Every few seconds of Heidi Coker's "Mindful Moment Monday - Ride the Waves" arrives a small instruction, the way a drummer keeps time under a soloist. Find a comfortable position. Take a nice deep breath. Feel into your body. Let your mind settle. Then the music comes up, a soft bed under her voice, and she begins describing a life that refuses to hold still: hurricanes and viruses on one side, birdsong and sunrises on the other, a wedding happening in one house while a marriage ends in the next. The video was published on YouTube on November 2, 2020, and runs about ten and a half minutes. In that time Coker makes a single, unhurried argument: the waves of life will rise and fall whether you like it or not, the energy you burn fighting them is the real source of hardship, and the pause that sits between one breath and the next is a place you can learn to stand. It is a short piece of spoken reflection, but it is built on an idea that people have been testing on their own cushions for centuries, and it rewards slow listening.
The metaphor is ancient and obvious, which is part of its strength. Coker opens on the sense that life keeps undercutting our plans. "Just when you think you've got things pretty dialed in, life throws you a curveball," she says near the start. From there she builds a catalogue of simultaneous truths: what is one person's best day is another's worst nightmare; a sunset in one part of the world is a sunrise in another; someone takes a last breath as someone else takes a first. The point is not that life is cruel or kind but that it is never singular. Every moment contains its opposite.
"We are always riding the waves of life," she says, and the sentence carries the video's first move. You are not standing on a beach waiting for the surf to calm down before you go in. You are already in the water. The question she poses is not whether the waves will come but how you will meet them. "Will you choose to participate and engage in life," she asks, "or will you choose to resist it?"
This is the center of the video, and Coker reaches for an image every swimmer recognizes. At about four minutes in she says that "when you're riding the waves of the ocean, we often find that the harder we push and fight and resist, we actually come closer to drowning." Anyone who has been held under by a wave knows the physics: the body that thrashes against the current uses up its oxygen and strength, while the body that relaxes and lets the water lift it often comes up sooner.
She translates that physics into the emotional register without much fuss. "The more we resist and fight and push back, the more energy we waste, the more hardship we experience, and the more out of control we feel." Notice the chain she draws. Resistance is not described as a moral failing. It is a cost. It burns energy that could go toward responding, and it makes the experience feel more violent than the event itself. The wave is still a wave. What changes is how much of your own strength goes into arguing with it.
Surrender, in this framing, is not resignation. Coker's word is "give in," but she pairs it with "let go," and the sequence she describes is active: you notice the struggle, you soften, and the wave begins to carry you. She is careful to say that the transition happens when "we notice that we give in," which places the turn in awareness rather than in outcome. You do not have to like the wave to stop fighting it.
"If we can learn to surrender and ride the waves, knowing that just as we come to the peak of one wave that wave will too come down, and just as we're at the bottom of one we will rise again. That is just the pattern of life." (Heidi Coker, "Mindful Moment Monday - Ride the Waves," 2020)
That sentence contains the video's quiet comfort. The peak is not permanent and neither is the trough. Coker is not promising that hard seasons end on schedule. She is describing a rhythm, and inviting you to hold onto the rhythm rather than the particular swell that is currently pushing you under.
The most distinctive move in the video comes around the six-minute mark, when Coker stops talking about the sea and starts talking about the body. "Just as we breathe in and out in a natural cycle," she says, "there is a point of transition in between each breath, a pause, a space." She compares it directly to the top of a wave: "just as the waves come rising up there is a pause before they come crashing down."
This is where the video stops being a metaphor and becomes a practice. The breath is the one wave you ride every few seconds without deciding to. Each inhalation lifts, each exhalation falls, and between them there is a short hinge where nothing is moving. Coker's claim is that this hinge is available in every life moment, including the ones that feel most chaotic. "As we ride the waves of life," she says, "we are offered a chance to pause and experience that space in between." She frames that pause as a place of presence: "in this moment we are connected to all of it, and yet in this moment the only thing that exists is now."
For a reader who has never tried this, the instruction is concrete. Breathe in and feel the ride of life lifting you. Breathe out and let yourself ride the wave down. Then notice the small gap at the top and bottom of each breath, the place where you are neither inhaling nor exhaling. Coker is not asking you to make the gap longer or to feel anything in particular inside it. She is asking you to notice that it is there, and that it is a point of rest inside motion.
Around the one-minute-and-forty-second mark, Coker names one of her favorite lyrics: "one man gathers what another man spills." She does not identify the song or its writer in the video, so this article will not either. What matters is how she uses it. The line is a compact version of her larger point, that one person's loss sits beside another's gain, that disaster draws people together ("we find friends rallying around us"), and that no single condition is the whole story. The lyric holds the wave's two faces at once: the spill and the gathering, the crash and the rally.
That doubleness is what keeps the video from becoming a brochure for calm. Coker does not promise that surrender will make every wave gentle. She acknowledges, plainly, that some "are tsunami-sized, and indeed it can be at times." She also insists that there are "great levels of calm" and "beautiful ripples," and that the sea offers floating as well as flooding. The practice is not to pretend the storm is absent. It is to remember that the storm is one part of a sea that also holds sunlight.
The video's closing minutes are almost entirely instructions, delivered slowly with long musical pauses. Coker asks you to take a deep breath "and feel the ride of life on the inhalation," then "riding the wave on the way out." She asks you to take it all in, filling your lungs and noticing how they expand, and then to release and "feel the sensation of letting go." Her final wish is that you find "a space of least resistance" and enjoy the journey.
If you want to turn this into a weekly habit, the structure is simple. Choose one moment a day when something unwelcome is already moving through you. Breathe in and name, silently, what is coming up. Breathe out and try, even briefly, to stop pushing against it. Then find the pause at the top or bottom of the breath, and rest there for one full cycle before you respond. You are not trying to win the wave. You are trying to notice how much effort you were spending before you noticed the pause.
Coker's framing also suggests a gentler question for those hard days: what would it cost me to stop arguing with this for ten seconds? The answer will not always be "nothing." But the video's logic is that resistance is never free, and that even a small release can change how much energy the next wave takes.
"Ride the Waves" is a short piece, and it is best understood as one installment in a larger body of work. Coker's description notes that the video is part of her Mindful Moment Monday series, which she also sends to subscribers by email. The full written companion to this video is a blog post titled "Ride the Wave" on her Heart 2 Heart blog at heidicoker.com. For a longer, structured approach to the same body-based awareness, the description points to a course called The Mindful Mover, hosted on kyanna.me.
If you watch the video once, listen for the moments where Coker stops speaking and lets the music carry the breath. Those silences are the teaching in its most direct form. The waves will keep coming. The practice she describes is to learn, one breath at a time, where the water is holding you up.
