How to dive into your fears (w/ Jill Heinerth) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Often on this show, I end up talking to people who are incredibly accomplished and renowned for their work, but I think that today's guest may be the person whose career made my jaw hit the floor the hardest. Today's guest is the cave diver and underwater explorer, Jill Heinerth.

Jill is in both the Women Divers Hall of Fame and the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame. In case you are not keeping track, that is two separate halls of fame that she is in. Just as a point of comparison, I had to quit the scuba diving class at my local Y because it was too scary. That is not Jill's life experience, though Jill dives in places that no other human has ever been before, including at record depths, at frigid temperatures, and on one expedition, inside of a moving iceberg.

You might be asking yourself, why would a person ever choose to do that? Why would a person put themselves in those situations? Well, Jill's diving has led to multiple scientific discoveries. It's expanded our understanding of freshwater ecosystems around the globe. And, she has pushed the limits of what we think is possible. Here's a clip from Jill's TED Talk.

[00:01:15] Jill Heinerth:
Imagine yourself here in this room if you were suddenly plunged into blackness, with your only job to find the exit. Sometimes swimming through these large spaces and at other times, crawling beneath the seats, following a thin guideline. Just waiting for the life support to provide your very next breath. Well, that's my workplace.

[00:01:37] Chris Duffy:
I am so glad that this podcast studio is my workplace and not a terrifyingly tight pitch-black underwater cave. But we'll be right back with Jill to talk about conquering fear and facing danger in your life and work whether you work inside of a submerged iceberg or not, don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

[BREAK]

[00:02:07] Chris Duffy:
We’re talking with cave diver and underwater explorer Jill Heinerth about conquering fear and facing danger.

[00:02:15] Jill Heinerth:
Hi, my name is Jill Heinerth and I am the explorer-in-residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the author of Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver.

[00:02:25] Chris Duffy:
You are often swimming in places that no one else has ever been, and cave diving is an extremely dangerous occupation, extremely dangerous pastime. What are some of the unique challenges when it comes to cave diving? What makes it so risky?

[00:02:43] Jill Heinerth:
Well, cave diving is extremely risky because we're, um, in an overhead environment, and so no matter what happens, any emergency that occurs, uh, you have to be able to solve the problem yourself. We like to say that there is no mission control to call for help, and the best people to save you are already in the cave with you. Um, and so we take a lot of backup equipment. We have to train, um, significantly to be prepared for emergencies just with our life support equipment that can be very, um, very complicated.

But we also have to think about things like, um, the silt that rains down from the ceiling sometimes completely obliterating the visibility. We have to lay a guideline through the environment so that if we can't see, we can at least get out by feel alone. So we have to be able to operate in complete blackness, you know, blinded from the silt, or also dealing with other issues like becoming lost in a complicated environment, getting entangled in a guideline.

There's certainly a lot of things that can go wrong, including the gear itself. You know, most people think I'm fearless because of the things I do and because it's dangerous and because I've, I've lost over a hundred friends and colleagues to cave and technical diving accidents. But, you know, cave diving is sort of an abstract concept.

I tell people I'm a cave diver, and sometimes they picture me, like, diving off of cliffs into ocean waters and things like that. But no, I'm literally swimming through the veins of Mother Earth. I'm swimming through these water-filled spaces beneath your feet. You know, deep ocean environments and certainly water-filled caves are a place of great mystery and for me, it, it’s been more than science. It's been almost a spiritual pursuit as well because when I do recognize that we are all connected by those watery resources around the planet, then I realized I had an important place, an important voice from, from the inside of the earth.

‘Cause if you think of the water that comes out of caves, it, it comes out of a spring, it feeds a creek, goes to a river. That river reaches an estuary that's like the nursery for all the fish and other inhabitants that are gonna fuel, you know, the ocean with great abundance. And so, you know, even if you live in the, you know, the center of North America, nowhere near a water body, the actions that you have on the surface of the earth will eventually affect these water systems all the way out to the oceans.

And being able to swim through these spaces, you know, helped me to realize that if I could communicate about what I've seen and what I've experienced, that maybe it would animate the environment and help people understand how they could protect it.

[00:05:25] Chris Duffy:
Your book Into the Planet is, I, I just like cannot say enough how extremely well-written it is and how moving it is. It almost is a disservice to it to call it a, a book about cave diving because really it's a book about overcoming fear. It's a book about taking risks. It's a book about exploring, not just underwater caves, but making exploratory choices in our own life. So, for someone who's listening right now, and they have no interest in cave diving, and they don't go cave diving, how can they take the lessons that you've learned about fear from this extremely risky pastime in life that you've built and put it into place in their own life?

[00:06:04] Jill Heinerth:
Well, we're living in such interesting times, aren't we? I mean, we're all really faced by a significant amount of change, and that's terrifying, right? There are a lot of things that, that cause us to be afraid and, and I believe that humanity is doing a bit too much of running away from things right now, like running away from things that scare us.

But I think that we all need to think about stepping into the darkness because when you step into the darkness in these very small little baby steps, you, you might not know what, you know, the big answers are for whatever you seek, right? But when you're standing on that threshold of dim light, like, that’s when you have the opportunity to employ your explorer's mindset and be on the edge of discovery.

And it might be something that's just new for you that you've never done before, but it also might be something, you know, really super important that's new for humanity. And if we all kind of employ that explorer's mindset, then I think that that's how we move forward to solving some of these really big problems in the world.

[00:07:06] Chris Duffy:
One thing that I think is really interesting, and you talk about this in the book, and I found it really compelling, is the idea you want to be diving with people who are also afraid. That in fact, if someone doesn't have fear, that's a danger to you. Can you talk more about that?

[00:07:18] Jill Heinerth:
Yeah. I, I've certainly dived with lots of people who are fearless and uh, and they scare me because, you know, before I go diving, I have to pre-visualize everything that could go wrong. Like, what's, what could kill me today? My dive partner? You know, like, where's their head today? You know, did they prepare their gear properly? You know, I'm kind of watching outta the corner of my eye.

I use a series of checklists for my own equipment to ensure that I'm continuing to follow through with all of my safety protocols and, and all of those things are really important, but when you can pre-visualize the things that go wrong and rehearse the solutions before you go underwater, then that's how you remove the stress.

And when you submerge, then the only thing that's in your head is, you know, “I got this”. You can be completely present in the experience as long as you expect crises, because I think that we should all expect crises in our life and, and have some sort of a plan in place for how to deal with that if it happens.

[00:08:19] Chris Duffy:
There's a, a passage in the book where you're describing diving in what for you is a relatively simple cave. It's not one of the most complex cave systems that you've ever been in, and yet you're diving in it with a scientist who is not as experienced a diver. And she starts to panic.

[00:08:34] Jill Heinerth:
Yeah. I mean, two of us were diving in a very small cave. Very small, very low visibility. The spaces that we're squeezing through would be almost like squeezing underneath your bed, but wearing a whole bunch of equipment. It's, it's so low that we wear the tanks on the side of our body, like underneath our armpits and kind of in line with our body, and we're literally like, squeezing through spaces where our belly’s on the floor and our shoulders are on the ceiling, but we needed to get a special bacterial sample for her work.

So I led the way into the cave system and threw a very small restriction. And when we went to turn around, she became momentarily disoriented and got entangled, not just in our guideline, that's our safety guideline outta the cave, but also in some old guideline that had been buried in the silt on the floor.

And so when she turned around, she got stuck, basically, and panicked and just a couple of fin kicks, and suddenly neither of us could see. So I was holding onto her with one hand, and I'm holding onto the guideline with my other hand, and she's pulling away from me. And the guideline is stretching, and I'm yelling “No!”

And as it's stretching and stretching and stretching, suddenly, ping! The line breaks, and I'm holding the bitter end in my hand and her in my other hand and I'm thinking, “Oh boy,” ‘cause we're far inside this cave. Neither of us can see, and now our safety line is broken. And I had to patch the guideline to just sort of resecure it, get ahold of her, get her sort of reoriented.

And at one point, I lost track of her, and I had put her hand on the patch guideline with a little arrow, a little navigational marker that would help her feel the way to go outta the cave. And when she felt that, she bolted. But now, I'm alone. I can't see. I've patched the guideline, and I have to make a decision about what to do next, and I realize the best choice is to go farther into the cave because I wasn't sure where she was, and I needed to be sure that I wasn't leaving her behind.

We always save a lot of extra gas for situations like this, and now was the time to use it. So I went further into the cave until the water cleared up, and I knew that she had not passed that point. And on the way out, I just slowly and methodically started to search, but half of my life support gear at this point was now not working because one of my regulators had been so packed with clay as I dug her out, that it was just spewing gas continuously and you just can't afford to lose gas when you need every second to search.

So I had to turn on the tank valve, on and off to supply each breath to get me closer to the entrance, and I just carefully and methodically kept doing that search, but I really had to separate myself from those, you know, natural emotions that one would experience, like whether you're cave diving or whether you're doing anything else that's scary.

Your heart races, right? Your respirations ramp up, and these chattering monkeys kind of explode in your head, and they're all talking at once. And I had to take a deep breath and just tell myself that those emotions would not serve me well in this moment, that I needed to slow down my breath. So I literally, like in my mind, mentally moved the emotions aside and thought, “All right, I'm just gonna do the next best thing. Just do the next best thing.”

And as it turned out, I spent an extra 73 minutes searching for her and when I reached the entrance of the cave, there she was. So she had surfaced and basically called 911 and then gotten back in the water to await my hopeful return. But, uh, there's nothing more beautiful than I've ever seen then, you know encountering her at the entrance, at the end of that dive.

[00:12:31] Chris Duffy:
And thankfully this is, uh, an emergency situation that ended with both of you making it out.

[00:12:37] Jill Heinert:
Yeah.

[00:12:37] Chris Duffy:
I wonder though, in situations like that one where you feel this intense fear both for yourself and for another person, and you know that losing mental clarity or starting to breathe heavily could very well kill you, that you were in a very dangerous situation. You talked about putting your emotions aside. Can you talk a little bit more about how you actually do that? Because it's a situation where that is a life or death decision.

[00:13:00] Jill Heinerth:
Yeah, it, it's something that I've really had to practice. I didn't learn about fear necessarily from cave diving. I learned about fear from like fighting off a burglar in my home as a, a young woman in university, and I sort of reanalyzed that whole situation over and over and over and over again until I realized just, just how, um, the emotions would compete with your likelihood of success or the emotions would stop you from succeeding. And, and I don’t mean to make myself this, like, sterile emotionless person, but, but I have practiced with sort of compartmentalizing that and, and through the physical process of taking a really deep breath and filling up my lungs.

Filling up my chest, filling up the air as much as I can, even all the way up into my neck. I literally tell myself, in my mind, “Emotions, you won't serve me well right now.” And then I visualize just sort of setting those aside, like a little box of emotions. But you do have to invite them back in later because certainly after an experience like that, there's a, there’s a rush for a while, but then there's a crash, and that's the time when you let all those emotions back in. You have a cry. You reanalyze the situation. And, and that's not just for me, it's for everybody that the situation affects. I mean, you can imagine how awful an experience that would've been for my husband to, to learn of a, a near-death experience that his wife had. And, uh, it takes time to sort of reprocess and invite those emotions back.

[00:14:34] Chris Duffy:
You raised such an important point, which is that sometimes it serves us to not feel and analyze and dwell in all of our emotions, and that's not to say that we shut them off forever, but that we have to be able to switch them on and off in times of survival.

You talked a little bit about how you put them in that box. How do you then, when you're safe and you're on land and you're processing an experience like that, how do you take them out of the box so that they don't kind of start to pickle—

[00:15:00] Jill Heinerth:
Yeah.

[00:15:00] Chris Duffy:
—and become more powerful and pop up in unexpected ways?

[00:15:03] Jill Heinerth:
It's a lot easier to unpack them after than it is to set them aside, I think, honestly.

[00:15:09] Chris Duffy:
Interesting.

[00:15:10] Jill Heinerth:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the moment of the emergency, like in that particular cave dive, I remember thinking like, crazy thoughts were just exploding in my head, including like, things like, “Oh, I've gotta get outta here. My husband doesn't know how to do the taxes.” You know, like, like, why am I wasting headspace on something like that in a moment when I could die?

But that's, that's what happens. It’s, if that’s your life flashing before your eyes. I guess that's what it is. But later, like I, I've been in situations where literally like afterwards, I, I could kind of feel it coming back in, like, I'm cold and then I'm shaking, and I'm physically expressing the fact that these emotions need to come out now and, uh, and have a good cry over it.

And for me, I've, I guess I've processed a lot of those emotions through creative pursuits, through writing, through my photography, through painting. Um, I think I spill a lot of things that way, but also through talking about the experience, like right after that dive, I felt the need to sort of break it down and, and, and do a series of blogs online to share with, with my community because I, I don't think we should just share the good things that happened. We need to share the incidents and the accidents as well, uh, so that others can, can learn from those experiences.

[00:16:25] Chris Duffy:
You write about this, and I know you've talked about this a lot, but at the beginning of your career, you had the sense of invincibility, right? You, you didn't know enough to know how dangerous cave diving was, but over the years you have quite painfully and viscerally learned how dangerous it can be, by losing people who are close to you and by having these kind of near-death experiences of your own, and yet, you keep coming back. When I experience something like that, honestly, my go-to is like, “Probably not gonna do that again.”

[00:16:52] Jill Heinerth:
No, no. Well, there are some things that I will never do again.

[00:16:56] Chris Duffy:
Okay.

[00:16:56] Jill Heinerth:
And I do believe that, like, the ultimate rule of survivors is, is being able to go to within a hair's breadth of what you consider to be complete success and, and whatever it is that you seek, and know when to turn around.

But, when you're young, it's a lot harder to do that. I mean, you're building a career, you're building a reputation, you're feeling the invincibility of youth, and as you age, you get wiser. Through experience, um, through, you know, the fact that you see fewer days ahead of you than behind you. And yeah, so I think the wisdom of age has been kind to me. I, I certainly am even more thoughtful about the risks that I take and, and I say no to more projects these days, but yeah, knowing when to abort, that's so important.

[00:17:46] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna take a quick break and then we will be right back with more from Jill. Don't go anywhere.

[BREAK]

[00:18:00] Chris Duffy:
As you can probably tell by now, there is no place that Jill Heinerth won't go, including inside of an iceberg in Antarctica. Now, Jill's trip there was set to be the first expedition dive inside of an iceberg. So naturally, that came with a lot of unknown risks and no promises.

[00:18:18] Jill Heinerth:
Frankly, we did not know with any certainty that we would find caves inside of icebergs. It was a hypothesis that we spent a lot of money on to go all the way to the Ross ice shelf to, to prove, basically. But then when we did indeed find these, these conduits and caves and tunnels that ran through the icebergs, it was like, “Wow, okay, here it is. But uh, how do we safely explore it?”

It just meant that every day we had to sit down and maybe even forget everything, you know, that we had decided was possible or not possible the day before and then talk it through like, like what is possible. What seems impossible? But what does impossible look like? Like, how might we achieve the impossible? How might we overcome, uh, a particular situation? And when I look back on it, I think, “Wow.” You know, we were lucky. We were certainly lucky. I mean, we experienced calving of the iceberg.

We experienced these horrendous currents that had us pinned down inside the iceberg, sort of tripling the, uh, the length of our dive, um, before we could finally escape. Um, and then even after our very last dive in that cave system, the entire block of ice that we had just been inside of actually exploded and broke into a sea of icy chunks as far as we could see.

[00:19:46] Chris Duffy:
Can you paint us a little bit of a visual picture of what you saw looking at the iceberg outside and, and when you were inside of it underwater?

[00:19:56] Jill Heinerth:
Sitting in the boat looking up at these sort of sheer vertical cliffs of the B-15 iceberg. They were as high as 200, 220 feet sticking out of the water. And we didn't even know what it looked like beneath the surface until we rolled in. But when I rolled into the water, um, at Ice Island Cave number four, uh, the water was all slushy. It was like, you know, jumping into a slurpee, you know, with big chunks, and then you kind of push it out of the way and clear it outta the way and then duck beneath that slurry until you're in this cobalt blue water.

And I remember seeing just this brief image of a leopard seal kind of, shoo, dart by outta the edge of my vision, and before me was this great crevasse. This white crack basically leading into the iceberg. So as we swam into that crevasse, I turned on my light because very, very quickly we started to lose the illumination of the sun behind us, and we dropped down, down, down, and I think we hit about 130 feet when I looked to my side and just saw this black tunnel, you know, going outta sight.

And from there, we swam in and got to a spot where eventually the iceberg was stuck on the sea floor, and we could swim in these spaces beneath the iceberg through these tunnels that were sheltering, uh, these filter-feeding organisms. So, this colorful carpeted floor of Christmas tree worms and sponges and, and fish.

And these anthropods that look like sort of cockroaches the size of your hand. They were actually dropping out of cracks and crevices on top of us in this space beneath the iceberg. So, it was beautiful. There were things to see everywhere. I was just trying to soak it all up and take pictures and connect with my partners, but also sort of feel the environment because there was this very intense, you know, freezing cold water just rushing through these spaces as well from the, the tidal currents. It was just wild. It, to me, was closer to, you know, going to another planet than any other dive I had ever done before.

[00:22:06] Chris Duffy:
You’re inside of an iceberg. You don't know if you'll be able to get back out the way you came because the currents are so intense and unpredictable. You don't know that there is necessarily a way out, right?

It could be solid ice all above you. How do you decide in a moment like that: how far is far enough and when you should turn back? How do you know not to quit too early, right before you make the incredible discovery that's gonna define the voyage for you or the expedition, but not to go so far that you don't make it back at all?

[00:22:37] Jill Heinerth:
Yeah, I mean I suppose that's just intuition really. That’s like the product of thousands of, of dives. I mean, I've done over 8,000 dives in my career now, but you know, we didn't always make the best choices. That's why I say there was a certain amount of, of luck there. There was one dive I was doing with my, with my partner when suddenly the current picked up, and it was pushing us into the cave and it, it happened so quickly that by the time we decided to turn around, we realized, “Uh-oh, you know, we can't beat this current.” And yet in the very far distance, we could see light, we could see that there was like a beam of light perhaps to another entrance, and we thought that was our best chance.

So the two of us just went with the current. And the thing that was crazy is that when you're inside an iceberg cave, an environment you've never been in before, you have no sense of scale. There's nothing there that you recognize for size. And so that distant light, I thought it was closer, but we swam and we swam and we swam and we swam until we finally reached an entrance.

And I thought, okay, great, you know, but now, we're like a mile away, you know? And we surfaced. We had to do some decompression, this slow transition back to surface pressure. And when we popped up and hit the surface, I remember. Just doing a slow, like 360-degree turn, and all I could see was ice, ice, ice, ice, ice all around me.

I couldn't see the boat, and I thought, “Okay, great. We got outta the cave. We got to the surface, but now we are a flea on the back of the planet. How is anyone going to see us?” I can't see the boat. And so we made mistakes and um, we got really, really lucky. The current got so strong that the boat got ripped off its anchorage, and it was only when it was ripped off the anchorage that they were able to see us. It's not all, you know, great decision-making on my behalf, that sometimes it's luck.

[00:24:40] Chris Duffy:
So Jill, the world of diving has come with other challenges for you too. It's not always just the risks underwater. Sometimes, because the field is incredibly male-dominated, that has come with sexism or you experiencing sexist remarks.

[00:24:53] Jill Heinerth:
There are more and more women getting involved in the kinds of things that I do. But, but I guess you would say that, that I broke a few glass ceilings along the way, um, pursuing my career and yeah, there've been times when you know, someone said to me, you know, “There's no room for women in commercial diving.”

I, I actually had an instructor say to me that if I just wanted to go train dolphins or something, there'd be other ways I could do that. So I've had some uncomfortable experiences. I mean, I even had a guy mail me a package of body bags before a project and he said, “You know, just clean up after yourself when you're done so we can get back to work.”

Horrible, horrible things. And those were incredibly painful. Those caused, uh, quite a lot of psychological trauma back in the days. But, I recognize today that those sorts of comments and those overt actions, they're not about me. They're about the person who's saying those things or doing those things. And so, I'm a lot more comfortable with the sexist remarks, whether they're overt or unintentional today, and I'm more likely just to say, “Hey, watch me.”

[00:26:07] Chris Duffy:
I wanna ask you a question that's kind of a little off to the side, but I'm just curious about it ‘cause it, it came up. What do you see as the role of, of humor or laughter in tackling life-threatening situations?

[00:26:16] Jill Heinerth:
Oh yeah. You can't take yourself too seriously, that's for sure. I think emergency workers, you know, firemen, police officers, whatever, they'll all tell you they have a bit of a dark humor within their circles and, and yeah, we do in the diving community too, I think. But yeah, I think laughter is an, is a good way to relieve stress. To, to bond with each other. And humor's always appreciated on a project.

[00:26:41] Chris Duffy:
There's a moment where you, you talked about being stuck. You're trapped, your boat is trapped in Antarctic ice, and you're running low on fuel and food and you're in quite a dire situation. And the solution that you and your team came up with in that moment was “We should get out of this boat and we should play a game of flag football on the ice”. And then in the background, as you're filming this, a crew member is streaking through the Antarctic ice. That is like, not what I picture when I think of “our boat is, is stuck and we might not make it out”.

[00:27:13] Jill Heinerth:
I actually got that from Ernest Shackleton, so when his boat was, you know, stuck in the ice, he's like, “All right man, get out. We're gonna go play soccer.” And so yeah, we're stuck in the ice, which could, you know, very easily crush our boat much in the way it crushed Endurance and, and sent Shackleton and his men on a two-year journey to save themselves. But I thought, well, “Gee, he's the greatest leader, you know, I've ever read about.”

And I thought, “Well, this is a really good idea.” So, we went out and we reenacted the Super Bowl that would've been happening, you know, back at home during the time. Had fun, laughed, and uh, had a good time. And yeah, I was, uh, training the camera on one of my colleagues and asking him to do what we call a piece to camera.

So tell us what's happening and, and Wes Skiles stands in front of the camera and he goes, “It's a bad situation. It's just like Shackleton in The Endurance. Our boat is trapped in the ice and it's groaning in resistance.” And he goes on and on and on and meanwhile, the first mate, completely naked, is running back and forth behind him in the camera. And I was just trying not to laugh ‘cause I just thought it was the greatest scene ever.

[00:28:22] Chris Duffy:
It's incredible. I love it. Well, this has been such an honor and a pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate you making the time to be on the show. Thanks so much.

[00:28:30] Jill Heinert:
Thanks, Chris.

[00:28:30] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Jill Heinerth. Her book is called Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver. I cannot recommend her book more highly. It is so, so fantastic. And if you think that Jill had some epic stories on today's episode, well that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I had to do it. I had to make that joke. I've been holding it in for the whole episode. I couldn't hold it in anymore. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows, which I promise you are better than that iceberg joke, at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniella Balarezo, Whitney Pennington Rodgers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who are currently wearing full oxygen tanks at their desks, just to be safe. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who know that the truth is still true no matter how far underwater you go.

On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team that, just to challenge themselves, assembled this episode inside of an iceberg, Morgan Flannery, Rosalind Tordesillas, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales.

And of course, thanks to you for listening to the show and making it all possible. If you're listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and a positive review. And if you're listening on the Spotify app, answer the discussion question that we've got up there. We'd love to hear your thoughts. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening.