Character Study: Banshidhar Medeiros, Soul Surfer, Dances With Waves

“There are a lot less distractions out there in the winter,” Mr. Medeiros said. “It becomes a form of meditation. You fix on one point, the horizon, and you start to feel at one with the rhythm of the ocean. When you’re in that state and you catch a wave, it becomes an effortless dance, a flow.”

Winter surfing brings out big waves and deters lightweights. It turns a surf session into something akin to an arctic expedition. But when he’s in the right state of consciousness — a state Mr. Medeiros has spent his life pursuing — the icy ocean can become a bubbling caldron of spiritual bliss.

“When it’s cold, it’s more fun,” said Mr. Medeiros, who began riding the waves as a child in Hawaii. Since his teenage years, he has followed the spiritual teachings of Sri Chinmoy, an Indian-born guru who in the 1960s established a meditation center in Queens with a devoted colony of followers. Mr. Medeiros keeps a small photograph of Mr. Chinmoy laminated onto the middle of his longboard — a Hawaiian-made nine-footer.

“It keeps me centered — he’s my guardian angel,” said Mr. Medeiros, who rents a room in a house with other disciples in the Briarwood section of Queens. Mr. Chinmoy died in 2007, but there are still several hundred disciples living here around his old house and following his spiritual path of prayer, meditation, vegetarianism, celibacy and extreme physical challenges.

Mr. Medeiros rises at 4:30 a.m. and practices meditation and yoga. Then he drives to Long Beach for a surf session, usually alone but sometimes with a few other disciples. He enjoys paddling out at daybreak, as the first streaks of dawn paint the sky. Then he heads to work, at a Queens factory making silk screen materials.

On Friday, he loaded his board into his minivan and headed south on the traffic-clogged Van Wyck Expressway. Tucked on his dashboard were two photographs of Mr. Chinmoy, and Mr. Medeiros drank from a special warming potion of juice infused with nut butters. He parked near the beach next to some frozen puddles and pulled on his thick wet suit with a hood, bootees and gloves. The air temperature was in the mid-30s; the water in the mid-40s.

As Mr. Chinmoy taught him, before entering the water Mr. Medeiros meditated on avoiding danger by “focusing on positive things and clearing the mind of all negativity,” he said. He also draws on some Hawaiian customs.

“Before I paddle out, I have a mantra,” he said. “I chant to the aumakua, a Hawaiian word for the gods that dwell in and protect a certain space. I pray to the soul of the ocean, asking for protection, and permission to enter their space.”

After an hour riding head-high waves, he headed back to his minivan and dumped a large Thermos of hot water over himself to warm up and rinse off.

At 14, Mr. Medeiros moved with his family from Maui to Puerto Rico, another prime surfing location. Within several years, the young surfer had joined a meditation center that Mr. Chinmoy opened in San Juan.

He recalled the first time he meditated with Mr. Chinmoy, in 1970: “It was like being pulled up by this tremendous force, rising like a rocket, with the earth getting smaller below.”

“There was just peace and absolute expansion,” he remembered. “I was just blissed out, and I knew then he was my master.”

Mr. Medeiros, whose given first name was Charles, was renamed by Mr. Chinmoy.

“Banshidhar means ‘He who plays the inner melody, and stirs the inner spirit,’ ” said Mr. Medeiros, who lived in various cities over the years and would see Mr. Chinmoy regularly on group trips and visits. As a member of Mr. Chinmoy’s marathon team, he ran ultramarathons for self-transcendence and to honor the guru. In 1985, at Mr. Chinmoy’s suggestion, he ran 3,000 miles from California to New York, a 108-day trip through desert heat and subzero temperatures.

By 2005 Mr. Medeiros was back in Maui, but again at Mr. Chinmoy’s prompting he abruptly quit his printer’s job there and moved to New York. He never wanted to bother with the East Coast’s sporadic surf, but Mr. Chinmoy realized that Mr. Medeiros was going through some gnarly surf withdrawal and urged him to hit the waves.

“So I bought a wet suit, and soon I was out there surfing in the snow, and it felt so exhilarating,” he said. “He knew it would help me spiritually.”

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