Sound in body and spirit

Dorian Paskowitz says that riding the waves has given him spiritual and physical health.

[Photo courtesy of Oceanman Hawaii]

Dorian Paskowitz believes that taking care of one’s spirit is as important as diet and exercise. “So when you ride a wave, you are tapping into something . . . that is cosmic,” he says.

[Photo courtesy of Israel Paskowitz]

Paskowitz, shown here at 40something, said surfing isn’t the only activity that has kept him “buff.” In his prime, he could stand on his hands and drop down to touch his nose to the ground 15 times.

"There is a wisdom in the wave . . ."

- Dr. Dorian Paskowitz

Dorian Paskowitz is 82 years old and surfs every day.

"Good waves, good food and good lovin'," keep him young, he said.

In the close-knit surfing community, Paskowitz is something of a legend, not just for his board-riding prowess and his board-riding children, but his board-hard abdominal muscles.

He claims there is no secret to good health.

"If I were going to address a group of young people on the subject, I would tell them that you just can't beat good nutrition," he said. "You can't think that because the body will take anything, you can give it anything. A proper diet, day by day, for the rest of your life, has to be coupled with enough exercise to burn off the excess.

"Diet and exercise should give you a body fat percentage of 14 or 15 percent. You can't be a tugboat and think that you are going to sail the seven seas gracefully and safely."

Paskowitz has a body fat percentage of 13. He said that he achieved it by clean living and positive thinking. His new book, Surfing and Health, is more like a novel than a health guide.

Born in Galveston Island, Texas, on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, Paskowitz learned to surf when he was 10.

"By the time I was 12, I was passionately in love with surfing, so I told my parents, please, please, please, let's move to California," he said.

It was the Great Depression, and the Paskowitzes were struggling when they decided that if they were going to be poor in Texas, they might as well be poor in California.

"So we packed up and moved to Mission Beach, where I finally had a chance to surf some bigger waves," Paskowitz said. "At the time, there were not many surfers there."

Paskowitz found a wooden surfboard, circa 1915, that weighed more than he did, dragged it to the beach and started catching waves.

"Pretty soon people started coming up to me and saying, "Hey, can I try that,"' he said.

In the years that followed, Paskowitz helped put the San Diego area on the world surfing map. After high school, he enrolled at San Diego State, but his dream had always been to get to Hawaii, the island chain where his beloved sport originated.

"I transferred to the University of Hawaii, where I met another fellow like me who was struggling to get enough fried shrimp to keep body and soul alive," Paskowitz said. "He went to Stanford. I had never heard of the school, coming from a poor family, but he said I should go there because Stanford was a rich school and they had lots of jobs for poor kids."

Paskowitz enrolled at Stanford, where he tutored to make ends meet, and received an undergraduate degree in biology.

"I remember sitting in the Cellar, a place where everybody hung out to have doughnuts and coffee, tutoring two All-Americans so they could play in (college football's) Rose Bowl, when a voice came over the radio and said that Pearl Harbor had been bombed," Paskowitz recalled.

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps., but before he could report for duty, he learned that he had been accepted to Stanford's medical school.

"So I joined the Navy and worked in the hospital and then aboard a ship," he said. "I spent some time aboard the USS Ajax and went out to the atomic bomb experiments in the Pacific."

Paskowitz continued his medical studies while in the Navy and received his degree from Stanford in 1946. When he got out in 1948, he and his wife, Juliette, started the family of which he is very proud.

"We had a bunch of kids, eight boys and one girl, and spent most of the time in Hawaii," he said. "My wife's family was from Southern California, so from time to time we would go back there and visit. But most of the time we spent in the islands."

Through all those years of working and raising a family, Paskowitz maintained his Olympic level of fitness through water sports - on good days, surfing a lot, and on poor days, not so much. "Outside of playing a little football at San Diego State, surfing has always been my one and only sport," he said. "But you have to remember that in my day, surfing was much more than just surfing."

The surfers of the '30s, '40s and '50s in Hawaii and California prided themselves on being all-around watermen.

"The first thing was, you had to be a good body surfer, and you also had to be able to row a Nova Scotia surf dory out through the breakers," Paskowitz said. "Then you had to not only race paddle boards but be able to play water polo one on one. You also had to be a good skin diver and, of course, surf.

"I wasn't a great waterman. But I was a good one."

There was also another activity that Paskowitz said kept him "buff."

"I used to love to stand around on my hands," he said. "I would walk all over the place, stand on the edge of a 15-story building. . . . I used to love that. I even got an offer to join the circus."

In his prime, Paskowitz could stand on his hands and drop down to touch his nose to the ground 15 times. That skill came in handy, especially on the beach, where weightlifters congregated before there were fitness clubs.

"I remember seeing some big-city champion working out, and I went over and lifted the weight three times over my head as if it were nothing," Paskowitz said. "I was strong because I was always working out with my own body weight."

Surfing and its related pursuits did more than give Paskowitz an Adonislike physique. Riding waves also worked wonders for his mind and spirit.

"I don't have the vocabulary, nor am I that literary gifted, to even try to express in words the emotional or spiritual benefit of surfing," Paskowitz said. "I think there is something primordial about it. All the great forces in the universe - heat, light, electro-magnetism - they all impinge upon the water to make waves.

"So when you ride a wave, you are tapping into something much bigger, something that is cosmic. It is like skiing down a mountain. Gravity takes hold, and the skier becomes part of that cosmic force. In surfing, the mountains move themselves."

Surfers often talk of the spiritual benefits of their sport. Bonding with nature in a pristine environment does wonders for the mind, Paskowitz said.

"I consider myself a religious man, but I have nothing to do with religion," said Paskowitz, who is Jewish. "I don't go to a synagogue, but I pray every day, several times a day, in fact. I put on the tfillin, the phylacteries of the ancient Orthodox Jews, but I have no truck with that stuff."

Paskowitz said that through the sea, surfing and his relationship with the people of Hawaii, he forged his spiritual beliefs.

"I talk to God personally," he said. "I don't want to sound like a kook, but I get out on my surf board and sit alone atop the deep blue sea and look around and just give thanks for being part of God's great world."

Paskowitz believes that taking care of one's spirit is every bit as important as diet and exercise in relation to overall health.

"When I say my prayers in the morning, I stretch out my arms, like a person gathering in wheat, I grab all the sunshine and fresh air," he said. "I try to fill myself with good things. Everything I do is an effort to align myself with the great vitality of life."

Death is merely the absence of life, Paskowitz said.

"I think as long as a person keeps living, they stop dying," he said. "And I think that when a person stops living, they start dying."

Paskowitz said that he feels at home praying with Catholics or kneeling with Muslims.

"The God that I have found is in all those churches," he said. "I have no sense of fraternity when it comes to God."

Writers and poets have tried to define love for thousands of years without much luck, so Paskowitz said he wouldn't bother, either.

"But the feeling that I get when I am out on the water, that feeling of being part of something much bigger than myself, is the same feeling that I get when I look at all my children and grandchildren," he said.

Paskowitz has been married 44 years. He said that he draws much of his strength from his relationship with his wife, children and 15 grandchildren.

"My son summed it all up once," Paskowitz said. "Eat clean, live clean, surf clean."'

A family practitioner for more than half his life, Paskowitz also specializes in sports medicine. He has a keen interest in asthma and wrote a book titled The Air Beneath Your Nose.

"I am a very bad asthmatic, and my whole life has been spent trying to prevent asthma attacks," he said. "The book has nothing to do with treating attacks but everything about keeping them from happening."

Paskowitz applied that philosophy to his recent book, Surfing and Health.

"Health is more than just not being sick. In fact, it is more than just preventing disease," he said. "All healthy men are fit, but not all fit men are healthy."

Paskowitz sees his book as a blueprint for this new discipline of medicine that he calls health.

"Diet, exercise, rest, recreation and attitude of mind, all working together, can make the human body superior in form and as a result, better enable it to fight disease naturally," Paskowitz said. "Your immune system can be in top form and so will the mental and spiritual aspects of your life."

Paskowitz has never been a fan of dietary extremes. He said he is not a vegetarian and instead eats a variety of wholesome, whole foods.

"Kooky diets are very dangerous," he said. "Man is a hunter-gatherer. That is how I live my life."

Paskowitz has spent the past 35 years as a "missionary doctor" and charged few people for his services.

"I always felt bad taking money from sick people," he said.

His work has taken him from the South Pacific to the Middle East.

"I was there during Operation Desert Storm and saw Scuds flying over," he said. "We took our gas masks, hung them on a tree and went surfing while those bombs were dropping."

Paskowitz said that he and his family have had few material possessions. His kids were homeschooled, and the family often traveled throughout the United States in a motor home. He would work from time to time where other doctors didn't want to go: Indian reservations, migrant camps and the emergency rooms of inner-city hospitals.

"I always felt that we had enough," he said. "We had our surf boards and the fish in the sea. But even better, we had each other."

To obtain a personalized copy of Dr. Dorian Paskowitz's Surfing and Health, send $55 (which includes shipping and handling) to Box 8082, Honolulu, HI 96830; call 808-926-0285; or e-mail: paskowitz11@aol.com

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright