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Whenever we get a chance to listen to Hollis ambassador, tech instructor and veteran explorer/filmmaker Jill Heinerth discuss her exploits, we get excited. A master of rebreather diving, Heinerth is one of the preeminent scientific divers in the world.
So we were stoked when NPR’s Fresh Air sat down with Heinerth in 2019 to do a long-form interview about her new book, “Into the Planet.”
Conducted with Fresh Air host Dave Davies, the interview kicks off with a granular description of Heinerth’s near-death exploration of the Ross Ice Shelf.
“I was hearing, you know, cracks and pops and groans and all sorts of sound from the ice,” Heinerth tells Davies early in the interview.
“In the moment, I didn’t realize what it was, but when we turned around to retrace our footsteps and come back out, we got to a point where we could swim towards the surface, towards daylight. And I realized that the doorway, the very opening that we had gone into to get into the iceberg had closed. There’d been a calving, and a massive piece of ice had blocked the doorway out.”
Jill Heinerth on Mastering Fear
Taken aback by the danger conveyed in Heinerth’s story, Davies prods her to explain how she handles extreme stress and what she does to maintain composure when things go wrong.
RELATED: JILL HEINERTH’S TOP REBREATHER SAFETY TIPS
“When something terrible happens,” she explains, “it’s really easy for your mind to just explode into these, like, chattering monkeys (laughter), you know? It’s like your emotions want to take over. You start to breathe fast. Your heartbeat starts to race. And you have to turn that all off. So I take a really deep breath and try and slow my heart, slow my breathing, and then just focus on pragmatic, small steps.”
“The big picture of survival is sometimes so hard to see,” Heinerth continues, “But we always know what we can do to make the next best step towards survival. So it’s really all about controlling emotions and controlling your breathing.”
Listen to the Full Interview
Click the embed link below to listen to the full Fresh Air interview with Jill. To read a written transcript of the interview, click here to visit npr.org.
