Top Highlights

• When I take off on a wave, poised on a sliver of surfboard, I am both fish and bird. On each occasion of bliss and fear, I am educated into the complex ways of the sea – a constant lesson in mindfulness.
• Surfing as mindfulness, however, does something a little different. It does not simply take us inside ourselves to find a still centre, but rather orients us within the environment to find place. We are immersed in water and the salt-soaked zone just above the sea’s skin. Around us, terns dive and fish jump. We are active, alert and intent on balan...
• We need to recover sensitivity towards the world around us – its cries and pleasures, its sufferings and beauties. Surfing is an ideal way to do this as a mindfulness given by nature. The saltwater soul of surfing is to be mindful of nature’s body as we cultivate a ‘bodymind’.
• It is the ocean and not surfing instructors that will teach you this mindfulness, and to which you must adapt. As expertise develops, the surfer becomes a connoisseur of the oceans, tutored and formed by them.
• the world actively educates our attention to its shapes, patterns, motions, colours, smells, tastes, vibrations, rhythms, oscillations and (dis)appearances. The world captures our attention, shaping and dictating what and how we sense. Further, the senses do not act independently but in concert as a sensorium or a total system, again shaped by envi...