Lessons from surf camp

I just finished my third surf session in just as many days and let me tell you, surfing has a lot to teach me about life. Surfing is new to me minus a few days on the water years ago, and I am feeling the weight of being a beginner. I am still working on my relationship with failure and surfing is challenging many of my ingrained patterns. I was floating in the water midway through my third lesson, just watching the gentle rolling of the waves, when a thought popped into my head. “This is too hard. I should just cancel all my surfing lessons and do more yoga instead.”

As soon as I thought it, I laughed at myself a bit and came back to the moment. I am floating in a beautiful ocean, with the sun glinting off the tips of the waves, being rocked gently by the current. What am I talking about? Yes, of course this is hard. But hard things are very often worth doing. I finished the lesson catching two great waves, enough to make my heart happy.

If I stick with what I know, what I have mastered, then I am not living life fully. One of the biggest struggles of my life is finding a balance between pushing myself out of my comfort zone while also knowing there is always time to stay tucked away safely within it. There have been moments of my life where I have lived in the extremes of both and I simply cannot do that any longer.

Life is so often about finding balance. Everything about surfing is about finding balance. Finding the center of your board as you wait for the wave, keeping your balance far back enough so you don’t catch your nose in the water as you paddle, and pushing your balance forward enough as you stand up to smoothly ride the wave. My balance point on the board is constantly shifting. There is not a dot here for one foot and a dot there for another. I have to know when to shift forward and when to shift back.

In life, we can catch glimpses of feeling aligned and balanced. It is a sweet sensation to experience, almost intoxicating. But like surfing, there are many different balance points we will have to move through in life. Where I find balance at one point in my life will feel terribly out of balance at another point in my life. This is natural and necessary despite what we think. The assumption many of us make, including myself, is that if I can find balance just once, then I will have it forever.

We think if we find the balance we are perpetually seeking then we can stop and finally rest. But in life, as in surfing, we will never catch the same wave twice, there will always be the need to realign and find our balance point in real time. How simple yet so frustrating is this? The balance we are searching for is potentially unattainable in the way we think it should present itself.

Surfing is also very much about respecting the power of the ocean and the waves. To fully respect the movement and flow, there is a great degree of letting go of control that must take place. There are times of consistent waves in the ocean but also times of lulls and utter chaos. Nobody can control what the water does, no matter how much we attempt. So we control the controllables and let the rest go.

This entire trip has been a deep lesson in letting go of control. Letting go of the control I think I have on life. Because lets be honest, there is actually very little of our external worlds that we have any bit of control over. At the very beginning of this trip I wrote my first blog on planning and letting go. Perhaps I called in this theme unintentionally. But I am here for the lesson and will continue to sit quietly and learn from every experience that wants to teach me.

In life we can control aspects. We have control over our internal world more than we know at times. But when we try to control other aspects, we can feel the resistance. With surfing, if I try to think my way into catching a wave, I usually end up in the water faster than I know what happened. I have so much more luck when I focus on one bit of technique. For me, it seems to most often be, keep your head up and heart open. Every time I have focused solely on keeping my head up and heart open, looking up above the palm trees, keeping my chest pointed towards where I want to go, I can stand with so much more ease.

What another beautiful lesson from surfing. Keep your head up and heart open. You will always move towards what you see and where you chest is pointed. If you look down and bring your chest down, you’re swimming more than riding the wave. Phew, swimming more than riding the wave. I think we all know what swimming vs riding the wave feels like.

It’s clearly another lesson from surfing I need in my life. Where we point our vision and keep our heart facing, is where we will head. When I am constantly looking down at what I can see clearly rather than looking towards the horizon where all potential exists, I, of course will not move forward. Where we point our chest towards, our heart space, is where our body will follow.

So I will leave you with the simplest of surfing advice, find your balance, let go of control and keep your head up and heart open. It seems fitting to step into a new year with these lessons guiding me.