What I Think About When I Think About Running
I love running, I love meditation. In this blog I’m exploring how the two fit together.
#2 Meditation~in~Motion
Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a fun and beautiful read. Including it here allows me to talk about running as both exercise and meditative practice. It’s clear Murakami sees running in much the same way.
As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
Every time I lace up my shoes and hit the road I re-negotiate my relationship to time, space and pain (to name a few). And I open myself up to parts of my consciousness that remain buried throughout the day as I focus on work, friends and family.
As I run longer and longer distances, I'm surprised by the thoughts and emotions that bubble up, triggered by the stresses of physical exertion or simply the freedom that comes to the mind when the body is in motion. In his simple, poetic prose, Murakami describes something similar:
The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.
This description will be familiar to anyone who has studied and practiced meditation, hinting at the notion that we are not our thoughts — that our thoughts and emotions are not reality, existing as they do only in our awareness, passing in and out of our consciousness like clouds in the sky.
It also hints at a state of being called equanimity — or in simpler terms calm, composure or cool-headedness.
Equanimity is a skill available to each one of us and it can be developed through practice. For me, a part of that practice is running in open awareness. This is just like it sounds: paying attention to everything that is happening around you in the present moment with curiosity, non-judgement and kindness. It also means not getting lost in a thought, story or daydream — a phenomenon called mind wandering.
It’s a lot harder than it sounds;)
Which is why my training includes meditation before I run and tracking mind wandering events while running. A quick summary of how I do this and more details to come in upcoming posts.
Meditations: Each meditation below represents a different meditation technique. There are many different types of meditation. I have chosen four of the most common by some of my favourite meditation guides on the AmDTx platform.
· Focused Attention, by Stephen Archer
· Mindful Movement, by Ruby Knafo
· Emotional Intelligence, by Stephen Archer
· Sky Meditation, by Bianca King
Mind Wandering: Here’s how I track Mind Wandering when running — good old-fashioned clickers! These allow me to count both positive and negative affect events, as well as the intensity of the thought or emotion (neutral, moderate or intense).
By the numbers: A typical week of meditation and run data, complemented by notes recorded immediately post run.
In the next post I introduce you to Hal Higdens, one of the all time great competitive runners and a writer who helped usher in the modern era’s running boom, Nike shoes and all. Says Hal:
Staying focused for segments of a workout or the entire workout [is] a form of meditation.
Tune in next time for more from Hal on running, focus and performance.
