Mike Stewart has always adopted a 360-degree health vision for his life and professional bodyboarding career.
At 61, the Hawaiian is still competing at the highest level.
In December 2024, Stewart placed third at the Arica Cultura Bodyboard in Chile, proving that age is not necessarily a handicap.
The nine-time world champion bodyboarder has always incorporated meditation and yoga into his daily routine.
As the year 2024 opened the way to 2025, Mike Stewart traveled to El Silencio, a yoga retreat near San Carlos in Uruguay.
“It’s a very special place – extremely quiet, very calm setting here,” notes the Hawaiian wave rider.
“You go from a state of feeling relaxed once you get here to a state of just continual deeper and deeper relaxation and calm.”
At El Silencio, Mike met and interviewed the local yogi Krishna Darshan, a direct disciple of an Indian yoga guru, Swami Vishnu Devananda (1927-1993).
In the enlightening conversation, the duo discuss the transformative power of mindfulness, overcoming fear, and living a purposeful life.
The inspiring dialogue encourages surfers and listeners to explore yoga and meditation, emphasizing the value of small, consistent steps and a connection to one’s inner truth.
We at SurferToday organized the transcription into a readable format while maintaining every word spoken by both Mike and Darshan.
“We Don’t Need Anything to Be Happy”
Mike Stewart: Thank you for having me here. Maybe you could introduce to everyone who you are and where we are.
Krishna Darshan: My name is a spiritual name, Krishna Darshan, and I run here a small ashram retreat center in Uruguay. We are about 40 minutes from Punta del Este and 20 minutes from San Carlos. So, we have a retreat place where people come from all over the world to take more in-depth studies in yoga, meditation, spirituality, and healing.
We are in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by nature. It’s very silent, as you know. We try to create an ideal place for people who want to really go deep within, tune into themselves, clean their minds from all the noise of the city and the activities, and have a little break to really tune in.
That’s the environment here.
Mike Stewart: I can attest that that is exactly what’s here. It’s incredibly quiet and peaceful. It’s somewhat rustic, but it’s also just so grounding and very peaceful.
We talked about a couple of things. One of the topics we discussed was happiness. Everyone’s kind of looking for this idea of happiness. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Krishna Darshan: That’s definitely a big topic. Everybody wants to be happy, right? The thing is, where is that happiness we are looking for? Usually, you see, most people think that in order to be happy, we need to get something that we don’t have – either some material possessions, or some person, or living in some place. We always see something we need to do out there and think that if we succeed, it’s going to bring us happiness.
But first of all, sometimes you don’t succeed – there might be obstacles where you cannot fulfill your desire. And then, sometimes, even if you fulfill your desire, you are happy, but only for a short period. Then again, you feel like you’re missing something. Then you have a new desire; you want something else. And like that, we spend our whole life.
The ancient yogis and sages – not only from yoga but even from many other different religions and traditions of wisdom – explain that happiness is our real nature. Happiness is the natural state of the self. We don’t need anything in order to be happy.
But why are we not happy? If we are that happy, why are we not happy The big problem is our mind. The mind is so in the habit of going outward, projecting itself to external achievements, that it has completely lost the connection to the inner silence – to what we call the Atman, or the real self.
So, we have a kind of artificial sense of self. More, we can say, our ego says, “I am Mr. So-and-so. I am from this country; I am male or female, tall or short, strong or weak.” But those are not really the characteristics of what we really are.
The ancient yogis say: You are that happiness. You are that pure consciousness. What we need to do to experience it is just bring the mind into a state of quietness – stop all this craziness of the mind, shut up the mind a little bit, and just be in yourself.
It sounds easy, but it’s not so easy because the mind is in such a long-standing habit that even if you want to sit and meditate, the mind keeps going. So, we need to train this mind gradually, and yoga offers many tools for that.
Beginning from the more physical level, we train our body to be more relaxed, to reduce tensions, and to be able to stay quiet. By removing physical tensions, already the mind starts to feel better. Then, we have breathing exercises, which help to bring the mind into an even deeper calm. That really prepares you for a state of meditation.
There are many different tools – like mantras and chanting of mantras. Yoga has a variety of tools to offer that might be suitable for different personalities or different likes. We have more devotional practices, more philosophical practices, and more physical practices. They are all complementary to each other. What they do is they prepare the mind for the state of meditation.
When you go to meditate, the mind is already relaxed and calm. Then you can concentrate. When you are fully focused, you experience your true self. At that time, that’s when you feel, “Oh, I am complete now. I don’t need anything. I found what I wanted. I don’t need to go anywhere or get anything. I am just myself, and I feel full.”
That’s the search. Of course, it takes a lifetime journey, but we are getting more and more into it.
Mike Stewart: Just being here the few days that I have been, it’s been incredible. I can get into a way deeper state of meditation and a deeper state of consciousness so much faster.
I think this environment – being so quiet and peaceful – really adds to that. By the way, Krishna used to get into the ocean. In fact, he still does – he’s a bodysurfer and a bodyboarder.
Krishna Darshan: Well, mostly when I was very young. But I still love it.
Mike Stewart: When he was young, like, last week!
Krishna Darshan: I definitely love the ocean, yes.
The Essence of Yoga
Mike Stewart: What would you say to a young Krishna? What would you say to yourself when you were young? What advice would you give to someone?
Krishna Darshan: Well, I remember when I was a teenager. I had a lot of energy and a lot of desires to explore life, but I wasted a lot of my prana, a lot of my life force, in just doing very intense, worldly activities. And then, when I was about 20-21, I found my health was not good; my mind was disturbed because when I was a teenager, I used to, like most people, go out at night, drinking, smoking, and everything else. And this wears out all your life force. When you are young, you have so much, but you don’t realize that you are, you know, depleting it.
Then there’s a moment where you realize, okay, all these things that I did, okay, they brought me some experience, but not the self-realization. No. I learned from that environment but had enough of it. No. Now, something else is missing.
And then, you know, you realize that you wasted so much of your life force in all this experimenting with different areas of life. That then, you know, I, I would say, well, I should have been more careful with what I ate, with how I treated my body and my mind, and then it would be easier for me now. But you know, we learn by experience.
It’s like you tell a kid, “Don’t do this, don’t put your finger on the outlet,” and then the more you say, the more he wants to put the finger on the outlet, right? Until he doesn’t get the shock, he doesn’t know. So, you need to get the shock, and you awake. So, life is a little bit like that.
But of course, if you could hear the good advice… I remember I got good advice, but I didn’t hear them when I was very young. So, I had to crash myself many times until I started to hear the advice of wise people, experienced people. That’s when I started to progress.
Mike Stewart: There seems to be some confusion right now in this space – it’s almost like a fashion. There are big brands built around yoga. Help me understand your perspective on everything.
Krishna Darshan: Well, on one hand, we can say it is good that yoga has spread so much around the world. Everywhere in the world now, there are some people teaching yoga and people practicing yoga. Remember, when I started about 40 years ago, it was quite unknown. We used to teach yoga, and it was completely new, and there were very few who practiced it. In some countries, there was nothing there.
Now, it’s the opposite – yoga is mainstream. Everywhere, people know something about yoga. This is good, but the prize for that is that yoga got very diluted and slowly became transformed into something more commercial, and it lost a lot of its authenticity, its original practice.
For example, nowadays, yoga is seen mostly as a form of physical exercise. Most yoga studios just give you some stretching and some workout, which is nothing bad about it. Working out is good, and physical exercise is good. But yoga has a different purpose. The purpose of yoga is not a workout – it’s a work-in. It’s really to take you inwards, to your soul, to yourself, to your inner silence.
And for that, the practice is different. It’s more about finding the right balance between the effort and the relaxation. There is a lot of working with the breath, especially with the mind – how to concentrate during the exercises. There is a lot of spiritual and philosophical wisdom that goes together with it that we need to understand.
So, yoga is not just a physical form of exercise, but it’s more like a way of living. It’s more like a philosophy, like an aim, something that you really want to progress and develop in your life, which includes all areas of life. This includes your health, of course, your physical body, but also, even in your relationships, even in your work, how you work, and how you dedicate yourself.
For example, we were mostly educated to work to earn our money. So, we work just to see how much we can make. The more we make, the more good we feel about it in the beginning. But yoga teaches, for example, a different philosophy.
It says, “Take your work as a service to the world.” Whatever you do – whether you are not only a yoga teacher but an accountant, an office worker, a cleaner, a cook, or whatever it is, do your work with the sense of love that you are helping someone with your work. Even if you are an administrator, you’re contributing to the society.
And then enjoy your work as a form of service, like an offering. And then, then your work becomes yoga. We call it karma yoga. It’s yoga in action.
One very important topic is stress. There’s a lot of stress in modern life. People look for yoga. Yoga is definitely helpful for stretching, releasing tension, and breathing. It helps us a lot to overcome stress. But where does the stress really come from?
It comes from our anxiety about the results of our actions. We want things, and then we take action to accomplish and fulfill our desires. And if our desires are not fulfilled, we get very angry and very frustrated. And then, you know, the problem is – I want something, but you also want, she also wants it. Then we have to compete with each other, right?
Then you start cutting your ground, you start cutting my ground and competition. And then that’s the world of today, right? Everybody is struggling to get their piece of cake, right?
And, so, it’s really the source of stress. There is so much expectation for the fruit of our actions. That’s how the yoga is described. So, what the philosophy of yoga teaches you is “Don’t worry.” There is something called the law of karma that we strongly believe in.
It means when you do good things to others, good things come back to you sooner or later. Sometimes immediately, sometimes many years later – you never know.
But your actions and your thoughts are like a boomerang. Whenever you help somebody, whenever you give love to somebody, and then maybe you teach something, then the universe will bring it back to you and amplify it, actually. You give one, you get 10, something like that.
And so, the yogis say, “It’s not that I need to concentrate so much on what I’m going to get from this, but let’s concentrate on how much good I can give, how much I can help others, how much love I can spread.”
Then we know this is going to come back to us sometime. There’s nothing to worry about – we’re going to have our food, we’re going to have our shelter, we’re going to pay our bills because that’s the law of the universe.
So, it changes a person’s whole lifestyle. This is kind of being forgotten in modern yoga. That was a very important part of traditional yoga.
Also, in traditional yoga, all the practices, like the yoga asanas, the physical postures, the breathing exercises, and so on, were done as preparations for meditation. The real deep practice of yoga is meditation.
Nowadays, people believe there’s yoga and there’s meditation.
But meditation is yoga, see? And all the other tools of yoga are just to help you to meditate. Why? Because when you meditate, it means when you silence this turbulent mind, you experience your true self.
When there is no noise, you hear the silence. For example, we speak, we don’t hear the bird, but if we make silence – he’s speaking, you see.
But we don’t realize it. We need to be silent to realize that the bird is speaking. So, like that, our soul, our happiness, is there. There’s so much noise in our minds. But when we silence that noise, we experience what’s already there.
And this is what happens in meditation. We get to make a silence with the mind and experience the reality of our being.
So, all the other practices are just tools, or like steps, like a ladder. You cannot go straight to the roof – you need to go step by step. So, it’s very difficult to just enter deep meditation from nothing. You have to prepare yourself physically, energetically, emotionally, and so on.
And then, when you are ready, meditation comes. We say you cannot even teach meditation. It’s like trying to teach somebody how to sleep. Then somebody asks you, “How do you fall asleep?”
What can you say? You can say how to get the right sleep conditions. Go to a nice bed, get a nice cushion, turn off the light, and make a nice temperature. And then, you fall asleep.
But maybe you have all the conditions, and you still don’t fall asleep. So, with meditation, we create all the conditions, and when the conditions are right, then the mind is ready, and then we enter into that state that you were saying you were experiencing the days you are here.
That’s how all this practice suddenly brings you to these moments of deep silence where you can experience something new, something deeper. And this is really the goal of yoga.
And it’s missing a lot nowadays in modern yoga, which is mostly a form of physical exercise.
“The Surf Fills You With Prana“
Mike Stewart: So that was the original intention, for the quieting of the mind?
Krishna Darshan: Yes. The body, breathing, and mind are very interconnected and inter-affected. When our body is tense, our energy, our prana, is blocked. And if the prana is blocked, the mind is in a state of stress and tension.
So, when we release the tension from the body, then the prana, the life force, can flow. Then, when the life force flows, it energizes the mind and cleans the mind, and then you can concentrate and meditate. That’s the process.
You like surfing, for example, right? Why do we like the ocean so much? Because it’s full of prana – the waves get very charged with prana.
Mike Stewart: Explain prana to me.
Krishna Darshan: Prana is translated as life force. This is what brings life to everything. Everything that is alive, and everything that has some beauty, that has some power, has prana.
What’s the difference between an artificial flower and a natural flower? It might look the same, but one is plastic, and the other has prana.
See? Which one would you choose? Would you choose to surf in the ocean or in a swimming pool of chlorine and all that?
So, prana is more abundant where there is water motion. Whenever there are waves, rivers, and cascades, they get very charged with prana. There, in the mountains, in the hills, and also in nature, the trees and the plants also have a lot of prana. So, sometimes you just sit under a tree, like we are now, you just relax for some time, and you get some life back.
Suppose you go to the ocean, but you don’t relax. Suppose you’re angry because you didn’t win the competition, or you didn’t catch the right wave, or whatever reason. Then you cannot really take that prana because you need to be relaxed in order for this prana to flow to you and through you.
So, when you are in the water, relax and let it happen, then it just fills you with prana. That’s why people like it. That’s why you feel attracted to the ocean.
The topic of the ego – what happens with the ego? The ego makes us believe that we are a separate individual. This is me, and this is the res – you are different than me, nature is different than me, the sun is different than me.
But, in fact, we are all one. We’re all connected. There is one cosmic being – you can call it – that we are all part of. It’s like we are the different cells of the different body. There’s just one organism, one body.
So, everything is connected. But it’s the ego that disconnects us – we isolate ourselves, and we want to take things for ourselves: “I want my will to be done. I want the best part.”
But when we understand that we are one, allow it to happen, you surrender; it’s not that you need to be taking all the time. Things come to you and go from you to the rest of the universe, and the prana flows.
The wealth of life is just flowing. So, when we put our ego aside, then everything flows naturally.
But the ego is really a big obstacle. Of course, we need a certain amount of ego to function in this world, like a personality. It doesn’t mean that you need to have a weak personality or something like that, no. You need to have a personality to function as a healthy individual.
But you have to be conscious that we are one, and you don’t identify with this personality, with this individuality. And the more you meditate on that, the more the bliss flows because the ego is a big obstacle between us and the bliss.
And then, the other part of your question. In life, there are always some problems. Nobody can avoid some problems. Things are never perfect all the time. It might be perfect for a little time, and then something happens.
First of all, we are all aging. And then, we start to feel the changes.
This is natural. And then there are people around us that have problems – maybe your family, relationships, children. And this, of course, creates some amount of stress in our life.
And sometimes, all kinds of obstacles kind of happen. But we cannot avoid it completely. We need to be like surfers. Because what does the surfer do? There are waves in the ocean, currents, but he goes on his board on the waves.
So, if the wave goes up, he goes up. The wave goes down, he goes down. He’s not resisting or fighting against the wave. He’s dealing with the wave and flowing with it, right?
So, we need to be surfers in all aspects of our life – not just in the waves, but in those waves of life. Like the ups and downs of life and the different currents of life. Problems happen. Things come all of a sudden without us expecting it.
We need to be like the surfer. Understand it, do the best you can, but don’t let yourself get drowned in that wave. You don’t want the wave to get you drowned. You want to remain on the surface and flow with it.
Like that – there is life. We need to surf life.
Mike Stewart: That’s awesome. How good is that? It’s a good example for surfers. That’s interesting. That’s Tom Morey‘s motto as well. You live in a very basic, but very rich, in a lot of ways, environment. You grow all your your own food here. How does that process work for you?
Krishna Darshan: It’s not always easy because it’s a lot of work. It requires a lot of work. We work a lot. But it was a choice at a certain point in life where I said, “I don’t feel satisfied in the world of business, and city, and running.” I was already teaching yoga, and I wanted to go and live in nature and dedicate myself to that and live in nature.
But a lot of work was required – building this place and planting all the trees took many years of hard work. But it is also very rewarding because, first of all, when I wake up, I feel I’m in the middle of nature. I feel like I’m so blessed, you know?
Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com