about
pranayama
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.
Long before freediving organizations and their certifications, before social media and their trends, before the wellness industry marketed it under a different name — I was teaching people breath training and it was simply called pranayama.
Over a decade of classical study, practice, and of teaching it quietly, without a platform or following, and without interest in either. The students who found me found me at the places I was teaching around the world or through word of mouth, and left with something that changed how they moved through life.
freediving
Unlike most people, it was the breath that brought me to freediving, not the other way around.
When I entered the water seriously for the first time, I already understood what most freedivers spend years trying to learn — that the mind governs the body, that the breath governs the mind, and that everything else is unnecessary attachment.
I would go on to train under elite freedivers in Bali and became a certified PADI instructor in Thailand. I returned to Mauritius in 2018 with a specific intention: to teach freediving not as a sport of numbers and depth, but as a legitimate practice of self-inquiry.
reflection
Post pandemic my relationship with the ocean deepened into something closer to grief, and grief has a way of clarifying what actually matters.
Within the freediving world, I began witnessing something I could no longer remain neutral and silent about — the illegal exploitation of the sperm whales residing in Mauritian waters.
Approached, followed, and disturbed by freediving professionals who understood exactly what they were doing and chose to do it anyway for content, for recognition, for the validation of an audience, and for profit.
mindfulness freediving
For years I campaigned and raised awareness, alone at first, until others joined to help me. I hoped the organisations that certify these instructors and govern the sport to respond with some form of accountability. They didn’t. The silence was institutional and deliberate.
In 2024 I stopped teaching standard freediving courses, and dropped my PADI license. I closed the school in Mauritius and relocated to the Himalayas in India to live and train at high altitude.
By 2026, the philosophy of Mindfulness Freediving had been forming for years, and it was the accumulation of all of it — the ocean, the mountains, the years of teaching breath before breath was fashionable, the disillusionment with an industry more interested in content than custodianship — that made it inevitable.
