One Life. One Thread.
Everything I do comes from the same place.
Come Alive. Be the Best. Make a Difference.
Of the Ocean
Everyone comes from the ocean. Some of us are of the ocean (Chasing Mavericks)
CANA has taken me into underwater caves with zero visibility, alongside feeding sharks at night, and through currents that don't negotiate. Those places tested my preparation and broke my assumptions. Of the Ocean is what they taught me about fear, identity, resilience, faith, and purpose.
CANA is how I live . Of the Ocean is what I learned.
The CANA Depth Protocol™
This is not a talk. It's a descent.
The CANA Depth Protocol is a real, guided ocean experience — a modern misogi, the ancient rite of facing something so demanding it changes who you are. It combines breath control, freediving, and a shark dive with real physical encounters, taking you past the surface and into the place where excuses don't survive: depth, darkness, and ultimate fear with real danger.
What happens down there isn't mystical. It's physiological, psychological, and spiritual all at once:
- Breath control triggers the body's dive reflex — slowing the heart, calming the nervous system, and teaching you to find stillness exactly when panic wants to take over.
- Depth and the ocean strip away noise and force absolute presence. There's no multitasking at sixty feet.
- Facing real danger — sharks, pressure, the dark — reveals who you actually are under load, and forges an identity that holds when conditions get uncomfortable.
- Coming back up delivers what most people chase their whole lives and never find: clarity, reverence, and the unmistakable feeling of being fully alive.
It's the difference between hearing about courage and earning it. Done with discipline, restraint, and the right preparation — not recklessness — it's the deepest expression of everything CANA stands for.
Because transformation doesn't happen on the surface. It happens in the depths.
Led personally by Mike Hawkins — rescue diver and adventure athlete with 40+ years in the water — every descent is built on preparation, safety, and self-control. You're never thrown in. You're guided down.
Who it's for Leaders, athletes, and anyone standing at a threshold — ready to stop reading about transformation and go experience it. No elite athleticism required; the willingness to be uncomfortable is the only prerequisite that matters.
What to expect
- Prepare — breathwork and mindset training on land before you ever go deep.
- Descend — freediving on a single breath, learning to stay calm as the pressure builds.
- Face it — a guided shark dive where fear becomes information, not panic.
- Surface — integration: turning what you discovered in the water into how you live on land.
Meet Mike Hawkins
Mike lives where most people hesitate
Mike walked away from the polished version of himself: a Berkeley engineering degree, a fast-track IT career, the condo, the suits. He traded it for a life at the edges of the map, from Saudi Arabia and Southeast Asia to the Indo-Pacific and Hawaii. He became a rescue diver, an international adventure athlete, and an enterprise risk advisor. He has fought cancer twice, lost vision in one eye, and started competitive powerlifting in his sixties.
Today he leads the Ocean Literacy Institute and Ocean Risk Intelligence, the firm he founded to advise federal agencies, banks, and energy companies on ocean systems and enterprise risk. He speaks to leaders, athletes, students, and anyone who has gone comfortable, about one belief: comfort is the quiet killer of greatness.