I've been learning to surf for over a decade. My progress has been slow: the first two or three years the learning curve was fast, and since then I have progressed in a much more difficult way. First of all, I started very late, as was usual in the Mediterranean, and not from a sporting background: what led me to surfing was skateboarding, in which I didn't stand out either; apart from this, activities like running, swimming, stretching or warming up were foreign to me.
I was lucky enough to fall in love with martial arts in my college days; karate first, aikido later. And although I had left them behind by the time I got hooked on surfing, I still appreciate the benefits they gave me: coordination, a sense of proprioception and balance. In spite of this, I would probably have had a better development as a surfer if I had started before, or if I hadn't left the sport somewhere in my life.
This slow learning curve, which I thought would be permanent, changed suddenly as soon as I started practicing yoga. It's not just about the physical aspect: yes, it's true, yoga gives me more flexibility, a better sense of balance, an internal force that I didn't know (by strengthening the muscles of the abdominal and dorsal nucleus) and compensates for the abuses to the lumbars that we commit after an entire session rowing. But above all, it brings mental focus, a "being here and now" that makes every surfing session perform better and better in every wave.
Surfing is like living in the absolute now. When you ride a wave, you leave everything behind, everything important and irrelevant: the purity of the moment envelops you.
Bill Hamilton.
It is believed that the first surfer to popularize the association between surfing and yoga was Gerry Lopez, who according to many has been the biggest thing there has ever been on a board. It is possible that it was him, and, if not, anyone from that golden age, between the late 1960s and mid-70s. In the midst of the hippy and Californian counterculture it was usual to look towards the East in search of new experiences.
Yoga is going through a process of prostitution of its essence that runs parallel to that of surfing. Take a look at the documentary Yoga, Inc. to realize that the dirty hands of capitalism have ended up pringing this discipline to result in aberrations such as people patenting millennial asanas, slopes practiced at 40 degrees or, as incredible as it is, yoga competitions. In a way, the process of cultural appropriation and trivialization has been exactly the same.
But beyond all this is the intimate certainty that surfing and yoga fit together perfectly. And much has been said about the benefits of yoga for surfers, but I think it would be interesting to study the benefits of surfing for yogis. Because many of the teachings of yoga become tremendously evident in a wave, as the yogi, surfer, lysergic acid guru, friend of Mike Hynson and father of the sixties counterculture, Timothy Leary, put it:
Riding the wave is the epitome of "being here now," and tubeing is the highest form of it. What it is: your future is right in front of you, the past is exploding behind your back, your wake disappears, your footprints in the sand are erased. It is an action that neither produces nor consumes, which is performed only for the value of dance itself. And that is man's destiny.