I am a surfer.
I have to travel to surf and find that beloved ocean which seems to have this „reincarnational“ force which my soul seems to long for.
No ocean in sight.
I train all year long to keep me in shape for those few weeks I get to be in the water.
You need a few ingredients to become a decent surfer. I guess bravery, which is a hate and love relationship on my part, is a good thing to have, but you will want to have a body that's in shape. Strong but not bulky, flexible, in control with high impulse capacity.
While surfing you will need to do a great amount of body movements simultaneously. If you’ve been lucky enough to get your position in the water right and build up enough speed, you might enjoy a ride.
To watch a good surfer seems effortless. It looks like the easiest, most fun thing in the world.
But here is where repetition comes into play. If you’ve been lucky enough to call the ocean your home, things build naturally and you build a habit by doing it over and over again.
All the odds against me, not only am I not living by the ocean and repetition and building a habit is hard to achieve, years pass by and my bones are getting old.
I tried a lot of things over the years to keep me in shape for that time in the water.
Yoga seems to be the place to go, at least thats what all the Gram is about.
I used to be very much into Ashtanga , which is quite the high performance version of all yoga practices.
Honestly, I loved it and my surfing was fine but I missed a bit of stamina.
So I started to combine it with gym workouts, based on a lot of balance workouts including weights.
At one point I build up so much muscle that I felt heavy and slow in the water. Lesson learned.
My surfing was okay but more on the „happy to catch a wave at least“ terms.
Things still felt difficult, not effortless, not at all at ease.
A dramatic change happened when I found the one thing, the one little piece of the puzzle that was missing in the game.
I started my apprenticeship at Kinetic Pilates to train to become a Pilates Teacher.
Through my training I developed a strong and flexible body, capable to control its movement very precisely. Using the mind to move from the strongest and most effective source - the core, or as we like to say the "powerhouse".
Pilates connected the things that already have been there, full circle.
Suddenly my surfing started to become light and my body seemed to know intuitively what it had to do next.
My wave count in a session increased and a lot of room for joy and fun came with it.
It feels like my brain developed new resources to thrive from and finds great new ways to perform.
The thing is I am 45 years old, a time where you might think you’d be happy to maintain what you have built and get used to regressing.
Surprisingly I am a better surfer than I ever have been. Still no ocean in sight most of the time, not a lot of time to build a habit, surfing occasionally whenever possible.
But I found what I was looking for.
And if I am lucky from time to time I experience this state of flow while practicing Pilates, when moving truthfully from my core only, everything seems to get effortless for that one moment in time and that seems to be a hell lot like how surfing makes me feel.
If you want to find a new way, get your surfing on a new level, I highly recommend a lesson @kineticpilates with Rebecca Convey and her crew.
