Sam Bleakley - Mindful Thoughts for Surfers: Tuning in to the Tides

Tuning in to the tides

Sam Bleakley

Wrapped in a cloak of seawater, surfing can take you out of your comfort zone, immersing you in a liquid environment. You become one with sealife. And as a temporary visitor, you must blend in.

The sea is a sensual world of beauty and brilliance, and if we can learn a deeper gratitude for the hospitality it offers, then we will deepen our own mindful states as we become ever more immersed in its wonders. If mindfulness is best described as bringing your attention to the moment and holding it fully, then joining the family of sea creatures, if only for a short while, is a remarkable way to achieve this state of being.

As surfers, our medium for mindfulness is the roiling, unfurling, shore-bound wave, an energetic shedding of the seas skin that we attempt to ride with style. Surfing is a contour-fitting act, making best use of the waves shape, speed and character one of the purest thrills anyone can enjoy and one of the closest embraces of the natural world.

Tense and uncertain when you first learn, surfing becomes elastic and effortless as you gain experience. And as your confidence grows, so your intimacy with water grows. Surfing gets you inside the folds of the world, into the beating heart of its mysteries. The stoke used to describe the joy of riding waves is the paradoxical and simultaneous balance of concentration and letting go, mixed together in a blue mindfulness.

This blue mindfulness may be a little different to the mindfulness of inner contemplation. What surfing teaches is that mindfulness is not in you, but in the world of experience. Indeed, blue mindfulness is a letting go of inward contemplation as you embrace natures expressions salt showers, rainbows, moments when the oceans skin folds over you, turning from navy to sapphire. Then, as you slot into your first tuberide, the sea reveals its secrets.

Surfing is a letting go of the desire to control and to know. In the letting go you are allowing the environment to take hold, to caress and to shape you. This is not always fun. Yet, as you bounce off the rocky reef, as you negotiate rip currents that want to drag you out to the horizon and as you brave the body-bending, mind-stretching lessons of the wipeout, to your surprise you find illumination in each encounter.

Then the coin flips and there is beauty; surfing with dolphins (scary too as they are big and unpredictable); standing tall at the tip of the longboard during your first noseride; riding all the way to shore where the sand bottom kisses you on arrival. Blue mindfulness is the enthusiastic embrace of these experiences in the present. A rinsing of the senses. A rinsing that is unforgettable and irresistible.

While meditation might improve your surfing, surfing will definitely improve your surfing. But surfing can also be turned from mere activity into a meditation based on the seas self-presentation its patterns, moods and mysteries. Inward self-awareness (ego-logy) becomes sensually embedded sea-awareness (eco-logy).

The waves shave off personal pride, set by set. Lets take an example. A cluster of waves is forming on the horizon. Where will you paddle? As the set looms closer, you suddenly realize that the waves are much larger than you thought and breaking much further out. You paddle like crazy to get over the first wave, but get caught by the second wave that tumbles you underwater, and, as you burst up to break the surface for air, a third (and by far the biggest) wave hits you right on the head. We talk about being taken through the rinse cycle as you are forced underwater, cartwheeled in the turbulence. After the fourth (smaller) wave puts you through another rinse, you emerge somewhat wiser.

Now you can position yourself for the next set, and now you know that the best wave to catch at this stage of tide, on this day, in this swell is probably the third in the four-wave set. Books do not teach you this. Immersive experience does. Sensually tuned immersive experience notches up the quality of awareness a sea-awareness rather than a self-awareness. Once again, the mindfulness is not in the mind, but in the total ecology of the moment.

We could say that your positioning in the aforementioned example showed an initial lack of mindfulness. Or, you fell prey to hubris or conceit, thinking that you could outwit the ocean. Certainly, you did not quite read the script first time around. Again, the mindfulness is surely not in your judgement, but rather in the way that the environment attuned you or taught you how to better position yourself for the next set of waves. This is affordance the sea affords or gives off a whole set of cues that shape your response. Mindfulness is, then, your entanglement with the sea as an attitude.

Attitude literally means fitness or posture. So, mindfulness in surfing is a matter of how well you allow the seas presence to shape your posture. Blue mindfulness is the fit between you, your board, and the contours of the waves that you surf. It is less a state of mind or being than it is a fitness to surf; a best fit between what the sea affords (shape, sound and movement of the approaching set) and how you respond. Surfing as mindfulness is outside in.

The next cycle of sea-awareness begins as you paddle for that sizzling third wave (in the next set), rising with it, feeling it propel you forward as you spring to your feet. Every wave is different. The wave, not you, dictates whether you turn to the left or to the right. Think otherwise and you will be unceremoniously dumped. Again, being in tune is letting the shape of the wave shape your response. Can you afford not to notice that mindfulness in surfing is outside-in? The mind in mindful surfing is a co-creation. What shape is the wave? Can you echo the waves insistence its prime quality as you take off to ride to shore in this divine entanglement?