What A Snowboarder Can Teach Us About Zen

March 9th, 2010 Posted in Outdoors

One of the things that people often do when they take up the practice of meditation is pigeonhole meditation as separate from their daily lives. They do their morning meditation and try to cling to that feeling of peacefulness throughout the day. They are encouraged to, in fact. This may not be quite the way to go about it, though.

Zen Buddhists of some schools emphasize the greater importance of ‘mindfulness’ over the meditation. The difference is that mindfulness is the cultivation of the ability to go about your everyday lives in a heightened state of awareness. They say that when you are meditating, you should meditate, but that when you eat, you should just eat.

If you learn to apply this to your daily life, you eventually learn to live in the moment even while experiencing the most stressful situations. Interestingly, many extreme athletes have had these moments of complete awareness when they have pushed their limits and are facing life-threatening situations.

A Giro ski helmet isn’t going to be of much comfort to a snowboarder when he’s flying down a near-vertical slope. At speeds like that, his life is going to depend on all the hours of practice he’s put into his sport and the reflexes and automatic responses he has cultivated.

Emotions like fear and even rational thought are useless and even reduce your ability to perform when you are racing down a ski slope. When you are trying to outrun an avalanche, this is doubly true. A snowboarder’s experience is a good case in point. When he realized that an avalanche was about to swallow him whole, something happened inside him. His mind became still and calm and it was as if he was a very alert but disinterested observer of all that was going on around him. He even said that he remembered observing his brown boots and wondering why he had bought brown snowboarding boots instead of another color!

The snowboarder outran the avalanche and made it safely to the bottom of the slope. When he realized he was out of danger, he remained in that place of pure awareness for a few minutes, until he looked at his digital sport watch and was shocked to see that only a few minutes had passed since the beginning of his race for life. Had someone asked him, he would have guessed an hour or more.

Meditation alone cannot produce lasting detachment. Mindfulness is achieved through living through all of life’s experiences in a state of detachment. Clinging to any emotion, not matter how ‘blissful, ‘ is somewhat misguided. Enlightenment is not a mood – it is far more than that.