The Fun of Being Here Now: Why Yoga and Sailing Belong Together

Everyone talks about how important it is to be more present, more mindful, to the point where it’s turning into one more thing to do, to learn, to practice.  Meditate more. Be still. Stop doing. Breathe consciously. Put the phone down. Work harder at being calm.

Speaking from 35 years of meditating, silent retreats, and teaching, I’m here to tell you: that is an exhausting way to find presence. I’ve come to believe there’s another route into it, and it’s a lot more fun.

Presence for sure is not something you have to sit still and force. It’s something that can happens naturally when you’re actually having fun.

I’ve learned that one of the easiest ways to drop into the present moment is to simply do something that brings you alive. Sometimes that means dropping into a flow state – that sweet spot where your body and mind line up to meet a dynamic physical challenge. Other times, it’s about pure presence – the effortless open awareness that happens when you’re absorbing the world around you.

Sailing gives you both, seamlessly.

One minute, you’re in total flow—moving your body, trimming a line, balancing against the heel of the hull as a sudden gust catches the sail. The next minute, as the boat settles into a groove, you’re pulled into deep presence—feeling the sun on your skin, hearing the water rush against the hull, watching the San Francisco skyline shift, and breathing in the cool Bay air.

You aren’t trying to quiet your mind. You don’t have to. The wind, the water, and the sheer joy of moving through space do the heavy lifting for you.

Inward Attention, Outward Horizon

That shared sense of presence and immediacy, of the body in yoga and the environment in sailing, is one of the reasons I wanted to bring them together into a single day experience. I first found that sense of presence, that feeling of being fully in the moment, after yoga classes and after my sailing days. I wanted to spend an entire day living that way, with attention moving between breath, wind, wave, and sky, all without effort, as naturally as the movement of the waves.

That’s why pairing yoga with sailing makes so much sense to me. They aren’t separate activities stuck together by chance; they feed each other:

• Yoga gathers your attention inward. It brings you back into your body, not to perform or strike a perfect pose, but to feel where you are holding tension, where you feel strong, and where you can soften.

• Sailing takes that same attention and blows it wide open. It gives your awareness somewhere tangible, thrilling, and beautiful to go; wind, waves, changing light, and the physical sensation of traveling across the water.

Most of us spend the majority of our day mindless about our physical experience. We work on screens, drive from place to place, answer messages, make decisions, and carry several conversations in our heads at once. Our thoughts are in the past or in the future. Even when our bodies are sitting still, our attention may be scattered across half a dozen other places. Yoga offers a simple way of gathering some of that attention back.

Being present does not require an empty mind or a perfect state of calm. In practice, yoga is really very ordinary. You notice that your mind has wandered to the grocery store so you return to your breath. You notice that you are holding onto something in your body somewhere and breathe in to soften. Gradually, attention becomes less fleeting and more embodied.

When we’re sailing, attention has somewhere very tangible to go. The boat shifts and our body moves to stay balanced. The wind moves across our skin adn we are completely present to temperature, velocity and direction. We adjust the shape of the sails to move with the ever-changing winds. The sun ducks behind a cloud and the air temperature changes.  We hear the water flowing against the hull, the clanging of rigging, and the rush of the wind. The shoreline begins to look different from the water, even when we’ve seen it hundreds of times from land.

This is one of the things I find most restorative about sailing. The environment itself keeps drawing us into the experience of living in that very moment. There is always something changing. Attention becomes less about concentration in the effortful sense and more about becoming immersed in the days and moment – full participation in the moments as they pass.

There is a useful parallel between breath in yoga and wind in sailing. In yoga, breath gives us information. It tells us something about effort, tension, pace, and how we are responding.

In sailing, the wind does something similar. A sailor pays attention to its direction and strength, then works with what is actually there. You cannot argue the wind into coming from somewhere else. You trim the sails, change course, or wait for conditions to shift. Yoga contains some of the same lesson. A body is different from one day to the next. Some movements are easy one day and anotehr day, not. The practice becomes less meaningful when it’s a contest with the body and more useful when it becomes an exercise in observation, adjustment, and response.

Both sailing and yoga also involve a relationship between effort and ease. That idea has relevance far beyond sailing or yoga. Much of modern life rewards effort almost automatically. We are encouraged to work harder, respond faster, optimize more, and push through resistance. There are circumstances where that is useful, but there are also situations where greater awareness produces a better result than greater force.

A sail that is pulled too tight does not always perform better. A yoga pose forced beyond the body’s useful range does not become more beneficial because it looks more impressive. Skill develops partly through learning how much effort a particular moment requires and when additional force becomes counterproductive.

Both a boat sailing with the wind and the body moving through yoga postures make that distinction clear.

When we spend time outdoors, we enter an environment that does not organize itself around a schedule or preferences. Wind changes. Fog comes in. The tide turns. Temperature shifts. We must adapt. The natural environment is not simply scenery; it is part of what moves the boat.

That changes our relationship with nature in a subtle way. We are moving through it and responding to it. Our senses become part of how we understand where we are and how to respond.

For people who spend much of their working lives indoors or on screens, that sensory experience can be surprisingly powerful. We are not used to our attention widening in normal work days. Instead of thinking almost entirely in words, we begin taking in temperature, sound, movement, space, balance, and distance. Looking toward a horizon has very different effects on us than staring at a phone or computer twenty inches from our face.

The progression we designed with our Yoga Flow Sailing Day is intentional. We begin on land with yoga, giving people time to move, breathe, settle into their bodies, and become more aware of their physical experience. From there we go onto the water, where that awareness naturally expands into the larger environment.

The two parts of the day are not meant to be separate activities placed next to each other simply because both are enjoyable. Yoga prepares us to notice more. Sailing gives us an unusually rich environment in which to notice.

There is also something liberating about experiencing mindfulness and presence this way. These words have become so common that they become meaningless and begin to sound like another thing to put on the to do list.

This experience is designed to naturally experience presence during the day with ease, as a natural flow we can simply enjoy.

That is what I think yoga and sailing can offer together. Yoga helps us become quieter and more attentive to ourselves. Sailing takes that attention into a world of wind, movement, water, and open space. Somewhere between the mat and the Bay, the mind begins to clear, and the senses come fully alive.

For me, that is reason enough to put the two together.

If you would like to experience it for yourself, join us for one of our Yoga Flow Sailing on San Francisco Bay.

We’ll start on the mat, head out onto the water, and let the wind and waves do what they do best: quiet the mind, wake up the senses, and give us a whole new perspective and a little more room to notice where we are. Maybe even more about who we are.

Deb Reynolds