Breath before depth
Every descent begins with the breath. Regulation, not performance, is the first skill — and the one that carries back to life on land.
New initiative · Founding partner
The MindfulDiving Institute
A new institute dedicated to diving as contemplative practice — where breath, attention and trust become the discipline, and the ocean becomes the teacher.
01 · The initiative
Diving, practised as presence.
Prof. Luis Miguel Gallardo, Founder and President of the World Happiness Foundation, is also a founder of the Mindful Diving Institute — an initiative built on a simple observation: underwater, presence is not optional. Breath slows. Attention narrows. The mind stops rehearsing and starts arriving.
The Institute exists to hold that practice with rigour — to treat mindful diving as a discipline with its own ethics, its own safety culture and its own contemplative depth, rather than a metaphor borrowed from the surface.
It stands alongside the Foundation as an independent initiative, sharing the same North Star: 10 billion free, conscious and happy people by 2050.
02 · What it stands on
Three commitments.
Safety as respect
Care for the diver, the buddy and the reef is inseparable from the practice. Mindfulness underwater is a safety discipline before it is anything else.
Ocean as commons
The sea is not a venue. Divers who learn to pay attention become people who protect what they have paid attention to.
03 · With the Academy
Where the two meet.
The World Happiness Academy program Dive Into Presence is the Foundation's learning path into this practice. The Institute is its wider home — the place where the craft, the standards and the community keep growing.
Explore Dive Into Presence04 · Learn more
mindfuldivinginstitute.com
Programs, guides, standards and how to get involved live on the Institute's own site. Details of upcoming courses and locations are published there.
Visit the InstituteListen to a meditation
Two guided meditations, one in English and one in Spanish, to train on land the presence the water asks for.
Listen05 · Research Lab
The science, gathered in one place.
Diving has been studied for seventy years through physiology and safety. Wellbeing science has been studied for thirty through attention and affect. The Mindful Diving Institute Research Lab keeps both literatures in one library, reviews them in public, and states what is still unknown.
- 77
- papers in the library
- 27
- open access
- 39
- cited in the review
- 9
- themes
Direction
Prof. Luis Miguel Gallardo
Director, Mindful Diving Institute Research Lab
- · Professor of Practice, Yogananda School of Spirituality and Happiness, Shoolini University, India
- · World Happiness Foundation Chair in Contemplative Sciences, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Five ways in
Institute publications
Open, citable and ORCID-synced. Titles and identifiers are listed exactly as published by the Lab.
Gallardo, L. M. (2026)
Mindful Diving: The Ocean as a Contemplative Environment for Fundamental Peace, Ecological-Collective Flourishing, and a Research Agenda for the Mindful Diving Institute
Mindful Diving Institute Research Lab, World Happiness Foundation
Gallardo, L. M. (2026)
Mindful Diving: A Comprehensive Literature Review on the Intersection of Diving Science and Wellbeing Science
Mindful Diving Institute Research Lab, World Happiness Foundation
Gallardo, L. M. (2026)
The FP20 Fundamental Peace Scale — Instrument Documentation (English & Spanish)
Mindful Diving Institute Research Lab, World Happiness Foundation
Gallardo, L. M. (2026)
The Ocean Within, Volumes II & III scripts (English and Spanish)
Mindful Diving Institute Research Lab, World Happiness Foundation
Gallardo, L. M. (2026)
Hypnosis as a Mechanism of Emotion Regulation and Self-Integration
Behavioral Sciences
Gallardo, L. M. (2026)
Hypnosis, Contemplative Practice and the Regulation of Attention
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis
Publish with the Lab
Send an abstract or a manuscript through the Lab's own process: you get a confirmation and a decision with named reasons.
What the Lab will not claim
Mindful Diving is not therapy and is not treatment. The evidence supports diving as a contemplative practice with therapeutic potential — not as a clinical intervention. Effects reported in the literature are often short-lived without sustained practice, and instructor wellbeing has received almost no empirical attention. Those are the gaps, and they are why the agenda exists.
Visit the Research LabGet involved
Come and practise with us.
Whether you have never breathed underwater or you have logged a thousand dives, there is a way in.