What do yoga and skydiving have in common?

I've said from the beginning that I thought skydiving was very "zen"...

"Participants do not freeze with fear; instead their perceptions seem to open up, resulting in the same heightened sense of awareness and calmness associated with meditation. Out of all the themes common to the extreme sports experience, this one surprises Willig, the London psychologist, the most. 'When you look at extreme sports from the outside, they look so fast, so ferocious,' she says.

Rich Gottleib loves the calmness and clarity, the sense of being completely in the present that comes with climbing. 'It’s a very immediate thing. It totally removes you, totally injects you. In that moment, reality cannot rear its ugly head.'

This mental state of complete involvement and focus, a loss of self-consciousness and a sense of passing time is what psychologists term 'flow.' For centuries, practitioners of Eastern religions have sought flow through meditation. Brymer finds that many extreme athletes report transcendental flow experiences similar to those of meditation practitioners."

Source

See also: http://www.oric.org.au/Resources/Rsch_extreme.html