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.

Some schools of Zen take a somewhat different approach. Buddhist mindfulness stresses the cultivation of the ability to do and feel whatever you’re experiencing with complete detachment. The way they put it is, ‘When you practice dhyana (meditation), practice dhyana. When you sit down and eat, sit down and eat.’

An extreme example of mindfulness in action is the oft-cited experience of extreme athletes who have found themselves in life and death situations. While they were not seeking a ‘mindfulness’ experience, it seems that is what happened.

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.


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!

Obviously, he came out of his ordeal intact. In fact, he did outrun the avalanche and when he reached safety, he remained in that vividly aware state of mind for some time. He only snapped out of it when he glanced at his digital sport watch and realized with a shock that his entire experience had only lasted a short time. It seemed to have lasted hours!

This feeling of extreme detachment can be achieved, but not through meditation alone. Mindfulness is something that is cultivated slowly. The best advice to meditators is to not cling too tightly to that nice ‘blissed out’ feeling after meditation. Enlightenment is much bigger than that.