Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of an ongoing series illuminating a number of pearls of wisdom from the great Gerry Lopez.
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.”
Related: Gerry Lopez: Choose Your Lifestyle Wisely
“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.”
Related: Gerry Lopez: “Do More Yoga”
For Gerry, whether it’s on a mat on terra firma or negotiating a foam ball it’s all the same: “Keeping a flexible spine and maintaining good breathing practice are very key. The control of prana–the breathing exercise in yoga being pranayama,” which translates to “breath regulation,”–”is the key to healing. If you’re an active surfer, there’s a lot of healing involved and that’s something that, whether you’re doing it in the water or land, since you’re spending more of your time on the beach you should be practicing that–and of course proper diet is very key as well. “Relaxation!” he blurts after a long lull. “You know? So you’re not all stressed out about stuff that you don’t really need to be stressed out about. These are things that come in pretty handy for I think every single person, whether they’re a surfer or not.”
Recently, in Indonesia, he found new ground in his practice. “Rather than start the day with some basic asanas,” a general term for meditation postures, “I would just get on my surfboard and start paddling it, and that was a different kind of vinyasa”—meaning “flow,” or “smooth-transition” yoga. “As soon as I caught a wave, that was that deep meditation. Then the paddle back out was more vinyasa. When you can do that in a place where there’s not a lot of other people, or distraction, or you’re just among your friends, you settle into almost like a repose, that calm state where even when you screw up and mess up a wave, you’re still okay. You don’t have to deal with the frustration that sometimes you do when the surf’s crowded… It can be easier to get to that mindset than it would be on your mat. When you can maintain it on the paddle back out, it’s even better yet.”
“I was mostly just surfing,” Gerry says as cool as you like, his stoic face melding into an expression of wonderment, riding a high most of us, by land or sea, might have to close our eyes to share in. We both met with a wide but silent grin, he in his place, me in mine, both too far out for words, but both somewhere on some wave, to be sure.