The Now

Sometimes I get ahead of myself. It's easy to do, thinking of all the things I want to get done and the time I have to do them. I think we all need to remind ourselves sometimes that the only time that is real is NOW. This instant. This moment in time is the only one that counts really. I know it's cliché but it's true, the past is in the past and the future is never guaranteed. When we are able to live in the now, we become more aware of things. This quality is captured in the Japanese word Zanshin. I believe that zanshin can be cultivated in human beings through practice. For me personally, surfing and martial arts training has helped me to practice living in the now. Whether it be a 20 foot wall of water or a man with a knife coming at you, you better be in the now!

This practice can be done through so many activities: yoga, tai chi, snowboarding, bicycling, skateboarding, a basketball game, painting, writing poetry, competitive sport fighting, rock climbing, horse riding ...well, the list is endless. I think the key is finding an activity that requires your complete attention at the moment you are engaging in it. It's so easy to get caught up in "the rat race" and so refreshing to find an outlet.

Don't Forget to Breathe

Got my first tooth pulled yesterday. It was the second time in my life that I have had "major" dental work done. The first was actually caused by surfing; somehow when I got slammed to the bottom (luckily in a sandy area) on Kauai during Hurricane Danial swell, my teeth banged together so hard that it cracked the root of a tooth and a couple days later I was flying home with an abscess and had to get a root canal done to fix it.

This time it was simply due to a lack of dental care, not super-fun waves, that I had to get a tooth pulled. I was fully numbed up and the dentist had been pulling on the tooth for about 10 minutes when I was pretty sure he was about to give up and cut the tooth out. I thought to myself, "Man, there is some natural instinct in my body that does not want this tooth to go." Even though it had caused me so much pain, my body did not want to give it up. I realized at that moment that my hands were clinched tightly and my body was very tense. I thought, "If this poisonous, infected thing is going to go, I need to relax and let it go. So I took a deeeeeep breath and let it out very slowly trying to relax my entire body in the process. As if right on queue, upon exhale, pop went the tooth!

So next time you get a tooth pulled or are just trying to relax for any reason, remember the words of my first martial arts instructor as we were throwing countless straight punches,

"Don't forget to breathe!"

Only Surfing

What other activity can you:

whack it
slash it
hit it
smack it
cut it
carve it
gouge it
and kill it while being in harmony with nature and hurting nothing?

An artistic look into ordinary surfers on a surf trip through Central America. A unique surf film.

Zen & Zero

A great intro into principles of Zen

The Zen Mind

“…really, we’re all human and just searching for happiness and wholeness.”

Zen of Surfing

Anybody who has ever flown down the face carving lines of inner expression has felt a "luminous mind", whether they know it or not. The Zen of Surfing is found in the ride, a spontaneous blending or AiKi of human and nature...the ride...a magnificent thing. We (surfers) all know that absorbing the rhythms of the ocean can be a very calming thing, a purification of the spirit or misogi. This blog is intended to be an open discussion of meditation, surfing, and the parallels between surfing and eastern teachings such as Buddhism and Taoism. Heck, we'll even throw some martial arts philosophies in the mix too. It's all good!