On the ocean’s edge, you’re ready to dance down to the beach, your surfboard under one arm. Take this image: Before ever took off for sea, you spread out a yoga mat. Aside from a little strangeness, it isn’t entirely inappropriate when you think about it–or indeed as strange at all that yoga and riding the ocean waves would be mixed together. They go together as naturally as peanut butter and jelly, don’t they? visit us?

Yoga has nothing in the world to do with surfers lavishing on the beach. Mentally, physically, in balance. Think of your body as smooth, steady as a tightrope walker’s–this is where yoga comes in. It provides both strength and flexibility — two things that might mean the difference between a whole lifetime worth of wave-riding pleasure.

Get swatted around by a big wave? It’s like being tossed back and forth between two giant roller wheels! Yoga shows you how to keep your head when Cloudbreak or Pipeline is roaring; a man who controls his breathing might be likened to the captain of a ship that navigates well even in monster seas.

Imagine how much concentration it requires to catch that perfect wave. Surfing is like trying to thread a needle during an earthquake. Yoga can help you to concentrate only–then when the right wave comes along your mind won’t waver.

The core strength one, your autumn surfing harvest. Imagine trying to pop up on your surfboard if you don’t have strong abs. You’re a yard dog. Yoga offers athletic stances so difficult that they train you to use core muscles.

But life holds many other things as well. Suppose you go with the flow and do a dog to end each day. This is the meeting point of two completely separate worlds. What a lucid while moment, for no other reason than sitting on land is quite hard! At such a moment, inspiration is bound to pour out naturally. After all it takes enough effort just to hold oneself up on dry ground: why not also allow a little humor into the business of surfing?

Should surfing not begin for one reason or another, never mind. And aren’s desserts always the tastiest!

Yet the following anecdote is from my own life. Until that morning when, with a clump of seaweed upper-body half-way in large wave. It was hilarious yet also somehow humbling. That episode made me see what are the beautiful results of daily yoga practice–to have the resilience and adaptability that can occur only when one accepts rather than struggling against, through each stage along life’s unpredictable way.

And surely we must not neglect the social dimension. If you join yoga classes, you will meet others who are as addicted to this royal sport as you are. In the Liuzhou Shantung Plain there is surely also a western community somewhere or conversely up in Ch’inghai: shared fields like just these tie all kinds of friends together.