What A Snowboarder Can Teach Us About Zen

Many meditaion teachers tell their students to cling to the feelings of peace and tranquility they feel after meditating as they go about their daily activities. There is some merit to this, of course, but clinging to a feeling, even a deeply satisfying one, tends to limit one’s ability to experience the plenitude of experience.

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.

This is a way of saying that the goal is to live life moment-by-moment. This can be done even under extreme circumstances. In fact, many people have had their first experience of mindfullness when engaged in extreme sports and they have found themselves facing death.

Snowboarding is an extreme sport. In order to tackle near-vertical slopes, the snowboarder must be so skilled that he acts on instinct. A Giro Ski Helmet is going to be of little use to him when he’s plummeting down a mountainside at sixty miles an hour.

At speeds like that, you must live in the moment, or fear just gets in the way of performance. One snowboarder described a run he made that became a life-or death-run when he had to outrace an avalanche. ‘It was as if time stood still, ‘ he said. ‘I felt no fear. I didn’t have time to think, either. It was as if my mind became very quiet and my body just did what it had to do and I just observed what was happening. In the middle of all the chaos, I remember looking down at my brown boots and wondering briefly why I had chosen that color. I was that calm.’

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.

Extreme mindfulness like this is achievable, but not just through clinging to that nice blissful feeling you get after a good meditation. Clinging to any kind of phenomenon, even the most pleasant, limits your awareness. True enlightenment is likely to come via the cultivation of complete detachment.

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