Emotional Resilience: Riding The Wave

We talk about riding the wave of emotions, but what does that actually feel like?

An amazing human and friend gave me a surf lesson in Tofino, BC one chilly September day a few years ago. It wasn’t my first time surfing, but thanks to his guidance, it was my first time successful at it.

While I always expected surfing to be a passion, I found my home instead in snowboarding. Surfing is a different beast, one I feel is even more humbling, intimidating and therefore an even more powerful teacher. Both the ocean and the mountain teach overwhelming humility if you allow them.

Sports always relate back to life, and their tendency to act as endless metaphors for living mean they never stop handing out opportunities to learn more about ourselves through them. Experiencing the rawness of the present moment with surfing, snowboarding, or any adventure sport whether you’re succeeding at it or not — quite often, more intensely when you don’t — is an experience that stops time.

Naturally, sitting in a moment suspended in time brings razor sharp awareness of everything around you and the emotions inside. This is the magic we seek.

I will never stop saying that intense emotions, especially those harboured and stowed away for a long time, left unacknowledged, are the toughest to be present with. Consequently, the toughest part of being alive. Processing emotion in a healthy way can be taught, yet that’s a road that has to be walked relatively alone. You can be surrounded by a team of professionals — in fact, I encourage it — but you are the only one feeling what you’re facing. You have to battle your own demons. Don’t let this scare you. This is your superpower, and it makes you a warrior.

Let’s put it into the context of surfing, from the perspective of a non-surfer.

Catching The Wave

I was on baby waves with a long board. There’s something intimidating about the cold, dark water of the Pacific Northwest, especially on a dark and dreary day. It was powerful, as was each wave I was catching. Tiny, but powerful.

When you catch a wave, it’s unlike any other feeling. Pick a wave, time it right. Turn around, paddle hard. It feels like such an effort to match the speed of a wave before it reaches you, feeling the power of an unseen force rising up behind you. It forces the back of the board upward and for a second you feel you’re going to dive downward into the water. But you don’t. Suddenly all the force begins to propel you and you can’t stop the momentum.

You stand up, gingerly, balanced between the intoxication of success and the fear of failure. Your board goes faster than you expect. Even standing, you aren’t sure you’re going to stay up. Falling sucks for so many reasons.

That heady mix of fear and excitement isn’t comfortable but it’s just exhilarating enough to keep you coming back for more. It takes presence to stay on the wave, confidence in yourself and your ability, an expansion of mind, and willingness to feel a all of the experience simultaneously.

Such is the path of the human emotional experience.

The Wave of Emotion

It’s easier and takes far less effort to not get on the wave in the first place.

To stay home and not go surfing at all. To sit on the couch, safely inside your comfort zone, or to float on your board and watching others surf instead. You can’t fall if you don’t get up. It expends zero energy if you don’t even try.

Surfing is a risk. Paddling is hard. Standing up is difficult. It all takes timing, balance, focus, commitment. Emotions take effort too. Real, focused, committed effort.

Like surfing, it’s easier to let waves of emotions pass by unridden and unacknowledged. Once unlocked, that wave can knock you off balance and completely overwhelm you. It can keep you from breathing, engulf you in ferocious intensity, consume you until it feels like you will never again see the surface.

It’s here that you focus on finding your balance.

You can ride any emotion. Many of us aren’t born surfers, but all of us are built to withstand the full force of our emotional experience. You are strong enough. It’s who you are. It’s what you’re made of.

You have the choice of facing your wave, the hard stuff you carry inside you. You can choose to open yourself to the world with an open heart and feel all there is to feel. Or you can close yourself up and save it for later. Later, however, always comes.

You can’t stop the waves of the ocean or the emotional experiences life provides you. All you can do is learn how to embrace your humanness and express yourself not in spite of your emotions, but along with them, harnessing the power of the waves to live a daring, intensely vibrant life.

Like a perfectly executed turn or a well ridden wave, you’re never going to know how good it feels to ride it out, the relief that comes from no longer sitting in fear, if you don’t get up and take that chance. If you don’t give yourself that opportunity to feel those emotions. Make the effort. Do the thing. Feel it all.

It was never meant to be a smooth ride. The ocean is wild, so is life. But you’re the warrior who can overcome it all.

Go find your wave.

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For a deeper dive into these areas, check out the F7: Seven Days to Forgiveness ebook + course.