What Does Meditation Have to Do With Surfing?
By Owen James Burke, originally published at SURFER.
It’s easy to identify yoga or yogic principles in many repetitive activities, but few may be as clearly paralleled as surfing. After all, isn’t the chop-wood-and-carry-water ritual of paddling out, catching a wave, and performing a sort of wash, rinse, and repeat exercise that requires almost trance-like meditation? Maybe not for all of us, but maybe for a good few, surfing actually embodies–if not substitutes for–yoga.
“A lot of people think, ‘What does meditation have to do with surfing?’ It actually has everything to do with surfing,” says Gerry Lopez. “In order to surf successfully as you start to develop your surfing, you figure out right away that if you don’t go into that totally focused, pretty much meditative state, as soon as you decide to catch a wave and turn around and paddle for it, you’re probably not going to get to far on that wave. That’s a really interesting thing: While you’re riding that wave, you’re in that higher state of mind that yogis or zen monks take hours to reach, and you reach that almost instantaneously. As soon as you stand up on your board, you’re at that place where your mind is totally focused and not bothered by any extraneous thoughts. If it is, well, you’re falling off your surfboard.”
“So,” Lopez ponders further, “maybe the old ancient Hawaiians were way ahead, and maybe there is a path to enlightenment in going surfing. The ancient Hawaiians didn’t have Patanjali to write Yoga Sutras, to give us all the answers, but I think that there’s something really similar in where yoga is taking you and where surfing can take you if that’s where you want to go.”
“When I began my practice, surfers were not looked at as adding much to society.” 1960s surf culture was something else entirely, as he sees it. “If they had a car, they probably lived in it. If they didn’t, they probably lived in a house with a whole bunch of other surfers. That was because nobody worked, because if you had a regular job and the surf got good, well, you couldn’t go surfing.
The surfing lifestyle that has developed over the years is pretty much the yoga lifestyle: proper exercise, proper breathing, proper relaxation, proper diet, and positive thoughts and meditation. Those are the basic tenets of yoga. They are exactly the same for surfing, and I think surfers are figuring it out. You need to be flexible to surf and yoga is all about maintaining that flexibility. Most athletic injuries are generally joint-related: shoulders, knees, hips, ankles. Yoga is all about keeping those joints lubed and in good shape.”
This article was originally published at SURFER and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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