“ALL OUR WAVES ARE WATER: STUMBLING TOWARD ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE PERFECT RIDE”
By Jaimal Yogis
(HarperCollins, 272 pages)
You don’t have to be to a surfer to appreciate Jaimal Yogis’ description of looking for the light at the end of a curling tunnel of water as a metaphor for his quest for inner peace.
Yogis actually spends quite a bit of his journey with his feet on solid ground. But his poetic telling of what it’s like to careen through the belly of an aquatic beast is reason enough to read his new memoir, “All Our Waves Are Water: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment and the Perfect Ride.”
Yogis, a graduate of the University of Hawaii at Manoa who frequently returns to the islands, recounted his youthful adventures in Hawaii in “Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea,” his 2009 memoir.
“All Our Waves,” continues the author’s search for self-discovery. It is absorbing without too much self-absorbed angst.
Yogis says he was once among those for whom “surfing was a way of life, a religion.” But the lifestyle was “sold out” to corporations that transformed little coastal towns “into fairy tales of happiness that sucked in young surfers so they could sell them seventy dollar surf trunks.”
He trots off to different parts of the globe, his search for life’s answers “an attempt to never grow up. To keep seeing myself as a victim of the system.”
In his early 20s, he spends time mastering meditation at a monastery in the Himalayas. There, he befriends Sonam, a displaced Tibetan whose enviable ability to be happy comes easily to him. Yogis moves on to Indonesia, Mexico and a Franciscan friary in New York City, and undertakes a mind-blowing trip to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
He ends up at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, where he now lives with his wife and three young sons. Along the way, he earned degrees from Columbia University’s journalism and religion graduate programs, scrounged writing jobs and found and lost girlfriends.
One day, after living an idyllic three weeks on a tropical beach in Mexico with nothing to do except surf, meditate and eat tacos with a beautiful woman, Yogis realizes “I was looking for slightly better riches, (feeling) life should always get better and better, bigger and bigger, as if we were all capitalist economies of our own. As if death didn’t exist.”
The Buddhist word for this feeling is “dukka,” which means “suffering” or “stress.”
Yogis reflects on Buddha’s teaching, which “seemed to be saying that all the unpleasant features of life are the wily waves on the surface of the sea. And as anyone who has ever surfed knows, bumps can be jolting and painful. Or they can be the way things are — even fun.”
Continuing the surf theme, Yogis delves into the oneness of everything in the universe: “Our individual wave has also always been the same nature as the entire sea. All water.”
Dukka, he reflects, “challenges us not to see liberation (and) enlightenment as somewhere out there on the horizon (but) to see the muck we’re in right now — the stack of dishes, the political fires, the stress, the insecurity — as containing everything we need.”
Yogis concludes this segment of his journey expressing contentment with his domestic life as a husband and father, knowing “the ordinary me was good on its own if I didn’t resist. How many times did I have to learn this?”
Every day, he says, still.
Jaimal Yogis will sign copies of his books from 2 to 3 p.m. Saturday at Barnes & Noble Booksellers at Ala Moana Center; call 949-7307.
