At Play in the Ocean of Mind: On the practice of “Rowga”

With our new July 2013 magazine – all about your body, from pleasure and pain to performance and path – available now, we share Jim T. Lindsey’s unique take on a simple practice that helps the body and mind work together.

Rowga is a portmanteau word that combines the words rowing and yoga. The practice of rowga is likewise a blend of these two, with an emphasis on meditation.

The seed of rowga was planted in 1991, in an old van headed north on Highway 1 to a meditation center in northern California. Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso (The Scholar Who Is an Ocean of Discipline) was our precious cargo. From Kham in Tibet, he had been teaching us in Berkeley and we were escorting him to his next congregation in Sonoma county. We were much taken with his talks about Milarepa, the great twelfth-century Tibetan meditation master who spontaneously composed thousands of songs about enlightenment. We asked him to make up a song just for us.

This is the translation of what he sang, looking out the window at the sparkling Pacific stretching away to our left:

Mind is like the ocean in its vast expanse.
Thoughts are like waves that arise from the ocean
and into the ocean subside.

I was a member of the community of meditation practitioners known as Shambhala. Though I became a student of the Khenpo, I continued my practice along lines set out by Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of Shambhala. Concurrently, because I moved to Nova Scotia along with many other Trungpa students, I did a good bit of sailing in an old wooden yawl up and down the north Atlantic coast. I came to know my new home better from the water than the land.

It took an accident, though, to bring the seed of Khenpo’s oceanic song to fruition. I had been on a month-long retreat when I fell while taking my supper to the table. The dish in my hand shattered and severed a nerve in my hand. Healing, according to the western medical tradition, involved a lot of rest and pain-killing drugs. None of which worked. The hand stayed swollen and inflamed and I stayed woozy and discouraged. A Buddhist doctor from Taiwan, trained in traditional Chinese medicine, gave me different advice. He said throw out the drugs, make friends with the pain, and exercise as much as possible. I thought I might as well give it a try.

I began to row for the exercise, at first wearing a padded glove on my injured hand. I didn’t have time in a day to run my book store, meditate, exercise, and have room for the rest of my life, so gradually my meditation cushion was replaced by a little plastic dinghy I had found adrift after a storm, and my meditation sessions became my daily jaunts around the rocky harbour of my seaside village, Prospect, with frequent forays into the open ocean.

My hand healed in a matter of weeks. To placate my neighours, who feared for my life every time I went out on the waves in a boat no longer than I was tall, I had Thomas Woods of Wallace, Nova Scotia, a young traditional boat builder, make me a proper rowing dory. That was six years ago. I have been rowing season in and season out and developing rowga ever since.

How does rowing qualify as yoga? You might think it only builds up the arm muscles. If that were so, you could make a case for weight lifting as yoga. But in fact ocean rowing involves the entire body. A proper stroke works the back and the legs. The continuous pulling is a boon for the heart and the lungs.

The fresh salt air invigorates and cleanses. Most of all, waves move a boat in all directions, back and forth, side to side, up and down. While you are rowing you are also constantly keeping your balance, and that requires continuous subtle adjustments of a multitude of muscles. Rowing tones the whole human machine.

At the same time, you don’t have to think about rowing. You just do it. Plying the oars is like breathing. In a sense, though you are doing it, you are not busy doing it. So you are free to meditate.

Traditional sitting meditation uses the breath as a way of keeping the meditator in the here and now. Rowga uses each stroke of the oars. Reaching forward is like breathing in. Pulling back is like breathing out. As you propel your vessel forward, you let whatever is on your mind fall behind in the wake. You do this over and over, hundreds of times every session, thousands of times every season, millions of times in a lifetime. Eventually you connect with a freedom beyond thoughts. Though you are involved in effort, the effort falls away. Though thoughts arise, mere awareness holds sway. A natural sanity prevails.

What rowga has to recommend it, as a meditation practice among so many other meditation practices, is its effectiveness as a skillful means. The view is not different from that of the Buddha. We have these bodies that on the one hand are no more than motel rooms that we visit and leave. On the other hand, they can be a temple, a sacred place in which to overcome suffering. If the temple becomes a slum, the chances of that are not so good. We tend to forget what we are doing, get hypnotized by all the garbage, and just want to watch TV instead. Nowadays many of us sit still all day at work. If we are meditators, we go and we sit still again when we meditate. And find we are sluggish, and that our legs hurt and are numb when we try to get up. The temple goes downhill. In rowga, though you also sit, you exercise as you meditate. The body becomes flexible and energetic and the mind sharp and focused. Clean and polished and glowing, the temple lets the meditation flow.

Further, rowing on the ocean is like meditating right in the middle of big mind, vast and expansive, the opposite of small mind that is more like a puddle being splashed by car tires all the time. The view to the distant horizon is uninterrupted. The silken rustling of the hull’s progress and the plash of the oars is pure sound, the rhythm of the waves the heartbeat of the universe. The shrine is open sky. You are not distracted by where you are going because you face backward, so the farther you go, the more open ocean you confront.

There is much to be said about rowga – I have written a book – but there is really only one thing to do, and that is to row and let go. The basic well-being that has always been ours arises on its own. It is a simple practice. It is new in itself, and yet it combines the two very venerable traditions of meditation and rowing, which are thousands of years old.

I might also say about rowga that it is fun, a discipline of delight. Dancing with waves is no labor of love. It is just love itself. The prospect of doing it over and over is a joyful one. Children rarely experience resistance to going to play in a playground. Meditation can become something that you always look forward to, a time to be simply at play in the ocean of mind.