Finding Zen in the Art of Snowboarding

I’m not sure how or where I first came across Zen.

At some point, I borrowed a book about Zen Aesthetics from the local library. I don’t remember much about it, yet it left me with a clear idea of the concept of “no-mind” - doing something without thinking.

At the time, the clearest application for me came with snowboarding.

I remember one particular ride on the slopes above Chamonix where I couldn’t quiet my mind. It was disturbing my enjoyment and impeding my performance. I wasn’t a greater snowboarder, but I wasn’t a beginner either. However, my internal voice was constantly berating me to do better - chatting, thinking, overly self-absorbed, noisy. It was then that I realised I had to shut up. I had to still my mind if I wanted to fully enjoy what I was doing.

Achieving this state was what I called “Zen Snowboarding”.

The concept of “no-mind”, or “mushin” in Japanese, comes from a fusion of the samurai ethos with Zen Buddhism. It was through Zen philosophy and meditation that samurai learnt to quiet and control their minds and emotions. But this was not pure mysticism or asceticism. It had valuable, practical applications in battle.

The sword fight is the most intense form of combat - fast, fluid and deadly. There is no time to think. No time for fear. No time to consider living or dying, winning or losing. No time to think about whether the move you made was good or regret the opening you missed. The moment you think something, you stop. Just for a second.

And when you stop, you die.

For samurai to have a chance of succeeding in battle, they had to be completely present. Their conscious mind under control. Not without thought, but without thinking. Breathing, reacting, flowing, acting, all in a state of no-mind.

Whether the samurai’s no-mind is equivalent to what we might call a state of flow is unclear. It certainly has some similarities. The difference perhaps is that flow is a psychological state that comes upon you while you intensely focus on something challenging.

By contrast, no-mind is something that is trained. It is a way to control your mind and your emotions. This training enables you to be fully present in the moment and to react without conscious thought. It is not something that you wait for; it is a skill you have. A learning to let go.

For the samurai, it was not just the mind that they trained. It was the body too. They spent all their time learning and practising how to fight. Hours and hours, years and years, of practice to make every move and counter move automatic. Engrained in the muscles, fixed in the fibres. To that end, no-mind is training the mental component of a physical activity. Importantly, the physical training came first.

We can start to see how no-mind applies to snowboarding and other physical activities beyond the martial arts.

To perform at a high level we have to let go of the slow conscious decisions and rely on the trained automatic movements. We have to remove the thinking mind from the equation. It is a bottleneck between our senses and our actions. Properly trained the subconscious mind and the body can handle the terrain. The micro-managing mind only slows everything down. And this is where mistakes are made.

In the Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Galloway is making the same point. He is telling the tennis player to stop thinking and let the automatic system, the training, take over. One problem is perhaps that our conscious mind, our ego, is reluctant to give up control, and another is that we don’t trust ourselves and our practice. Unless we do, however, it is difficult to perform at the level we want to be able to.

Stilling the mind is easier said than done. These days proponents recommend mindfulness meditation to teach the mind not to wander, focus and be comfortable with stillness by focusing on your breathing. Mindfulness meditation has a lot in common with Zen meditation. One trick Galloway used with tennis players was to have them focus on the lines of the spinning tennis ball, and try to keep their attention there rather than judging their performance.

But one simple thing for me is just to be kinder to ourselves. We are not engaged in life or death battles like the samurai, we are just trying to enjoy the things we enjoy doing. Part of that then is accepting the level you are at now, it can’t be changed in this moment, so just accept it - the good and the bad - don’t judge. There is no need to bully yourself because you fell in the snow or missed a shot. The only thing we can do is get better. And we can get better.

Voltaire made famous the saying, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. The perfect is something rarely, if ever, achieved. Moreover, achieving perfection implies we can no longer improve. This simply isn’t true. We can always improve. It is the ego that demands perfection. If we can let go of that pressure and just be content with being good, the paradox is we will perform better and enjoy what we are doing more.

I went snowboarding recently for the first time in many years. Well, it was the first time in many years that I had been able to do a serious couple of days riding. And I enjoyed it immensely. Did I fall over? Yes! Did I get stuck in knee-deep powder while someone else casually rode past? Yes! Did I get frustrated? Yes, a little. But for the most part, I wasn’t disturbed by a chattery mind. I enjoyed the time, the moment. I challenged myself on some difficult terrain and felt that I grew as a rider. The best moments were when I was doing everything automatically, reading the terrain, responding and riding. Not without thought, but without thinking.

No-mind.