I still remember the look in the eyes of two of my Australian surfer friends in 2015 during a walk along the Mediterranean coast, their gaze fixed on the waves that the wind, blowing harder that day, lifted and slowly carried towards the coast. In meditative silence, they contemplated the sea and seemed to be surfing in their minds, at one with the waves and with a mystery towards which they guided me by their simple presence.

This scene gave me the intuition that surfing was one of those places where a new bond with nature was manifesting itself. This intuition has since been widely validated, including by researcher Bron Taylor, professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida. He has highlighted in his work that many surfers, whom he calls "soul surfers," understand nature, particularly the ocean, as "powerful, transformative, healing, and even sacred."

"Surfing is a spiritual practice," said Stéphane Bayle, a surfer I recently met not far from the town of Hossegor in southwestern France, renowned for its surf spots. For this Air France pilot and a Zen-inspired practitioner of still, silent meditation, this sport is an opportunity to practice "meditation in motion."

But is surfing really even a sport? Over 20 years ago, Californian surfer Jay Moriarity noted its unclassifiable and multifaceted nature in the book The Ultimate Guide to Surfing: "Surfing fits into all categories. It’s an ART by the way you express yourself on a wave. It’s a SPORT because you compete with it, and it's SPIRITUAL because it’s just you and Mother Nature." This spirituality may not be connected to a personal, transcendent God, but is felt as a communion with nature. Surfing is therefore closer to the immense, evolving galaxy of new spiritualities.

This surfing spirituality is also a unique emanation of a groundswell that Taylor – author of Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion – calls "dark green religion." He defines this as a set of beliefs and practices characterized by a central conviction that nature is sacred and that its members (humans, animals, but also plants and minerals, even cosmic laws) are interconnected and interdependent – with the occasional dark side coming from followers of this vision when they fall into violence or misanthropy.

Born in Polynesia and originally rooted in cultural and religious practices, surfing is also a way for some to reconnect with ancestral and indigenous cultures, and even with ancestral spirits – other recurring themes in today's new spiritual sensibilities.

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