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UNCODE.initRow(document.getElementById("script-180342"));"... my whole neurological being, body, mind, and spirit, is enhanced when I get in the water. And when I come out my perception, my storytelling about any particular "problem" is, it's just redefined.
I don't sweat the small stuff."
~Elsa Rivera
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Show Notes
GI Josie Website
Britannica Entry About Yemonja
Blue Mind Book
Outside Magazine Article about Blue Mind and J Wallace Nichols “How Water Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Successful”
Trailer for Documentary about Women Veterans Suffering from Military Sexual Trauma
Article About Military Sexual Trauma
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UNCODE.initRow(document.getElementById("script-158556"));Interview Transcript
Intro
Maia: My name is Maia Dery. This episode impart of a series called the Waves to Wisdom Interviews. The project is a simple one. I seek out people I admire, surfers with what look to me to be ocean centered wisdom practices. I ask them if they’d be willing to share a surf session or two and then, after we’ve ridden some waves together, talk to me about their oceanic habits: about surfing, work, meaning, anything that comes up.
Elsa: Seeing these grown women who can connect with that joy inside themselves even with, when they’re on land, even on the dry sand telling, sharing stories about why that it’s possibly not for them, or it’s too fearful because they have circumstances at home that has have oppressed them, suppressed their joy somehow. They have access to that by getting in.
Maia: Elsa Rivera is a devoted surfer, committed community servant, immigrant, and successful business manager. Our conversation took place overlooking the Pacific on California’s incomparable Central Coast. We’d ridden the chilly waves of a spectacular stretch of shore where graceful arms of kelp and barking, splashing marine mammals can make you feel, for a moment, like you’re a part of a vast ecosystem, a thriving planet abundant with life.
Elsa’s clarity of priority and purpose, and the role her relationship with the ocean plays in that clarity, add delicious nuance to this ongoing story of the power and plain utility of cultivating and stewarding a relationship to the ocean. Welcome to Waves to Wisdom.
Maia: If you are comfortable with it would you tell us your name and age and where you live?
Elsa: Elsa Rivera, I’m 55 years old and I live in Monterey California
Maia: Excellent and did you grow up in Monterey?
Elsa: I’m originally from Columbia. I grew up in Columbia until I was nine and then till 1981 I grew up in Santa Monica.
Maia: This morning we surfed together for the first time
Elsa: We sure did
Maia: We did. We surfed at Asilomar. It’s a place that I have watched people surf before and it’s always been remarkably intimidating to me it seems, well it is very rocky and it also seems prone to wind, and changes… conditions change out there rapidly but it was fun we had a great morning!
Elsa: Definitely! Ah, it’s gorgeous, gorgeous out there.
Maia: And I took off on some waves that scared the heck out of me and that was good.
Elsa: Looked graceful doing it.