Episode 6: The 360 View with Erich Schiefelbine

In this episode with Erich Schiefelbine, we talk about handling high stress with surfing and yoga, how being a missionary in Ecuador inspired him to fight for social justice and become a lawyer, why he teaches yoga in Spanish, and his secret to finding peace. Erich will expand your horizons, sit back and enjoy!

Episode Highlights:

• Handling high stress through yoga and surf
• Surfing, the ocean based version of yoga
• Peace is found through self care
• From missionary to activist
• Yoga en español
• Being in the water is the activity
• From punk skateboarder to lawyer to surfer

[00:00]  How to handle high stress
[05:21] A mission in Ecuador
[10:35]  From Missionary to Activist
[15:54] Becoming a Lawyer
[16:57] Yoga en Español 
[22:34] Being in the water is the activity 
[29:45]  From punk skateboarder to lawyer to surfer

Quotes from Erich:

"Being present, in my humble experience, is where peace is found, that self care is found. If you can stay present with what you're doing, you're going to minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week experience one of the greatest human virtues you can find."

"I couldn't imagine prior to that time in my life that Texaco, a US company, would come down, find these oil reserves, pull it up to the surface and refine it, next to a community, into their main water supply and leave the by-product and the refinement water in these pits, or next to the river, or where these people get their water from until you actually see it."

"The journey from not being able to touch your toes, to touching your toes, there in lies the richness, the fulfillment, that unbound consciousness, that's the experience."

Get in touch with Erich

• Instagram @erichyoga 

More about Christine Foerster

• christinefoerster.com
• Instagram @christinefoerster 

Chapters

• 0:00 How to handle high stress
• 5:21 A mission in Equador
• 10:35 From Missionary to Activist
• 15:54 Becoming a Lawyer
• 16:57 Yoga en Español
• 22:34 Being in the water is the activity
• 29:45 From punk skateboarder to lawyer to surfer

Transcript

Christine: Hi Erich. 

Erich: Good morning. 

Christine: Good morning. Thanks so much for joining me today. 

Erich: My pleasure. 

Christine: So you are a lawyer and you said that surfing and yoga help you to see the stress of what actually being a lawyer is, which is dealing with other people's problems. And you are paid in a sense to handle other people's stress, but then you in turn handle it through surfing and yoga. Could you elaborate on that a little? 

Erich: Yeah, by nature, when legal problems arise, whether individually or with a company or what not, it's a stressful event. I've handled hundreds of lawsuits, and I never would want to be part of one. As you said, lawyers are essentially people who are paid to manage that problem, to absorb the stress and find a solution that's best for their client's needs and, you know, objectives. Any lawyer needs to come to terms with that and then learn, if they're going to, if they're enjoying lawyering, practicing long term. You need to figure out a healthy solution. Right next to dentists and air traffic controllers. I think lawyers are right up there on the top of the list of the most stressful professions out there, among others, soldiers, things like that. And like you said, surfing and yoga are just, those are two of them.

Christine: What is the difference then, say, not letting the stress get to you when you surf versus when you go to yoga practice? Do you feel that? 

Erich: They're different. Yeah. And I realize I'm giving a long winded answer. The coffee's kicking in. It's a beautiful morning. There comes a point, I think each day it's important as in any trade or service or profession or vocation, whatever you're doing to set that. And say, okay, now is the time of day, or I have time for me and attending to myself and, shorthand self care. So part of that is a recognition that, look, this is what I do to help other people and service their issues and what they've gotten themselves into. It's very stressful, but there's a practice to set those aside each day. Focus on myself, just like yoga. I feel like surfing the ocean is the water based version of yoga and vice versa. Yoga is the land based version of surfing. It's just, you’re present. You're not, I'm not anywhere, other than, there's something about the activity or the environment of surfing that helps put you present, just like yoga. There's something about the activity that puts you into the present moment and it's easier to stay there, or air quotes, easier, right?

Erich: It’s something about that activity that where being present, in my humble experience, is where that peace is found, that self care is found. If you can stay present with what you're doing, you're going to minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week experience one of. I think one of the greatest human virtues you can find that is peace. It's so elusive, so it seems so easy to say, but I think so few of us all can access truly what that is. Unbound consciousness. And there's something about those two activities that focuses the mind, puts you at peace, puts you present.

Christine: Wonderful. Yeah. So simple the way you say. It takes us a long time sometimes to arrive to that conclusion, doesn't it? You wonder if children growing up now, because it is so much a part of our kind of everyday culture, if kids will grow up learning and exploring more about mindfulness and they will become more into the presence or the present moment a little sooner than we did because I know for me it was something that was so far removed from most of my childhood. Even my early adult years, right? I mean, it's as basic as how do you cook dinner and how do you handle a budget. Right. These things that we hope, these basic skills.

Erich: It's a pragmatic, I think there's so many things in just basic education that are not pragmatic day to day living like, and that's one of them.

Christine: Well, you lived in Ecuador and I think a few other areas in Latin America for about two years, which inspired you to study. So would you talk about how living in an entirely new culture changed the course of your life? 

Erich: Well, to explain that, you gotta understand where I grew up, and that's in North Orange County like Fullerton, Anaheim, LaHabra, area up there. It's kind of where East LA meets North Orange County, it's Southern California. You grow up sheltered from the rest of the world. Education is very American and there's not a lot of emphasis, in your early education on what your country and what they've done or doing in the rest of the world, what the rest of the world is like. So if you want those experiences or information, you have to have some sort of exposure to that, I guess. And I just didn’t. I grew up skateboarding in a very, it was like a suburban environment, late eighties, early nineties. It was just punk skating. It was awesome. That was the environment, which I love. I was committed, raised in a LDS Mormon environment home. That's my heritage, my tribe at that time. So I was excited in a way to be able to leave Orange County. And go somewhere far away. It was exciting to me. I wanted to go learn and see and live, and I wanted to learn another language. And living in Southern California, I hoped, I crossed my fingers it would be Spanish because I grew up around, you know, gangs and cholos and it was awesome. And a lot of my friends were Mexican, spoke Spanish, and so I kind of crossed my fingers and, and I thought if they tell me, you volunteer. Hey, I'll go anywhere you send me,  I'm ready to go, and I'm 19.

Erich: But in the back of my mind, I'm like, if they tell me to go to Ohio or Nebraska, I might just tell my parents I'm not gonna go or something. There were places I wanted to go, but I had no control over it. And for me, in hindsight, as I look back, I kind of hit the lottery in a way. As I look back, it was great. They assigned me to go to Ecuador. I got there and no one spoke English. My Spanish was limited to bad words that you learn on the playground, right? and simple food things. Simple Mexican food orders. And as it turns out where I went, they don't have any Mexican food, so, I had to learn very quickly how to speak cuz no one spoke English in the city or rural parts of that country. And it's a very high Indian population coming from that environment of where I grew up. And then you're dropped in the middle of basically what's like an Indiana Jones environment, when you're 19 years old is exciting. It's eye opening. I took to their customs, everything abou what Ecuadorians were doing and what their history was. I tried to learn Spanish as best and as quickly as I could. I wanted a real experience in an ethnographic sense, like to acculturate to really become the mindset of what it was like to be. In that environment 

Christine: Where were you exactly?

Erich: I started in the capital in Quito, but I lived in different parts of the country. So there are three parts of Ecuador, mainly geographically, there's the coast and Coastal Plain. The coast is kind of similar to here, north County, San Diego. It's just like geographically. Then there's the mountains that Andes that rise up at 9,000 feet and it's beautiful every day. It's perfect weather. And then you have the Amazon on the other side. So heading west to east, you have the coast, the Andes, and then the Amazon basin right behind. And I lived in all three areas. They're all very different. It's like three different cultures in one country about the size of Nevada. It was just loaded with color and fascination and intrigue. I would go off to the bookstores, libraries. This is before the internet. I knew nothing about Ecuador. Most Americans, I don't think it’s a place that most people don't care about. It doesn't have a whole lot in terms of an American oriented sense that like you'd hear about it a lot. I took to it through language. That's how you access culture on a deeper level. Otherwise, you're always gonna be sort of superficial, right?
Asking where the bathroom is, directions, food, that stuff. But I would go off to the library, like I said, and I'd start research reading about the United States history from some of their writings and their history. I learned a lot about the CIA. I learned a lot about petroleum development and exploitation and discovery in the Amazon, and then I was living there, and then it turned very tangible and real because I lived in an area.

Erich: There was a place called Shell, Shell Mera. Now I believe it's renamed, it's called Puyo. Anyway, I thought Shell, Shell what? You know, like that was familiar to me. I only know one Shell growing up and that was Shell Gas station. Well, it's the same. In the fifties and sixties, a lot of the multinational petroleum developers and refiners were looking as they still do all over the planet, for the next opportunity to come down, find and refine oil. They found massive reserves under the AM Ecuadorian Amazon, right where the Andes descended into the Amazon basin and they happened to be beneath a lot of Indigenous communities that had had very little contact with air quotes, Western world as we would say it, right? These communities had been there for time in memorial. They had their lives. What astonished me and was just amazing, and this is all before the internet, and I never knew anything about. They had plant-based medicine. They had drinks that I was learning about that they would ask me to try and I'd never heard of them. They would explain things and you know, being so ethnocentric American at first I'm like, you guys are long forgotten.

Erich: This is like, the Native American Indians. There’s been modernization and development that has taken place and these communities have just decided to stay away from that or resist it. But the other part of me was just so fascinated and curious to learn. Then, back to the development of petroleum and the oil fields, I learned that there had been a long history basically where, Texaco, who from America, you know, and I can't imagine that Texaco would come down, find these oil reserves, pull it up to the surface and refine it, next to a community, into their main water supply and leave the byproduct and the refinement water in these pits or just next to the river or where these people get their water from until you see it, until you actually see where it is, until you actually hear about or meet families who have birth defects and all sorts of stuff. And again, a lot of their first contact with the western world was with an oil company, a multinational oil company. And as it does, I'd go off to libraries and I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing as a missionary, read these contracts where Texaco would come down and they'd say, Hey, they'd tell a whole community. We will clear this field of all of the trees and roots and everything and create a soccer field for you and we'll give you 50 soccer balls if it's okay that we develop oil. The price of oil, the world market, price of oil you can imagine was compared to soccer ball.

Christine: Right.

Erich: That's it, it was just raw information to me. It made me, it hit something. It inspired me, I thought, are there lawyers helping these people back in the United States? It just struck me. I couldn't believe it and I wanted to learn more, but that's not why I was there. I didn't have time, but it sat with me. It bothered me in the back of my mind. And I thought when I go home, I'm gonna investigate how something like this can be resolved. And when I came home, I start poking around and seeing what's out there. And then in college, researching this topic, I came across a lawsuit against Texaco by the community, they're called the COFA Indians, and I have been to their community. It's on the Agua Rico River, and they had a lawyer in the United States and were suing Texaco. The lawsuit was filed, as best I can remember, in 1996. It really got going in 97, 98, and that was it. Somebody's out there doing it, and so I wanted to go to law school. I wanted to participate. 

Christine: It's just fascinating that you went to Ecuador as a missionary with that purpose to bring people into the Mormon tradition and religion, and yet it seemed like you completely diverged from that and were inspired and then you actually absorbed and took in more, right?

Erich: Yeah. 

Christine: And then came back completely different. That's always been kind of my experience too. Anytime I go abroad a lot of the learning actually comes, happens when I come back because it gives you such a clear lens to your upbringing, your own culture, the belief systems that surround you.

Erich: Yeah. You're able to step outside and look back at your own self a little bit more objectively when you are open to other perspectives like that. And I think that's not only important when you're young, it's, I mean it's a virtue daily. You gotta always stay open minded. You never know what you're gonna learn the next day or in an hour or two hours. 

Christine: Well, tell me quickly about Hot Flow in Espanol, 

Erich: With Hot Flow, which is a type of Vinyasa class, it’s a type of vinyasa sequence in yoga. Part of what I've done as, as an attorney, just one of the avenues that it brought me in was to do a lot of work in Latin America for a while. For about five, six years, I was with a company where I was going back to Central America, to Columbia, often to different places, and I would always go to a yoga class. It's always been a great experience to go to yoga classes in Spanish or in other languages, like German, Italian, these things and so it's just great cause it's an experience in itself. So I'd always thought it would be fun to teach a class, teach yoga in Spanish. Just combine the two. And the whole motivation of becoming a yoga instructor was because, I wanted to give back. It helped me so much that if I could, if there was 1, 2, 3 people that experienced the same thing I did as I discovered it or it came to me in the time of life that it did, then that would be, that's fulfilling. 

Erich: And there may be a language barrier where we live, where a lot of people don't get the opportunity or they don't feel comfortable or they're intimidated. The language of yoga can be kind of intimidating. I've been told from a lot of people, so I think maybe there's a language barrier there that maybe it's more accessible to people in Spanish that are Spanish speakera. So then yoga came up. It was about, I wanna say 10 years ago. Stress was at an all time high for so many reasons, and I was looking. I'm like, I need like a holistic, healthy solution other than pharmaceuticals or whatever. You know, people are saying or recommend, go talk to the psychiatrist and this and that. I thought, there's gotta be like, stress isn't new. Really, really high stress isn't a new thing to the human experience, and somehow people have survived, survived it prior to the Western solutions, right? Of just medicine. Take a pill, this kind of thing of thing. Just work harder, jog longer, you know, just exercise, or get over it or find religion. It was like none of those things were very pragmatic to me.

Erich: I wanted something more immediate and pragmatic to work with stress, and so I started looking for what's out there. I started just looking into stress and how people deal with it, in body, movement. Around, 2005 or something, I read, The Power of Now. I started becoming more interested in breath. When you're young, when you're in your twenties or whatever, you don't care about breathing. It's something that just happens. It's in the background all the time, and, mindfulness and breath, I'm like, okay, that's interesting. Can you, does breath regulate stress? I got curious about that. 

Erich: No one's taught me this stuff. I knew about stoicism and all these thought solutions and stuff, approaches to stress, but it wasn't very pragmatic. So I started exploring that and then I think it just naturally leads to yoga. You find yoga once you get interested in that. I went to a hot yoga class on a Groupon, and there was something to it. It put me present like, an activity like surfing or doing artwork. If you're paying attention to your breath and watching it, you can't help but be present and then you start, over time, to see so many little subtle, tiny things start, like parasympathetic stuff and even your diet and your sleep, your circadian rhythm, everything. It starts getting into everything. And as you look back day by day, you're like this, this is three or 4,000 years old. There's something to what these guys figured out where you unite breath to movement. It’s that simple. And it's not hard on the joints, the hips. The journey from not being able to touch your toes, to touching your toes, there in lies the richness, the fulfillment, that unbound consciousness, that's the experience, 

Christine: Right? Because in that journey, if you take one small step and then that opens you to another set of possibilities, and then again and again, and I think before you know it, you have completely changed everything about your life because you keep inviting new things in, right? You start to breathe and then you can feel the relaxation in your stomach, and then maybe you're a little bit more aware of the digestion process and it gets into absolutely everything. Well, let's move to our surf session. Thanks for taking me out that day. That was the first time I'd gone to Teramar and I was so impressed with the gentle waves, the lack of struggle to get out to the lineup, which it's such a contrast from trying to navigate the chaos you find in the Oceanside beaches. And it made me think, this is probably when people imagine Southern California surfing, this is the image, right? It's just so blissful. And I've been back a few times since then. It's just everybody having this gleeful moment together 

Erich: Yeah, there's two places that I think of that are like that here in North County, it's Terramar and then across the base is San Onofre. It's very friendly, it's exactly as you described it. It's a gorgeous, beautiful morning. Like this morning, water's warm, a less intimidating place to learn. I think people are pretty friendly to share waves, things like that. Whereas I think, maybe even 200 yards down the beach, they wouldn't be, I like the venue too. Terra Mar's a gorgeous place. It's the coastal bluff there, the water's really clean and clear. There's a nice, rocky reef that’s pretty characteristic of Southern California. It's a mixed sand rock bottom. So when you get wind it tends to stay a little smoother ocean surface and texture than your standard beach break of sandbar. When I think of getting out, having a fun, non-stressful surf day. The surf was pretty mild that morning. It's just a great place. Being in the water is the activity. I'm happy if it's ankle, if it's over, you know, we rarely get large surfer of that quality. But no matter where it is, it's just good to be in the water. 

Christine: Yeah, I've been out a couple days since we went together and, there's a ton of that sea grass, seaweed, and I got completely tangled up with my leash and everything so much that there was this whole drag that I had to like, stop and unravel, get all the seagrass off, and that neat too, right? That you feel the ocean coating you with all of its plant life.

Erich: Yeah, exactly. One thing about just being in the ocean, whether it's surfing or standup, paddle or even fishing, you feel there's life there. You're, you're surrounded, you're immersed in it. There's an energy that you sink up with and, with the sea grass, it's funny, different times a year, like the kelp will be growing. There's that kind of offshore kelp, large kelp forest. I think there's a pretty big one off Terramar. I can see. It's like a big patty out out there. And then there's that green sea grass. And at different times of year it's breaking off and it does, you get all wrapped up in it. It just kind of floats around. I noticed that the other day. But there's all these variables. Yeah, just little things and you remember, I'm in a different environment. I'm somewhere else. And there's a lot of stuff going on down below that, seasonally, even like our trees on land, they change color, they shed their leaves. It's the same thing. And that's another one of the beautiful things is watching it change the color, the tide, red tide, all of that. It's just another environment

Christine: And it is a very popular break, right? This perfect wave that everybody wants to be on. So my question for you is, if you have any tips about how to be part of that crowd, right? Because we all are the crowd at the end of the day. But when you're, especially when you're new, the last few times I've kind of been hanging to the side a little bit, trying to understand how I can get myself in there and not still not be in people's way.

Erich: Like at Terramar and San Onofre, every break. It's weird. It has its own little culture to it and understandings and at those breaks, I think it's okay. People are respectful that there's learning going on. What I would say is just be respectful of others. It's the same old, surfing etiquette as if you see somebody who's already up on the wave and they're coming towards, you gotta look right. You gotta pay attention to your surroundings and look and make sure somebody isn't coming down from the wave towards you and if you take off, they're gonna crash into you, or you're gonna cause them to have to turn gaging their speed. Just being aware of your surroundings, being respectful. There's usually a point or two, a takeoff point.They're crowded. It's summertime, it's Southern California. There's people, you drive down, along the street and there's license plates from all over the place and people wanna learn and that's great. Since Covid, I’ve noticed even more people want to surf. You know, they wanna learn. It's one of those things where it's kind of like the ocean itself. Don’t fight it, don't resist it. Don't try to try to swim against the tide or the current. It's like repetitions. The mother of skill, the more time you put into it. your ability, your comfortability, your strength in the muscles you need for surfing, will get sharper and more acute, and then you'll be a little more confident in how you handle space relative to other people. You won't crash into 'em. 

Christine: What I've seen and felt so much as time has progressed is that when you're a beginner, you're on the board and you gotta remember the right position, and then you're trying to catch the wave. And sometimes you can be very much in this tunnel vision. But you're talking a lot about this having a 360 view almost. And so in watching people in Terramar, you could see three people pretty close, taking the same wave. But it's okay because they're all beginners and they're all going kind of straight down. You know, perpendicular to the beach. But then you see other people will catch and they'll ride the face and then you are in their way. And I think that that's the moment when you're trying to catch, is that you, you've gotta be so aware of everything around you and have your head up, right? Cause you need to know the direction that people are gonna be going if you can easily share it with another person, or if you're gonna really be right in somebody's way who has right to the wave. 

Erich: I think of it as like a southern California freeway. You have to just, it's like you're driving straight, but your eyes are always in the rear view mirrors on the sides of your car, out the doors. You're constantly looking around because there's cars merging on and off. They're going different speeds, and we're all driving really fast. But somehow it works, right? It's like there's so much movement and it just comes with time.

Christine: Well, let's go back a little bit and why don't you tell me about your history with learning to surf, and particularly if you had any struggles in the early days, technical situational. What was like for you. 

Erich: I didn't begin surfing until after college. We'd go down in the summer, We'd go down to Huntington and Newport a couple times during the summer, but it was just, the ocean was terrifying. There's so many days where, everybody has that experience when they start surfing or going to the ocean where they get spooked, they get held down, or, oh my gosh, the ocean, the current took me out. There was a rip current. I think those are important to have, but it wasn't really anything. At the time we were skateboarding all the time. But after college, my parents moved down to San Clemente and so I was down there more often visiting and stuff, and I thought, I'm just gonna go down and take advantage of this cuz it's nearby and it feels like it's a good exercise. Surfing's kinda like the gym or yoga. It's a good workout. I started doing it then, and through law school I'd break away. I went to law school in Northern California and I was surfing pleasure point up there, Capitola, a little bit in Santa Cruz. It was really fun. That's when I started surfing more. And then when I came back after law school down to Southern California again, working really long, long, stressful hours as a young attorney out of law school. They're working you hard, they're working you a lot of hours, a lot of stress.
Erich: Gosh. I only remember really one kooking moment. It was at Ala Moana Beach, right there on Oahu. We were over there. I had just passed the bar. It was like on a bar trip celebration, and I just was surfing all day and I had my shortboard and I was out at Moana Beach. I took off from Moana Park. I paddled across the channel, the marina channel there, and then I was out surfing and it was really fun. It was really good. And I didn't look, it was summertime, so that's when that break kind of starts turning on. And I didn't look. I didn't see. I didn't gauge the speed or if somebody was gonna be able to connect these sections, and so I just kind took off. And this local guy just gave me an ear full, he was Hawaiian. He just like, yo, it's not like that here. Almost trying to get me to get out of there, that kind of thing. But I was alone and there were like four or five of 'em, you know, and that kind of thing. It was fine at the end. I was respectful. I apologized all that, but that one stuck with me, in terms of just not looking, not being aware. Oh, it looks like I can take off right now. There's nobody around. I don't care.

Christine: It seems like this idea of being aware of your surroundings, whether on the surfboard or traveling, heightening this awareness to all the differences or what your purpose is there. It’s kind of a neat full circle, I think from where we started. And then coming back again to surfing and yoga, which allow you this hyper intense focus again to release the present, release the past. But at the same time, you're able to do that because you still are engaged in that kind of 360 view. Mm-hmm. . Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. 

Erich: Yeah, my pleasure.