A: And then came scuba diving?

 
E: I was diving, scuba diving and teaching scuba diving since the age of 21.All along freediving was just in the background.  It was my favorite past time, the thing I most liked to do. Then I decided to make it professional and started training. It was in '96, '97 that I had a chance to do a freediving course, an advanced course, with a guy called Pipin from Cuba, who was the world champion, who I always wanted to dive with.  So, I did the course and it was amazing. Then I started teaching free diving.  I got certification to teach and created and established the Israeli Freediving Team. I have been training them ever since.

 
A: Your life has taken a different turn since then, hasn't it?

 
E: Yes, a few years later in 1999. I didn't plan to start studying, to go to university.  I met this guy who wanted to know about freediving. He was doing Alexander Technique in the water. He asked me, "Okay, so if you're doing freediving, why don't you learn hydrotherapy?  It could be interesting for you.  You could do Watsu." And I said, "Watsu? I don't know the name, but it sounds nice." So he said, "Go and check it out at the Wingate Institute." "Okay, I'll go check it out." I got there and the same day I signed up for two years of study for hydrotherapy, medical massage and to become a swimming trainer.

 It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I never thought I'd be able to treat and heal people, and to be able to approach handicapped people, people with special needs, without being repulsed.  I used to see my Grandma and think, "I cannot come close." Maybe it's not nice to say, but I was really a bit disgusted with drooling and people with no hands and people that are paralyzed.  We started the training and went to Tel-Hashomer Hospital to start looking at pathologies.  The first time that I went into the water I left the pool two hours later. I was smiling like I never smiled before.  I was thinking, "This is what I want to do with my life. Where was I until now?" It was amazing.

I started volunteering.  I did a hydrotherapy internship in the hospital and then continued there after I finished the studies for another year and a half.

 I discovered that water work can do so much for people, especially for the really difficult cases such as paraplegics and quadriplegics who are practically, you can say, helpless out of the water.  They cannot move anything; they cannot do anything. But in the water, after they have some sort of muscular control, you can do a movement and they can bring, for example, the hand back in. I started out using Halliwick Method and rehabilitative swimming.  And then during the year of training we started learning Watsu.

 Also during that time I had the privilege, the honor to take the first WaterDance course with you, which was really opening doors for me. I said to myself, "Okay, I'm doing this my whole life, I'm dancing in the water. It makes me feel good. And someone came to the conclusion that it can help other people, also. Why didn't I think of that before?" The impact was so strong that I started trying to implement it in my work in the hospital. It was a bit scary in the beginning. I started with very easy cases, people who had minor muscular and joint problems, doing very subtle moves and very small stretches and a lot of rounding.

 And then I got a bit gutsier, and started thinking about it more and started reading more and found out that basically there's no reason for people not to be submerged, even if they have paralyses, or MS, CP or whatever. I got to work a lot with people after diving accidents who had decompression sickness.  There were quite a lot of fishermen in Israel that made serious mistakes in the water and then ended up in my hands with decompression. They would be able to dive again in years to come, but at that moment they had this fear of water and needed to release it to be able to help themselves. So WaterDance really helped these people to get rid of these fears. 

Then I started working with this quadriplegic guy after a car accident.  He was unable to do anything out of the water. He was very lively, a nice guy, but totally frustrated from not being able to do anything.  I went to the physical therapists and started talking to them, asking if it were possible with his blood pressure and all to submerge him. After discussing it quite thoroughly they said, yes, it's possible, you just have to do it very slowly, not doing full inversions because quadriplegic people usually have this problem with the autonomic nervous system adjusting their blood pressure, heart, breathing. So I did everything very conservatively. 

We started with two people holding him because he had a problem with his neck.  Doing sudden moves might harm his neck -- he has no protective muscle spasm to help himself. Normally with stretches in the water you can make a strong stretch, It's very hard to hurt someone in the water if you're attentive, because his body will contract in order not to be hurt. But with paralyzed people it's not the case. 

You must always support the whole length of the vertebral column.  So I started moving him and he was not able to breathe properly due to a problem at C4 or C5, so he had no control of his diaphragm, only of his intercostal muscles. He was not able to hold his breath for more than a few seconds. So I took him to the side of the pool and started explaining to him for whole sessions how to breathe properly, because I teach freediving and my main field of interest and my main field of knowledge is breathing and all the mechanics of this in the water. I was able to give him this bit of knowledge and after a month he was doing two-minute breath holds in the pool while waterdancing.  Okay, it wasn't dynamic moves like Leg Aikido's and Parachutes; only Freeing the Arm, only Stillness. Stillness above the water and stillness under the water is something totally different for quadriplegics, because they are usually lying on the mat with pressure sores and unable to do anything. And now they are floating in the water weightless.  It makes such a big impact. He was not getting better; he was not able to walk afterwards because he had his spinal cord cut, after all.  WaterDance did not heal him or cure him, but did generate some sort of mental process to help him adjust, to help him deal with his new situation.

In my breaks between sessions I was always doing breath holds and swimming and suddenly all these patients were coming to me and asking, "Can you teach us how to hold our breath? Can you teach us how to breathe?" "Okay, no problem!"  So I started holding these sessions with them, "Okay, let's breathe, and let's swim underwater and work our muscles and learn how to dive with what we have." And then once they had this feeling that they were in control of themselves and they were safe in their own hands, they allowed me also to hold them and to do some moves.  And it's never really strong moves unless you have people whose problems are not so great. You have people who are, for example, amputees--no leg, no arm.  No problem, you can do whatever you feel like; you just have to adjust, because you cannot do Leg Aikido if you do not have a leg to hold.  The balance is totally different, so you have to hold them a bit differently. Sometimes when they have no leg their balance is so disordered that they have strong tension in the neck, and their pelvis is a bit tilted.  Then you have to work on it in the water and it's very easy to work on it, easier than working on land.  So I started thinking a lot about WaterDance applications.