Don W wrote:
Well, I guess experiences vary with the individual. My main
point was that if the poster (purple stars) was experiencing
pain trying to free-dive he should be very careful and learn
to equalize the pressure or he would get to learn about
barotrauma from a medical specialist ;-) The time I think
I hurt my ears I was in about 12 feet of water at Stingray
City in Grand Cayman. It was a long time ago, but the
tinnitus is with me still sigh.

PS - I agree with you that its much easier to equalize ascending
rather than descending.

Don W.

hi folks, thanks for all the great advice and thoughts!

yes i never force it when it involves my ears. as soon as my ears
start to hurt i stop and don't go any further, i couldn't work through
the pain even if i wanted to because it kind of freaks me out. i
really don't know what the problem is. maybe if i say more about it
you folks will know and maybe have some thoughts or suggestions.

it started out i couldn't equalize at all. i could sort of move my jaw
and have my ears pop on their own, but it just never occured to me in
all my years being a human being on the earth to force air in when i
did it. i guess i was told somewhere along the line that doing that
was a bad thing, because i was very reluctant to do it. i felt i was
going to blow my eardrums out or something. if i was going up in an
airplane i would yawn and things to "pop" my ears, which sometimes
worked and sometimes didn't, but if anyone told me to hold my nose and
force air in i would decline .. and in my mind i'd be thinking .. what,
are you freaking crazy or something, you'll screw up your ears doing
that.

so when learning i started small. i would open the tubes by moving my
jaw and sort of breathing out, and i could hear the air in my ears
going over/into the tubes. then i put my fingers over my nostrils and
with a lot of practice started pushing air into my ears. but it really
freaked me out because i was still afraid i might hurt my ears. there
wasn't any pain though, just some pressure, so maybe it is ok to do
that.

i had some problem with my right ear opening easilly but not my left.
i started to fear something was wrong with one of the tubes. but after
much practice and moving my jaw around in all kinds of weird positions
i figured out over a period of weeks that it was actually just some
sort of habit i had all these years, sort of like cracking your
knuckles or something, that was the problem. it just so happens that
all these years, i had been opening the tubes on the right and could do
it easilly but just hadn't done the same thing on the left side. so
with some practice i got past that and both tubes open just fine now.

but i'm still unpracticed and reluctant about putting a lot of pressure
into my ears. i pre-equalize at the surface and that gets me maybe 5
or 6 feet down. maybe it's possible to force higher pressure into your
ears to start with ... i don't know, i've been very reluctant to try
it, it makes me uncomfortable. so instead i guess i've been trying to
go down a little ways and then try it at depth. but it's not much
different, even getting down towards 6 or 8 feet it still freaks me
out, and it still feels like i'm blowing up my eardrums like a balloon.
i don't know if that feeling ever goes away and returns to a "normal"
feeling when the pressure is equalized at a certain depth or not.
maybe the only two options are pain (not enough) or balloon (too much
or just right). maybe by it's very nature it's just supposed to feel
weird, i don't know.

so i may just be being held back by my own sensitivity with my ears. i
know pain is bad, so i never do that ... i won't go past pain. if it
hurts, i either stop going down (rarely) or sort of freak out and
immediately surface (usually).

i have not had any pain surfacing, only descending.

and since this is already too long a post for anybody to bother reading
all the way through, i might as well ask a question too! haha.
question is ... when you do get good at equalization and get down to
like 30 feet or 40 feet or something, what happens if you accidentally
let your ears "pop". what i mean is, i understand that you have to
force air into your ears to keep from experiencing pain. sort of like
positive pressure inside. but what happens if you accidentally swallow
and all that pressure goes back into your throat, doesn't it go back to
the same pressure it was at the surface, won't it suddenly be like you
had never equalized at all ? or does it just let the ballooned air out
enough to be equalized with whatever depth you are at ?