I’m a beginner again.
The ocean stretches before me like a pane of painted glass, strands of white foam striping it at intervals. I’m nervous. I can feel it in the way my breath hangs suspended in my chest, my ribs refusing to expand to let air in.
I cross the dark-sand beach, strewn with hieroglyphs of driftwood. The ocean seems so distant, but before long it’s lapping against my pale shins. The surfboard, tucked under my arm, is a windsail carrying me northward. I drop it in the water and tell myself that I’ve done this before. Same water, different board, different people.
Before long I’m popping up and riding the white water consistently. I’ve had worse. In 2018 or 2019 I paddled out off the dog beach in Asbury Park as a hurricane was barreling toward shore. It was only my second time surfing in anything other than lazy summer conditions, and plummeting down those steep faces felt like tumbling down moving cliffs. I paddled into those waves and was thrown again and again, dreading not the fall, but the climb back over—or more often, through—the break.
This was nothing by comparison. Except this time, I had an empathic instructor, Prado, watching me in the whitewater. Prado is also a fighter, world-champion judoka. Like any skilled judoka, he knows how to upend your world effortlessly.
With a few gentle interventions, my base vanished. My stance: wrong. My ideas of balance: wrong. My hand placement on the rails: wrong. I made these hacks work for me, but they combined to form an unsound foundation.
An example: Throughout my limited surfing experience, I had strived to equally distribute my weight between both feet, as you would on a balance board, or as you would to avoid a throw or takedown. In surfing, a more sound approach is to front-weight the front foot, turning toes inward instead of forward, which allows the rider to control the board with the front-facing hip and keep their hands suspended over the rails.
Suddenly, I had to think about my foot placement, my hand placement, my balance point—things I had intuited unsoundly. The pop-up in whitewater that was once available to me had vanished. The realization nudged me into rupture, a familiar but long-absent acquaintance.
I’ve been training in Jiu Jitsu for almost eight years. Rupture—the revelation of profound unsoundness—comes less frequently when you’re a brown belt. I’d nearly forgotten the panic it provokes, the feeling of falling overboard and watching the boat speed over the horizon. This happens often for the blue belt, the white belt. And we, the instructors, are the architects of the experience.
How do we orchestrate it with kindness, empathy, compassion, a light touch? How do we handle it like Prado?
Category: Inner Work
Tag: Embodied Wisdom
Recent meditations