Ocean Surfing and Children with Autism

I have always been interested in the possibility of nature, particularly the ocean, having healing effects on autistic children.  There has been extensive research on nature and ocean therapy on autistic children but it is difficult to quantify the specific instances were parents and doctors have reported increased cognitive and social skills as a result of spending time in nature or the ocean.  One pivotal account is from a psychologist, Dr. Matt Mendel, on his blog (2009).  His son suffers from autism and Dr. Mendel decided to take his son out to the ocean.  He says:

And then we were on the beach.  I asked him if he wanted to walk or to sit and he said he wanted to walk.  But once we’d gone over the last little drop-off and were near the water, he sat down.  I sat down next to him and he slid over close to me, snuggled up against me.  I put my arm around him and started asking him if he liked just looking out over the water and listening to the waves crash.  Then, I realized, “what in the world am I doing?” I’m trying to teach this perfect being to appreciate something that he already appreciates with a mindfulness, a fullness, a calm, a peace, a quiet, and a tranquility to which I can only aspire. So I stopped talking. And we sat there in silence for about 10 minutes, looking out over the ocean and listening to the waves crash. My son is rarely quiet, rarely not in motion.  But for this, to drink in the transcendent beauty of the ocean, both he and I sat in quiet wonderment. Finally, as if to signal that the time for sitting had come to an end, my son said “the waves crash,” stood up and said ”swimming water” (the pool) and started his walk back.

In many accounts, observers notice that autistic children seem to be at peace in or around the ocean.  Children who normally are hyperactive and have a hard time expressing themselves seem to respond to the stimuli in or around the ocean in a positive manner and often become more confident after tackling ocean sports, frequently engaging in other sports after gaining the courage to try new things.  Many also thrive in what they perceive as a safe environment, allowing them to explore things on their own and developing a sense of autonomy that often carries over into daily life outside of ocean play.  In this paper, I hope to provide a strong argument for the benefits of surfing on children with autism.

In order to illustrate how surfing may have beneficial healing properties, it is necessary to understand how autism is first diagnosed.  Christina Mann Layne (2007) wrote in the Journal of Counseling & Development the following on “early identification of autism”:

Autism is usually diagnosed around the age of two years and impairs language, social interaction, and play skills, as well as cognitive and adaptive functioning. Although the exact cause is unknown, research suggests that specific areas of the brain are affected by neurological abnormalities. It has been reported that 1 out of every 166 children will be diagnosed with autism (Talk About Curing Autism, n.d.). This does not included other autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), such as Asperger’s syndrome or pervasive developmental disordered not otherwise specified (PDDNOS).

This not to say that diagnosis in young children is without controversy. Many psychologists believe diagnosis of autism in a child 2 years of age may not be accurate. Such a young child may not have the developed skills that it takes to make an accurate conclusion of autism. Erin Mooney (2006) writes, “The levels of language and cognitive maturity necessary to identify whether particular symptoms of autism are present may be lacking in young children. Consequently, not all criteria may be able to be assessed in very young children [29,35]. Nevertheless, there is evidence that a stable and reliable diagnosis of autism can be made in children aged less than 3 years, although the expression of repetitive behavior is highly variable [31].”

Exposing a child to nature can reduce the effects of autism. For example, surfing in the ocean has softening effects on autism symptoms in children. One of the main questions asked by people is if surfing or the ocean is responsible for the healing in autistic children. To understand why surfing is healing to autistic kids, we need to look at its history starting at surfing’s indigenous roots. When we look at surfing’s birth in Hawaii, we begin to understand the spiritual healing properties that it held for the Hawaiians hundreds of years before it was discovered to hold healing powers for children with autism.  Western society believes that this is a new discovery but indigenous Hawaiians have held this knowledge for hundreds or even thousands of years before contact with Europeans.

It is important for Westerners to notice that many times what they call new discoveries are in fact old indigenous knowledge, especially when it comes to natural healing wisdom. Three visiting Hawaiian princes introduced surfing to the people of Santa Cruz in 1881. They also gave the knowledge of its healing powers and how surfing needed to be respected as a spiritual occurrence. Rob Pratt (2006) of the Metro Santa Cruz newspaper had this to say about the introduction of surfing into American culture: “Surfing first landed on the continent at Santa Cruz. A trio of visiting Hawaiian princes, apparently missing their home break and willing to brave the comparatively frigid waters, procured suitable redwood timbers and in 1881 surfed waves that formed at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, which reaches the Monterey Bay at the east end of what is now the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.”

The first Western documentations of surfing came from Captain James Cook’s journals. Ben Marcus says, “By the time Captain Cook and his ships reached the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, the art, sport and religion of surfing had reached a sophisticated peak.” Two pages of Cook’s journals contained descriptions of surfing. Lieutenant James King, who was ordered to continue the journals after the Hawaiians killed Cook, wrote two pages on surfing in 1779. Marcus quotes Lieutenant James King as writing:

But a diversion the most common is upon the Water, where there is a very great Sea, and surf breaking on the Shore [sic]. The men sometimes 20 or 30 go out to the swell of the surf and lay themselves flat upon an oval piece of plank about their size and breadth. They keep their legs close on top of it and their arms are used to guide the plank. They wait the time of the greatest swell that sets on shore and altogether push forward with their arms to keep on its top. It sends them in with a most astonishing velocity and the great art is to guide the plan so as always to keep it in a proper direction on the top of the swell as it alters its direct. If the Swell [sic] drives him close to the rocks before he is overtaken by its break, he is much praised.

The Hawaiians seemed to be as comfortable in water as they were on land. They treated surfing and swimming as natural as running. The difference between running and surfing was that surfing gave the Hawaiians inner bliss. According to Lieutenant James King, Marcus writes:

The greatest numbers are generally overtaken by the break of the swell, the force of which they avoid, diving and swimming under the water out of its impulse. By such like exercises, these men maybe said to be almost amphibious. The women could swim off to the ship and continue half a day in the water and afterwards return. The above diversion (surfing) is only intended as an amusement, not a trial of skill and in a gentle swell that sets on must I conceive be very pleasant, at least they seem to feel a great pleasure in the motion, which this exercise gives.

It would seem that, by Cook’s journals, we can see that surfing to the Hawaiians was part of the fabric of their society; spirituality, exercise, and legends. After Cook’s presence in the Hawaiian Islands, surfing and other indigenous practices faded from the Hawaiian lifestyle as European missionary practices replaced them. Marcus writes, “The end of the kapu system (indigenous system) also brought about the demise of the Makahiki festival, the annual celebration to the god Lono in which surfing played an integral role. But now that the Hawaiians had been set adrift from the old ways, Hawaiian culture fell into chaos.” Even though Christian Missionaries continued to discourage Hawaiians from kapu traditions, they were unable to stop surfing altogether.

The first surfers in North America who learned from the three Hawaiian princes in Santa Cruz practiced surfing as a spiritual tradition, just like the Hawaiians. This would change shortly after World War II, when American service men serving in the Pacific Ocean were exposed to surfing while stationed in Hawaii. By 1957, a novel came out called Gidget that would change the face of surfing forever. Gidget was about a white, middleclass American girl who lived the 1950s Malibu beach party lifestyle. Gidget was made into a series of low-budget of movies and eventually was the subject of a television show. The late 1950s also brought the musical surf group, The Beach Boys, who had a squeaky-clean appearance. This was the beginning of the commercialization and spiritual depletion of surfing – something that Beach Boy member, Brian Wilson, would later regret being a part of. By the mid-1960s, surfing was all about tan, blonde Hollywood-type surfers and surfing contests. This all began to change by the mid-1960s, shortly after Nat Young won the 1966 World Surfing Champion held in Southern California. Young is Australian and only Americans held the championship title up until he won.  This caused a verbal war between American and Australian surfers via magazines and television sportscasts. Even Young, full of ego, boasts of his victory against the Americans. By 1968, Young dropped from the face of the earth. Nobody from surfing magazines or television sportscasts could find him to interview. American surfers seeking to regain the title from him went looking for him in Australian contests but he was nowhere to be found.

Ultimately, in Eric & Lowell Blum’s film, Fantastic Plastic Machine (1969), they found Nat Young in seclusion; meditating, in self-realization, and using surfing as a spiritual religion like the indigenous Hawaiians who created it. Ethan Stewart (2005) writes that Young says the following about winning the 1966 World Surfing Championship, “‘I wish that when they asked us; ‘What is surfing?’ I would have said it’s a spiritual activity, and not just a sport, because that’s what put us on the wrong track.’”

Though Young and other surfers experiencing what is called the Shortboard Revolution were seeking the spiritual insights that surfing can bring, they did not look into Hawaiian surfing roots. Instead, they used Eastern philosophy made popular by the hippies at the time. This may be what led to this spiritual rebirth in surfing being short lived since it lasted only from 1968 to 1975. Young says in Fantastic Plastic Machine,  “Surfing is the finding of yourself through the medium of a surfboard. It is perfect form of self-expression. I glide and rip with no ambitions – totally free to express the mood I am in. I see how small I am in relations to the ocean. I’m sure it holds the answer I seek. If I can get closer to it, I can get closer to myself.”

Young’s words changed the way many in surfing looked at what they were doing. In the film Morning of the Earth (1972), many surfers in the early 1970s already realized that there was more to surfing than beach parties, winning surfing contests, and blonde coastal girls. The film was made with no human dialog other than the movie’s musical soundtrack. This was odd for a surf film since all movies before had a male narrator describing what you where seeing or a Hollywood plot. Morning of the Earth showed that surfing could provide healing if it was looked at in a spiritual framework instead of as a commercial sport.

Unfortunately, this era of surfing was short lived and disappeared for the most part as the late 1970s progressed. The visionary surfers of the early 1970s saw the beneficial healing quality that surfing in the ocean held similar to the indigenous Hawaiians who created it as a spiritual occurrence.  But, in the end, big companies that wanted to make huge financial gains dominated surfing and overshadowed people with any spiritual insight. G. Wayne Thomas who wrote all the songs that narrate Morning of the Earth sings in the beginning of movie,

Sometimes I get worried

Thinking about what each new day will bring

All the world is hassled, hurt or hurried

There’s never time to share the painful things

Never time to think on where you’re going

Or where you’ve been

You can tell them I’m going home.

When Thomas says, “going home”, he means back to nature, back to the ocean. He is telling us that life in the city is so confusing that we cannot mentally or emotionally sort through life’s pains and changes. This was written in the early 1970s, when life moved a great deal slower than it does now.  If people back then were already feeling the pressures of modern society, you can imagine how a child dealing with autism feels in the today’s world of consumer chaos. Forty years ago, going back to the sea allowed the surfers in the film to find inner peace and today it still allows autistic children the same.

Israel “Izzy” Paskowitz is the founder of SurfersHealing.org, the largest non-profit that works with autistic children. He discovered that his son, Isaiah, who suffers from severe autism, was calmed by riding the waves of the ocean on a body board. Soon, he took Isaiah out on his longboard, where he helped his son stand up and ride the surf. He noticed that his son would be much calmer at home after the surf sessions.

Israel’s father is Dorian Paskowitz, M.D., also known as the Surfer’s Doctor.  Paskowitz is the grandfather of surfing in Israel; he brought surfboards to Israel in 1951. In the summer of 2007, Dorian donated 12 surfboards to a small surfing community in Gaza. He personally delivered the boards by going through the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. He felt that this small act could help in healing the riff between Palestinians and Israelis (Drumm, Russell, 2007).

Russell Drumm reports, “‘Autism is a mysterious affliction,’ Joshua Paskowitz said on Saturday afternoon, a day without a cloud in the sky. ‘It’s like they hear at double speed a record that’s playing at normal speed. They experience overwhelming input. They are a part of another world, another speed. They absorb things differently. One kid on my board said look, a rainbow in the sky.’” When the kids are interacting with the ocean, they also begin to recognize the rest of nature that surrounds them such as a rainbow. What kind of connection is there between autism and children’s lack of contact with the natural world? In the book Last Child in the Woods author Richard Louv quotes North Carolina professor Robin Moore as giving this answer,

Children live through their senses. Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world. Since the natural environment is the principal sources of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life… This type of self-activated, autonomous interaction is what we call free play. Individual children test themselves by interacting with their environment, activating their potential and reconstructing human culture. The content of the environment is critical factor in this process. A rich, open environment will continuously present alternative choices for creative engagement. A rigid, bland environment will limit healthy growth and development of the individual or the group. (65)

Russell Drumm (2007) quotes Israel Paskowitz as saying the following, “‘They (autistic children) are on a different frequency. They see the sun differently, (and their) tastes are alien. The water captures every one of their senses, neutralizes [the static]. It’s not surfing…It’s the ocean.’” By looking at the Hawaiian roots of surfing, the statements of Nat Young and Robin Moore, it is clear that Israel Paskowitz is wrong in his statement “It’s not surfing… it’s the Ocean.” If it were just the ocean that gave the healing spirituality that surfers experience, then indigenous Hawaiians would have just stuck to swimming in the ocean which they already did remarkably well as documented by the first Europeans. Young says, “Surfing is the finding of yourself through medium of a surfboard.” The surfboard is the magical vesicle that connects you to what the spiritual healing properties that the ocean has to offer. Moore elaborates on this deeper when he says, “…the natural environment is the principal sources of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life.” Their space and time would be the surfboard vehicle, which is the link between the self and the natural environment (ocean). It is reconnecting to nature that seems to have healing effects on autistic children.

“A related psychopathological metaphor put forward by theologian-turned-geologian, Thomas Berry, is that the human species has become autistic in relationship to the natural world. He traces the origin of this autism to Descartes’s invention of the mechanistic worldview: ‘Descartes…killed the earth and all its living beings. For him the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world’” (Metzner, Ralph, Ph.D., 1999, p.88). Rene Descartes worked in the 17^th century and is the father of today’s Western math and philosophy system. He was also strongly against Locke’s empiricist school of thought. Empiricism was based in sensory perception learning—experiencing your environment. Paul Shepard author of Nature and Madness (1982) writes:

Mircea Eliade interprets the utopian dream and paradise imagery of Protestant America as autistic adolescent psychopathology. To borrow a phrase from process philosophy, the paradise ideal as the goal of social action and of political, religious, and ecological transformation, is ‘misplaced concreteness.’ The ancient worldwide shamanistic and access by an extraordinary spiritual act remained distinct. The medieval Christian spiritualizing of ‘desert’ and ‘wilderness’ and ‘paradise’ as states of mind would seem to preserve the distinction, but the Protestant reformists sought to end. The literalizing impulse of the sixteenth century was one of those broad shifts in cultural style that show us the shared underpinnings of modern science and Christian fundamentalism, both riveted to a juvenile insistence on positivistic, utilitarian thought. (90)

In Berry and Shepard’s view, all humans are autistic in some variation and have been for hundreds of years. It would seem that in Berry’s view as human relationship with machine has grown, so has the effects of autism. Autism seems to be a curse thrown upon humans for turning their back on nature. He appears to view autism as a resulting mental disorder that separates humans from nature. Then the surfboard must act as a sort of magic carpet that helps the autistic child travel back to the natural world of the mighty ocean.

Kristina Chew, PhD (2007) writes, “The ocean is no swimming pool, but a living creature, changeable, wild, and mightier than us all. Surfing on an ocean that is more vast and powerful than anything else on earth, shakes autistic kids out of their narrow vision of a mechanized human world. Once they connect to the power of the ocean they being to notice rainbows, like Israel observed. C.G. Jung says “our intellect has created a New World that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so              indubitably useful and so much needed that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or of our odious subservience to them” (Sabini, Meredith.2002, p.122).

Conclusion

Even though modern medical science seems to be stumped in finding a cause or cure for autism, everyday people are finding that by just exposing their autistic children to nature activities, such as surfing, a healing is taking place. Greater healing could take place if we began to relearn from the indigenous cultures what we in Western Society have lost. Indigenous cultures have the knowledge to live in harmony with the natural world, instead of trying to conquer it as we do in the West. Just by understanding how the Hawaiians used surfing spiritually and socially, autistic children could gain even deeper healings than they are experiencing now.  “We need to adopt a strategy so that the voices of indigenous people can lead the way to a moral relationship with the planet”(Mander, J. & Tauli-Corpuz, V. p.27).  We must begin to think less like individuals and more like a community.

Work Sited

Blum, Eric & Lowell. (1969). Fantastic Plastic Machine. USA. Unavailable. Used a bootleg DVD copy.

Chew, Kristina Ph.D. (2007). I Never Meant to Raise an Ocean Swimmer. Retrieved November 5, 2007 from http://www.autismvox.com/i-never-meant-to-raise-an-ocean-swimmer/.

Drumm. Russell. (2007). Taking Autistic Kids for a Surf in Montauk. The East Hampton Star. Retrieved October 3, 2007 from http://www.easthamptonstar.com/DNN/Default.aspx?tabid=3608

Elfick, David, &  Falzon, Albert. (1972). Morning of the Earth [Motion Picture]. Australia: Albert Falzon. Available from sales@morningoftheearth.net.

Layne, Christina Mann. (2007). Early Identification of Autism: Implications for Counselors. Journal of Counseling & Development, 85(winter). Retrieved November 29, 2007 from EBSCOhost database.

Louv, Richard. (2005). Last Child in the Woods. North Carolina, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Mander, J. & Tauli-Corpuz, V. (2006). Paradigm Wars: Indigenous People’s Resistance to Globalization. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books.

Marcus, Ben. From Polynesia, With Love: The History of Surfing from Captain Cook to the Present. Surfing For Life. Retrieved November 2, 2007 from http://www.surfingforlife.com/history.html.

Mendel, Matt, M.D. (2009).  How my son taught me to shut up and appreciate the ocean. Retrieved May 2, 2009, from http://www.drmendel.com/blog/.

Metzner, Ralph, Ph.D. (1999). Green Psychology. Vermont, Park Street Press.

Mooney, Erin L.; Gray, Kylie M.; Tonge, Bruce J. (2006). Early Features of Autism. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 15(1). Retrieved November 29, 2007 from EBSCOhost database.

Pratt, Rob. (2006). Surf City, No Matter What U Say. Santa Cruz Metro. June 21-28. Retrieved November 2, 2007 from http://www.metrosantacruz.com/metro-santa-cruz/06.21.06/surf-spots-0625.html.

Sabini, M. (2002). The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung. Berkeley, North Atlantic Books.

Shepard, Paul. (1982). Nature and Madness. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books.

Stewart, Ethan. (2005). Spicoli is dead: Glass Love a surf film by Andrew Kidman. Retrieved November 4, 2007 from http://www.nesurfari.com/blog/category/videorev/.

Paper written by Michael Haber