About Me
My Journey
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.
Freediving was a natural transition for me. The knowledge and experience I acquired from almost a decade of teaching and practicing those breath related practices were easily carried over to this new discipline.
A yoga and pranayama teacher turned freediving instructor with 13 years of combined teaching experience, since 2018 I have been pioneering the development of freediving in Mauritius and more recently in India.
My Philosophy
Just like yoga, freediving has also become part of my way of life. For me being a freediver is not just about diving deep into the ocean. It is also about being free from the mental conditions that keep us from reaching our true potential in and outside of water.
My aim is to show people that freediving can be a powerful tool for the mind, personal development, self-reflection, and not just some form of underwater activity.
This is why instead of chasing after numbers or marine life, I prefer to focus on techniques to give people the proper foundation to be able to later grow as better freedivers and human beings.
For me, it does not matter how deep you can dive. What matters is what you have learned about yourself during that dive.
Mindfulness Freediving
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 or so. 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 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.
Today I have moved away from teaching standard freediving courses to focus on an approach oriented more towards personal devleopment than recreation or competition. I have relocated to North India, where I am now conducting yoga, breathwork, and meditation retreats in the Himalayas.
