach through
Much of Deepak Chopra’s work

Books:
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
And Brené Brown’s work:
Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone
Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection and Courage

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Sara Campbell is a Kundalini Yoga teacher, and four times World Record-holding freediver. She is the founder of Discover Your Depths, a unique teaching and personal growth philosophy based on yoga, meditation, freediving and mind-body-spirit awareness.

Sara is passionate about people; how they think, love and live. Discover Your Depths is about helping people to realize they have more to give, more to live, that each of us has untapped potential and unexplored, unrealized depths. Sara helps everyone she teaches flick that mental switch from “I can’t,” to “I can and I will!”

Sara has been practicing Kundalini Yoga since 2003 and attributes her personal practice to her phenomenal success in breathhold diving—from beginner to three-times World Record holder in just nine months (diving to 90m below the surface of the ocean on just one breath!). She is one of only two women (plus a handful of men) to have dived, self-propelled, below 100m on one breath.

Through the mediums of yoga, meditation, and breathwork, Sara teaches people, both in and out of the water, to live boldly. She is passionate about transformation and helping people achieve their dreams and live more fulfilled, peaceful, joyful, successful, loving, happy lives. Through her Discover Your Depths program, both in Dahab and online, she has brought hundreds of people to discover their own potential through awareness and breath.

Sara has been the subject of several BBC documentaries, as well as sports, news, and lifestyle programs, and has been featured in travel, women’s, and sports press internationally.

Sara recently released her first online training program Yoga for Freediving, and is working on her first book, based on Kundalini meditation and her own personal journey from chronically ill London PR girl, to desert-living, deep-freediving, life-embracing international teacher.

She lives in her chosen hometown of Dahab on the Red Sea in Egypt, where she teaches classes, workshops and retreats. She also teaches, retreats and presents internationally.