By Dan Lawrence
I often dream about mat surfing. The weightlessness. The sheer texture of motion. Watching water pass at a rapid rate under the leading edge of the mat from an inch off the surface of a shimmering wall of molten glass. Momentary timelessness. The moment when sense of self dissolves back into wave. The feeling of reconnection to nature. The intimacy of it all. It starts with watching the online weather forecasts in the knowledge that the waves I ride came into being as spontaneous winds in a storm blowing across open water many days ago. I sit imagining raw energy invisibly transmuted along, atom to atom, eventually finding form as ocean waves until breaking around me upon a distant shore. Over the course of a week or so that same energy has travelled to the coastline where, with an accommodating tide and kind enough wind, conditions are right for a limp bag of breath to facilitate a transpersonal experience of reconnection. You have a mat, breath and earnest intention. That’s enough.
The waiting and artful noticing are part of the ride. Anticipation is bittersweet but serves as a connective thread to an experience passed or in-potential, that hints at the Buddhist notion of thusness. Following the storms, the swells, the tides, the winds and knowing the local topographic elevations or bathymetric depths are all part of the ritual as it happens. It’s hard to capture in photographs or through descriptive language the real business of riding a surf mat. It’s a common experience to be having the best ride of your life and yet a fellow surfer paddling out on his or her mat, watching you closely, is not aware of even a droplet of what is being experienced. The feeling of the force of gravity pulling the mat down the face of the wave and the resulting acceleration and speed. Thinking about nothing but the moment unfolding. The late psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (2009) called it flow. Mats put your face inch-close to the wave face, giving a wonderfully heightened sense of speed. Naturally, a mat provides a far greater connection to the immediate environment in comparison to regular surfboards and more speed and glide than that other intimate oceanic dance of bodysurfing. The reciprocity between mat and wave is like nothing else. It’s like being part of an enlivened field of water mediated energy. No separation between water, body, mind and whatever animates it all. The late aviator-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1984) explains it best: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”(p.33). Bodysurfers are similarly directly connected to the wave but being more immersed in the water equates to more drag. Riding a mat, you are actually suspended weightlessly upon a morphing bubble of air that transmits every ripple of the wave through to the rider whilst miraculously smoothing them out. Paradox becomes a language of wisdom on a mat. Ridden well, a mat can be virtually flat, an ethereal non-friction surface one moment and a contoured craft that offers sudden hold in critical situations and turns like a sharp railed shortboard the next. Opposites collapse into coincidences on a surf mat. The poet-philosopher Coleridge once used a metaphor of a bar of soap (a surf mat can feel very much like a bar of soap) to explain paradox: what can make it slip around when you put it down (water) is exactly the same thing as what eventually makes it “stick”. On a surf mat, as in all human existence really, we are beset by paradoxes; by pursuing speed, the mat drags and we lose flow, just as in pursuing happiness we often become less content. Or how in our collective impatience that scientific research should lead to positive findings, scientific research has become less adventurous and ever more detached from the messiness of subjective reality. Everything has its necessary opposite. There is nothing so good that it cannot have negative consequences and nothing so bad that it cannot occasionally give rise to good. The coincidence of opposites is at the heart of everything and gives rise to everything we know. It transcends ordinary reasoning. Mat surfing reminds me to not be tempted to resolve this. Ride a mat and you’ll understand. It’s a lesson in simultaneous form and emptiness, and of the understanding that opposites are always present regardless of whatever solution seems to present itself. As Alfred Whitehead (1944) noted, “to have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it” (p.57).
“Riding a mat, you are actually suspended weightlessly upon a morphing bubble of air that transmits every ripple of the wave through to the rider whilst miraculously smoothing them out. Paradox becomes a language of wisdom on a mat”
Opposites do not have an ultimately irreconcilable relationship. It is not a matter of linearity; the case that the further you go towards one end of the line the further away you are from the opposite end. Rather, opposites eventually tend to coincide in a more circular motion, or via circumambulation as Jung put it. For instance, both extreme religious fundamentalists and extreme atheists ultimately have the same rigidity in their different views of the world or psyche. If they go full circle they would eventually coincide. But whilst opposites genuinely coincide, they remain opposites and are mutually sustaining. Paradox again. They give rise to and fulfil one another and are conjoined; you can’t have one without the other, but they remain distinct as opposites, as in heat and cold, light and dark, mountain and valley. Indeed, everything that exists can be thought of as a form of energy which results from the coming together of apparent opposites, but a thing and its opposite can also both be true at the same time. The individual and the collective, the temporal and the eternal, the embodied and the disembodied present simultaneously. My other beloved practices, Jungian psychotherapy, and contemplative consultancy, are rooted in this perspective too. Jacob Needleman (2016) wrote: “Stay with the contradiction. If you stay you will see that there is always something more than two opposing truths. The whole truth always includes a third part, which is the reconciliation” (p.38). Jung’s whole corpus of depth psychological writing relied upon this spontaneous coming together of opposites (his “Transcendent Function”). East and West are simultaneously present on a compass and need to be so, not just to navigate the world, but to have a world to navigate. The idea of complementarity is foundational in nature, morality, and spirituality. The whole is never an annihilation but rather a subsumption of the parts. All is one, but also all is many, or “not one, not two” (Advaita-aneka) as in the philosophy of Kashmir Saivism. As Goethe imagined and McGilchrist (2021) strives more recently to remind us, we need the “union of union and division”. Read that again and savour it. Deep or meaningful things, like consciousness or matter, have a truth and a necessary opposite that similarly hold a kernel of truth within. Shallow things, like what we had for breakfast, do not. Mat surfing, in all its sublime paradoxical absurdity, is a vehicle of nondual experiencing as much as a physical workout.
"Both extreme religious fundamentalists and extreme atheists ultimately have the same rigidity in their different views of the world or psyche. If they go full circle they would eventually coincide. But whilst opposites genuinely coincide, they remain opposites and are mutually sustaining”
At full pelt, on a solid, glassy, lined up wave you can reach phenomenal speeds beyond anything else naturally powered in the water. Nothing feels like that. It’s as close to the practice of a Pelican in effortless flight as you can get. It’s as close to a dedicated regular spiritual practice as I can manage too, if spiritual and what lies outside of the machinations of my busy mind. As a contemplative Jungian therapist rooted in a tradition of monastic and depth psychology, I find myself echoing the ancient language that whispers something akin to the experience of a “liberation of being”. In various ways the main schools of depth psychology and psychoanalysis suggest the importance of being able to bracket an ego-directed manner of being in order to gradually ultimately argues that healing or integration can occur when the ultimately argues that healing or integration can occur when the spontaneous movement of feelings, thoughts, words, images, or bodily energy can arise without relative hindrance. Freud and Jung were intensely interested in the content of what arose through their methods of free association and active imagination, and much of their analytic, interpretive work focused on this content. But in mat surfing I’m reminded that the kind of permissive intention and respect for the emergent or unknown that is at the heart of depth psychological work is the real magic that heals and reconnects us with depth. Freud would ask the patient to let ideas “emerge of their own free will” (Freud, 1965, p.135). Both analyst and patient were to avoid psychotherapy’s becoming a scene for the discussion of the (already) known, instead of a place where the mind begins to freely come into being, as personal resistances are softened through interpretation. Fundamental to this method was Freud’s conviction regarding the partialness of rational, purposive, directed thought. The psychoanalyst Charles Scott (1982) similarly asserts that the “therapeutic occurs as one is able to welcome events”(p.159), to engage in what he terms “world-openness”. Of course, the capacity to welcome events with an evenly hovering attention cuts across paradigms or psychological landscapes. When surfing quick shifting peaks there’s no point in willing things calmer, more uniform or otherwise. In psychological work too, it is as relevant in welcoming the being of the other, as it is in allowing the multiplicity of ourselves. It is an openness toward things as they are, an “openness toward the forthcoming of hiddenness” (p. 83). This openness requires that we suspend our ego-interests, desires, and intentions with their conditioned knowings and one-eyed judgements of things.
“The implicit holds particular value on a mat. You intuitively shift your weight around your proprioceptive core to facilitate changes in the mat shape and volume”
Where does a liberation of being lead or land into? To reconnection. Always. To what or to whom is one
reconnected? To Nature. It’s always a return to Nature. Until recently the natural world has functioned as a backdrop to the psychological within depth psychological theories. The recent necessary proliferation of deep ecology movements reminds us of the inseparability of our wellbeing from that of the natural world. Like the ecological frame of the late psychoanalyst Shoma Morita, when riding a surf mat, emotions are experienced as natural occurrences rather than symptoms or products of anything else. There’s no time to make much more of them. Mat surfing, lying prone, involves sensing the Nature that surrounds us moment to moment. It does not call the mat surfer, unlike much of modern notions of mindfulness, to become mindful of the environment, but urges an immediate intimate, immersive and sustained relationship with Nature, the ocean, here and now. The mat surfer intuitively understands something of Osborne Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis and its premise that an inherent emotional affiliation exists between humans and other living organisms. And be careful not to prematurely bracket what is “living” and what isn’t. To find oneself in the pocket of the wave buoyed by unseen energy, eyes stung by salty sea breath, is to encounter the intelligent aliveness that runs through all natural habitats. I like to watch waves too. Sometimes I’ll bob around in the water at the shoulder point of the wave where they break and just witness them. The view of an unbroken wave on a mat can be breathtaking. Breath returning to fluid breath. Liquids do not readily compress; it takes significant force. Lying prone on a thin layer of rippling air just outside of the impact zone becomes a spiritual practice of noticing and reconnection to life in its powerful state of flux. It can be momentarily overwhelming, like the bittersweet intimacy of psychotherapy. But it can offer liberation too, like that moment of an organisational shift into new relatedness. Compared to surfing on a board, the movements are much more subtle on a mat and quite often invisible to all but a handful of others. I imagine the seals that sometimes roar their approval know it. The implicit holds particular value on a mat. You intuitively shift your weight around your proprioceptive core to facilitate changes in the mat shape and volume. Without thinking about it, you are maximising speed and subtle directional vectoring in tandem with the way the wave is breaking. Since the wave leads in this dance you are best advised to be tethered to its present unfolding and to put technique aside. Attunement takes precedence over imposition upon the wave. And when we evolve and hone our inquisitive nature and sources of wonder through attunement, we start to move once again along our creative grain.
“Healing or integration can occur when the spontaneous movement of feelings, thoughts, words, images, or bodily energy can arise without relative hindrance”
The biggest advances you can make in mat surfing happen when you aren’t trying. Like the notion of satori in Zen, advances represent a falling away of an idea you might have had held about mats or surfing or the ocean, to be replaced by a more intimate, intuitive knowing of what it is to ride a mat in harmony with the world. The trick after mat surfing is to then resist the urge to spend weeks afterward trying to figure out what just happened and how to do it again. Eventually the experience becomes like taitoku, the kind of knowledge that sticks to your ribs, and you’ll want to rush out to find someone to tell. Unfortunately, when you find someone, the things you say don’t capture it at all. But that’s ok, most experiences of depth or connection are like that. The French Existentialist, Louis Lavelle (1993), wrote that “love is the pure attention to the existence of the other” (p.112). I like to think of love as simply a certain kind of attention, albeit one in a distracted and fractured world we’ve somewhat lost touch with in a collective sense. “Pure attention” is a term that also invites depth beyond something like modern notions of “focus” or “being mindful”. Mat surfing, like the experience of “shikantaza” in Zen or Freud’s “free floating attention” in psychoanalysis, has served to remind me that everything that is valuable that we know has to remain, at least in part, implicit. The pull towards making sense of what you are doing on a wave, to chop up the experience and to begin to analyse as it happens, ends in something very much unlike mat surfing. The sense of flow is lost and you’re likely to lose the mat altogether and find yourself facing your necessary fear of drowning. Take poetry as another example. You cannot explicitly explain a poem without losing something of its core meaning or soulful quality. It’s just not the same.
Similarly, there is a profound difference between the presence of something and the re-presentation of something. From both a poetic and a depth psychological perspective, the representation of an experience as it occurs to us post-packaged by the mind, is a mere ghost of the thing it represents. Consider the difference between a two-dimensional map and the rich topography it represents. Of course, you need both the map to navigate and the capacity to learn from the territory in the moment if you’re really going to stomp around and have fun. It’s like trying to write about mat surfing. At best, as a writer, I’m hoping that you, the reader, falls into a state of reverie at moments in this piece, whereby images and a felt sense of something implicitly hinted at here draws you towards the spirit of all things mat surfing. As a mat surfer, I’d rather put down the iPad and meet you in the ocean, bobbing around on a half-inflated surf mat with a knowing nod and wry smile between us. There’s an old idea that something that presences itself to us is not just
present in a passive sense but is actively manifesting itself in our attention – it is an aliveness to be connected to. How often do we allow things to penetrate us in that way? How often, within our families, our workplaces, our cultural spaces do we allow for the depth of experience that the notion of active presencing invites in us? Increasingly we seem to spend a lot of time fragmenting and categorising things, ignoring the value of resting in implicit knowledge and valuing explicit representations instead. The neuropsychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist (2021), however asserts that everything is reverberative; reality is constantly coming into being. Try riding a breaking wave on a thin layer of air and concluding otherwise. For McGilchrist (ibid), relations are prior to relata. And it is this idea of an interconnected relatedness, prior to that which is identified as being related to, that so much of modern life seems both to have forgotten and actively discourage, but that mat surfing elevates to awareness through experiences of reciprocity. Like Wordsworth’s lament that “shades of the prison house begin to close around the growing boy” (Davis, 2015), the prior presence of our interconnected nature and its presencing to each and every one of us has eroded to the degree that much of what passes for psychotherapy and coaching in the last decade, focuses almost exclusively on what is known or produced, rather than the feeling of being alive. The mat surfer, grizzled and defeated by his past efforts to make something of his practice, has no choice but to reorient to an a priori relatedness - to the wave, the air in the mat, weather, invisible currents - as they arise, lest a long swim through churning surf holds some strange or perverse attraction.
“How often, within our families, our workplaces, our cultural spaces do we allow for the depth of experience that the notion of active presencing invites in us?”
Over time, the relationship with emergence that mat surfing demands, alters the kind of attention one brings to the world. In neuropsychological terms, we begin to rely once again on the first quarter-second of thought – the right hemispheric taking in of the whole picture prior to making sense of it. And this changes our world. Central to McGilchrist’s (2019) exploration of the difference between the two lateral hemispheres of the brain is the central notion of fundamentally different kinds of attention. As he suggests, “attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions”(p.28). Rather, the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world actually alters the nature of the world we attend to: “Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world” (2019, p. 28). The open, vigilant, contextual form of attention that McGilchrist characterises as the right hemispheric mode is of particular significance to psychoanalytic approaches, as it is precisely the mode of attention that Freud himself claimed lay at the centre of the practice. As psychotherapist Robert Snell (2013) wrote, “this undirected but somehow actively receptive state of mind ” (p.47) is of central importance in psychotherapy. This is the implicit attitude that characterises for many the uniqueness of the psychotherapist’s stance in psychoanalytic settings. It also captures something of the mat surfer’s free-floating attention and free listening to the whisper of the ocean’s energy, like a neoprene wrapped Freud attuned to the unchecked free associations of Mother Nature. This suspended state – somewhere between readiness and passivity – is known also by the contemplative, hovering on the edge of knowing and unknowing. I think all of us know we are happiest when we forget the time, or lose ourselves in a beautiful piece of music, a movie, or an intimate moment with someone we cherish. The ability to come full circle and forget ourselves is perhaps uniquely human and why we’re still drawn to the poet’s hints of the underlying hidden realities to life. We behold that we’ve lost something of our innate natural intelligence in our striving for progress and the phenomenal world. We’ve somehow gotten caught up in this endless cycle of noise and information that we don’t know how to stop. And we all intuitively know our outer expression is only as good as our inner awareness. Once, I attended a private interview with the famous Tibetan Buddhist teacher of a dear friend, on his rare and brief visit to England from distant lands. He sat patiently as, in my unacknowledged excitement, anxiety, and small mind projections, I babbled on for about ten unbroken minutes about my spiritual practices and psychotherapy work. At a rare pause for breath, he finally interjected with a question; “Dan, what do you do to relax?” I told him I felt most relaxed and in flow when mat surfing. “Surf more,” he replied, before waving me out of the door.
As a psychotherapist and consultant, I often encounter successful people that are living so close to their lives, they can’t make sense of them. The narrow yet often inflated self-conscious mind makes lots of complications over what is potentially a much more beautiful and intimate encounter with the world. The yearning for connection and simplicity is why folk still go on retreat, meditate, or do yoga, go for long runs, or seek the curious echo-chamber of therapy. In essence, many people are seeking to reinvigorate the flow between the narrow world of self-consciousness and what the contemplative Maggie Ross (2014) calls “Deep mind”; the multi-dimensional matrix in which everything takes place, from the implicitly choreographed dance of energy particles that create the illusion of materiality to the soft containing words spoken by a mother to her child. For instance, when reading a poetic or spiritual text, as much as when sitting in a garden or bobbing around in the ocean, you have to pause to let the depth of what you’re receiving reverberate in you lest the poetic essence of the moment be lost forever. Aliveness resides in the intentional pause that begets attunement. The 12th Century Zen teacher Eihei Dogen said that “We should live each day, each hour, in the same frame of mind as that of a man falling from a horse. In that brief moment before he hits the ground, all his ability and learning are useless, and there is no time to think, no time for daydreams or self-reproach”( Aoyama, 2019, p.98). Note the lack of anxiety or fear in Dogen’s falling rider. Instead, he advocates a daily falling off of ourselves, an unwinding of our usual mental scaffolding against the reality of the moment. We become positively bereft of our mental life rafts and survival strategies. And we receive - really receive - the world. We also survive, moment to moment, and so trust in emptiness knits together thread by narrow thread. We must believe, as the contemplative Simone Weil intuited that what we are unable to grasp is more real than what we are able to grasp.
“For many mat surfers I’ve encountered in the water, there is a turn of intuition in those early rides towards a life re-connected to a sense of awe”
If you’re an experienced surfer there’s a creative unknowing process akin to the beginner’s mind of zen practice that goes with artfully approaching this particular mat. It requires an intimacy or appreciation of humility and emptiness. How else might you have the inner agility to mind-meld with a craft that might dramatically change shape at any moment during the ride and that responds immediately to even the most minute of postural shifts that accompany nascent thought or feeling? But the reward is thrilling. For many mat surfers I’ve encountered in the water, there is a turn of intuition in those early rides towards a life re-connected to a sense of awe. Wonder and humility are the only currencies that make a difference on a surf mat. An intuition develops over time that there is no riding of a surf mat, it is simply a vehicle to explore the wave… and waves are infinitely complex. The mat holds fast, not by slicing into the wave with hard edges, but rather through an intimate conformity to the water’s surface. Not knowing is most intimate. The mat surfer, like the modern monk of Panikkar’s (1982) imagination does not wish to wash his hands of doing, but to free them from having, so they can be put to their true task of re-establishing an authentic connection to a reality beyond what has been narrowly conceived. Read that again and apply it to your working attitude – what would it mean to frame your core professional task around re-establishing an authentic connection to reality? Similarly, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s work conveyed an attitude that clearly considered the truth of the analyst’s psyche to be the crucial factor in psychotherapeutic work. His advice for the training (or experienced) analyst was therefore never concerned with what to do or what technique is “held”. His focus was almost exclusively on how to listen deeply. For Bion, each new client engagement took on the spirit of pioneer work, and every trace of routine then proves to be a blind alley.
“It is no good resorting to the method which suits somebody else. The fact that other people do differently is useful – it may give you a hint – but the fundamental point is, can you find out what suits you?”(Bion, 2021, p.30). I invoke the spirit of Bion when in the water on a surf mat or when meeting with the young adults mentored at Dallington. Both situations invite curiosity in service of what Jung called “individuation”; the artful crafting of an individual out of deep engagement with the collective. Another brilliant psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott (1949), once stated: “acceptance of not-knowing produces tremendous relief”(p.248). I read Winnicott much as I approach mat surfing, as an aid in hopeful search of the creative easement that sits between marvel and doubt. To aim true at a mode of living and relating with clear discernment to choose to dwell in the anxious truth of life and live fully, is to resist the urge to settle into a “forgetfulness of being” that is more comfortable in denial. Clare Winicott (2017), also a psychoanalyst, once described her husband as someone who: “Made it his aim to enter into every situation undefended by his knowledge, so that he could be as exposed as possible to the impact of the situation itself. This approach was more than a stance; it was an essential discipline, and it added a dimension to his life as vital to him as fresh air” (p.2). At the heart of her approach was also a questioning about how we recover a sense of feeling alive and real, sensibilities fundamental to feeling our lives are worth living. I’ve noticed that the call of the surf mat often arrives into peoples’ lives at a point of need, boredom or disconnection. Mat surfing enlivens that which has often become disconnected or despondent in adults. It reintroduces play where routine and conformity has taken gnarly root. In his persistent attention to the early relationship between mother and child Winnicott observed how a baby can be made to precociously comply with mother’s needs and desires, in order to maintain a relationship with her. In doing so, however, the child loses a sense of connection with what freely arises in her own experience. Taken to an extreme, this inhibition of the spontaneity that characterizes the aliveness of the person is, for Winnicott, synonymous with illness or sense of futility and hopelessness. Psychotherapy, he argued, must then provide a “holding place” in which it is safe enough for spontaneous experience, play, to arise. The imagistic archetype of the foolish mat surfer is one of intuitive allegiance not to thought, feelings, images or bodily experience per se, but to that state of being in which one’s inherent liveliness can become the foundation of activity in the world.
And the relief this entails can be potentially life changing. It makes space for spontaneity and serendipity; the art of making appropriate responses to life without the interruption of that wobbling and indecisive state we call choosing. As Jiddhu Krishnamurti once remarked: “one must seek out something beyond the inventions and tricks of the conditioned mind” (p.40). The mat surfers experience of a “freedom from the known” leaves mental space enough for connection to be felt, intuition to take her place in things. In my social dreaming work with organisations over the years, I’ve witnessed a similar relief ripple through participants, once invited to drop their own fraught storylines in favour of a reconnection to the threads running between the group. Reconnection to a lost transitional space marked by playfulness and a sense of communitas. The poet-philosopher Gaston Bachelard (2010) recommended “reverie” as the primary attitude towards nature to be cultivated. By “reverie”, he did not mean idle daydreaming, but an alert and flexible mindfulness – an openness to the reverberations of things, words and images - closely akin to Daoist spontaneity. In reverie, the self no longer opposes itself to the world by subjecting it to scientific categories and theories. It’s an attitude of positive disinterest, free from practical concerns and ambitions. No longer self-concerned, one is able to move into the space of elsewhere, in which the poet and mat surfer resides. Always elsewhere, immersed in a dream that is unfolding.
To let things happen in the psyche is an art which few people know. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. Steady observation though, will allow one to understand how “all the time we are dependent upon the things that literally fall into our consciousness” (Jung, 1968a, p.173). We credit our conscious selves with far too many of them. When persevering with mat surfing, after a while one is reminded of the limits of reason or individual perspective. In a philosophical sense, one encounters what McGilchrist describes as “An unknowing the other side of ignorance that is far superior to both knowing and ignorance… a wisdom the other side of folly that is superior to both folly and common sense”. Most mat surfers I know encounter something of a “wisdom the other side of folly” whilst fooling around out back on a limp bag of air. Care to join us?
References
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