Chapter 7. Running with Effort

"[Effort] is the sense of not having the faintest indulgence toward any form of entertainment. We have to give something up." -Chogyam Trungpa, "Heart of the Buddha".

"Laziness also manifests as busyness. Speediness is laziness when we use it as a way to avoid working with our minds."-Sakyong Mipham, "Turning the Mind into an Ally."

Chogyam Trungpa called the Buddha's Third Foundation of Mindfulness (Effort) "perhaps the most important" for the meditator. This is equally true for the awake runner. Effort is the glue that makes true mindfulness practice possible. So much of what drives neurotic mind is speed, the quest for "the next thing". This drive is often glorified in Calvinist culture as virtuous hard work. "Git 'er done" is the mantra of the harried machine age doer.

Without mindfulness of effort, running as meditation is impossible. But just as runners are well suited to inhabit and work with the previous two foundations, effort and running are closely related. That this is obvious from a literal standpoint only underscores the simple elegance of the deeper truth.

And there are various styles of expressing a relationship with effort. It is instructive to work with children, particularly middle school cross country runners. One would expect such an energetic group to need to be told to "slow down", that surely the same creatures that bounce against the walls of American shopping malls would need a good harness when being introduced to running. Quite the opposite is true. Very young people are often much slower than the actual limitation of their bodies. They are sleepy in their effort, unsure of what direction to even sight the barrel when aiming for their own limits.

Adults, and certainly most adults who take up running, suffer from the other extreme: rampant speed expressed as an inability to run within their aerobic threshold for much longer than 5 or 10 minutes. This is not a deficit in fitness. Rather it is a symptom of how desperate our neurotically conditioned minds are for relief. This manifests as distraction and impatience, some thing that walks hand in hand with the whole panoply of mental habits that create suffering. Running mindfully is very much about waiting, ironically.

The practice of running with mindfulness of effort can be best approached by using a heart rate monitor. This may seem surprisingly technological in reference to running meditation, but these gadgets are great tools for gaining some understanding of our exertion, something most novice (and some expert) runners actually don't really know how to experience.

The object of using a monitor is to become familiar with a sustainable level of exertion. Most people who start using a monitor find that they have been running at a level of exertion that is at or beyond what is called the "aerobic threshold". Running like this is uncomfortable and frustrating when done mindlessly, meaning that when we allow our exertion to get too great, our mind becomes busy and agitated and we struggle. Running with proper exertion means an absence of struggle.

How to run with a heart rate monitor:

1. Determine your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 240.

2. Determine your ideal training pace by multiplying this new number by 0.75.

3. Use the heart rate monitor while running and stay within 2 or 3 beats per minute of your ideal pace. The pace should feel comfortable to the point where you could carry on a simple conversation with someone.

As you work with the monitor, you will begin to know what different levels of exertion feel like, mainly as a sensation of your own beating heart, and when you begin to go beyond your ideal pace. Transition from using the gadget for reading your heart beats per minute to running without the monitor and mastering the ability to simply being aware of the level of exertion you are putting forth at any given moment. This will open an entirely new richness to your running routine, allowing you to truly ride your exertion like a skilled jockey rides a horse.

The heart is not wired to our "feeling" nervous system, so perceiving the heart's level of exertion is not centralized in the same way that we feel our feet striking the ground. Rather it is a "whole body" sensation, and a subtle one at that. In using a heart monitor, you will notice how easy it is to go beyond your ideal range. The "creeping" increase in exertion is the reason so many novice runners become discouraged, and why many non runners think the activity is unappealing. How many of us, as new runners, or as experienced runners who have taken a block of time off, have had the sudden desire to stop and double over? This is because the transition from a comfortable exertion level to one that is unsustainable is largely unperceived.

Running without struggle is actually very challenging because of the level of mindfulness it requires. To the inexperienced, it may appear that struggle is everywhere while running, either the physical struggle of gasping for air while running over one's sustainable level of effort, or the constant effort it takes to keep one's pace in check. This dynamic is a core part of training the mind in classical mindfulness meditation. To go beyond struggle, the practitioner must first become familiar with struggle, to know what it feels like and to make peace with it.

The Buddha's instruction for dealing with the inevitable struggle one must confront when learning to practice is to apply great gentleness to the process. This is the Buddha's way of letting us not make his instructions into ambitious projects, where we drown out the essence of his advice with the entrenched habits of self criticism and ambition.

The running meditation example of gentleness is to simply notice when we have let our pace become too quick, and in that noticing to come back to our experience, be it seeing digits displayed on our heart monitor, or the first sensations of breathing and heart rate begin to run away from us.

Mindlessly letting our pace creep up happens because we have let our attention drift into our discursive mind. Why do we do this? Because the present moment and its simplicity are foreign to our carefully constructed expectations. This manifests as boredom, agitation and distraction.

Holding a truly "comfortable" pace means not indulging the urge to cover your boredom and restlessness with the entertainment of charging forward. Running faster, if done without care and intention, is like our thinking minds-- it is where we go to hide from the present moment. We want to "crank" things up. We actually want to struggle, on a habitual level, because it is familiar.

The task of meditation, including running meditation, is to familiarize ourselves with the absence of struggle. For runners, this is maintaining a comfortable, consistent level of effort. There are no magical realms for us to be transported to in this practice, because it is based in relaxation and utter simplicity.

This simplicity is what the Buddha called "mindfulness of mind". How we bring mindfulness of mind to running is the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 6. The Technique of Running with Life

"So the life force that keeps us alive and that manifests itself continually in our stream of consciousness itself becomes the practice of meditation." -Chogyam Trungpa "Heart of the Buddha".

'When feeling a painful feeling of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a painful feeling of the flesh. When feeling a painful feeling not of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a painful feeling not of the flesh. When feeling a pleasant feeling of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a pleasant feeling of the flesh. When feeling a pleasant feeling not of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a pleasant feeling not of the flesh. When feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling of the flesh. When feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling not of the flesh, he discerns that he is feeling a neither-painful-nor-pleasant feeling not of the flesh.' - Sakyamuni Buddha, the Sattipatana Sutra: -Translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

How does this, the Second Foundation of Mindfulness, get skillfully applied to running meditation? One thing the scripture is inviting us to do is begin understanding how our mind, body and awareness work. We find that this awareness flickers in its focus, and that this "pulsing" quality is a basic aspect of our perception. When the Buddha lists the various sensations of pleasure, pain or what is neither, he is pointing to the aspect of mind that experiences these things one at a time, as raw experience, before they become a thinking narrative or emotional response. In running meditation, due to the bevy of sensory input, that "flicker" is particularly vivid, and the tendency to psychologically solidify our various sensations is rich. This makes running meditation excellent training in the Second Foundation.

The Second Foundation, like all four, is a crucial piece to the technique of mindfulness and awareness, as taught by the Buddha. Running "with our life" means simply noticing the fact of our own unfolding experience. This experience is not seamless, it is not constant, and it's fickleness is not a problem. That constant movement from "this" to "this" to "this" is the movement of our minds, and like the reference point of our breathing, it is something we can come back to.

Running itself, its rhythm and flow, is a literal expression of the "living" quality of our experience. The feet touching and releasing the earth, the cycling of the breath, even the unfolding road before our visual sense, are all expressions of the the union of our psychological awareness and body awareness.

Some meditative runners say that the Second Foundation of Mindfulness is relatively easy to work with. The dynamism of running, by nature, constantly refreshes the practitioners field of perception. The relatively static quality of sitting practice, on the other hand, means this truth about our experience is less glaring. Boredom has alot to do with this foundation, because the difference between "hot" and "cool" boredom can be linked to the practitioners tendency (or lack of tendency in the case of "cool" boredom) to solidify her experience. Each moment seems like the next usually because we just are not paying attention fully. This is hot boredom. Cool boredom means relaxing into the unfolding subtleness of our own experience. Runners' boredom is no different, be it hot or cold.

Mindfulness of Life also frees the practitioner from burden of having to hold too tightly to her awareness, because we will always, eventually, come back. This is where the aspect of true gentleness is essential to the practice. The flow of mind has no beginning or end as it relates to our experience, so there is nothing to maintain or "gin up", nothing to fix, no problem. Meditation, be it sitting or running, becomes completely natural and inseparable from the very process of our mind itself. This sense of naturalness and constant renewal allows the practitioner to "ride" her experience as one would ride a horse (Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, "Turning the Mind into an Ally").

Practicing this Foundation can be particularly joyful for the runner, because we are working toward a level of relaxation wherein we can start to truly perceive what is going on, to truly begin to inhabit our awareness with immense gentleness and precision. This is the ancient and powerful path to beginning to glimpse the stunning power and beauty of our own existence.

Chapter 5. The Technique of Running with the Body

Meditation, in simple terms, is the practice of repeatedly focusing one's attention on some object. The Buddha encouraged different objects of meditation depending on the specific needs of who he was instructing. His most widely followed instruction, even to this day, is resting one's attention on the sensation of the breath.

The words of the Buddha are preserved in ancient texts written down by early disciples. In the the Ānāpānasati Sutta, or the "Breath-Mindfulness Discourse", the Buddha instructs his disciples to place their attention on every aspect of their breathing during meditation. Is this because of some higher truth or mystical power can be found in our breathing? Not at all. Breathing, in this case, is an ever present and dynamic reference point for the moment to moment truth of our own experience. The sensation of our own breath does not require interpretation or any kind of elaborate technique, but is simply a way of staying present to one's own physical situation. "I tell you, monks, that this — the in-&-out breath — is classed as a body among bodies, which is why the monk on that occasion remains focused on the body in & of itself." (translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu). The text also instructs the practitioner to regard all aspects of experience within the simple, repetitive technique of watching one's breath. In this way, no aspect of our experience is divorced from the body and its constant and living expression, which is the breath.

Running meditation is different than the Buddha's classic technique of sitting meditation. With running, we are adding the element of elevated physical exertion, which may seem contrary to the "stillness" that meditation encourages and cultivates. Certainly, tearing off down the street seems almost opposite to the notion of quiet contemplation that the idea of meditation popularly evokes.

In running meditation, we are jumping straight into the realm of our physical selves. The intense physicality of running elevates the potential for either connecting deeply to our physical reality, or spinning off into further distraction and separation from our bodies. Running actually works to provoke a kind of confrontation with our physical selves that creates immense opportunities for both awakening as well as confusion.

In regard to using the breath as an object of meditation while running, we need to acknowledge that the breath is conditioned by the intensity of the body's exertion. Sitting meditation affords a quiet and calm environment to observe our breathing. Running meditation means elevated breathing, sweat, pounding feet, motion through space and all the "distractions" that these can deliver.

Although running meditation also uses the breath as a gateway to directly experiencing our physical selves, to truly meditate while running, we cannot just rest our focus on the breath. Because we are also regulating our pace, steering our bodies through space and processing a sharper and more unavoidable set of physical sensations, our awareness must be more refined, more agile, more flexible.

EXCERCISE ONE: DIRECTING THE BREATH.

The ability to focus on and direct our breathing to different parts of the body is a foundation to all levels of running meditation. It is strongly encouraged that the aspiring awake runner become familiar with this first excercise before applying the technique while actually running.

1. Sit in a kitchen style chair with a strait back and slightly tucked chin. Relax the shoulders, face, hands (resting atop the thighs). Settle into this posture.

2. Observe the sensation of your own breath and calmly, but deliberately rest it there. If your attention wanders to daydreaming, bring your attention gently back to the sensation of your own breath, flowing in and out of the nostrils.

3. Once you feel like you can repeatedly come back to your own breath, begin visualizing and feeling that your breath is flowing directly into your heart center and into the heart muscle, almost as if the breath is illuminating or energizing the heart as it beats within the chest.. Do not "deep breath", but rather breath naturally and evenly. As you breath out each time, just let the sensation of the inbreath dissipate into your whole body and the space around you.

Do this first, preliminary practice once a day for at least 10 minutes, or longer if you like.

EXERCISE TWO: Directing the breath while running

1. Suit up for a run/walk. (If you are not at all habituated to any kind of running, please start by walking. All further instructions are equally valid for walkers as they are for runners.) Dress comfortably and perhaps a bit more warmly than you otherwise would. Body heat has an important role in creating a settled mind during running meditation. In fact, you should see the first 20-30 minutes of your run as a preparation and warm up for your RM session. For this reason, a gentle pace is key at the beginning. (If you allow your pace to build too quickly, even if you are a veteran runner with a high degree of fitness, it will be more difficult for you to hold your awareness on your breath/body sufficiently).

2. Once you begin moving forward, immediately direct your awareness to your breath in the same way you did in excercise one. Progressively work toward both taming your attention to rest on the body/breath, up to the sensation of the inbreath entering your heart center and diffusing through your body, all the way to the crown of your head and the bottoms of your feet as they push and release the ground. Completely relax and let go on each outbreath.

3. You will notice the sensation of discursive thought. Avoid becoming too involved in the story of your thoughts by simply noticing when thoughts arise, letting them go, and returning your awareness and attention to the breath entering the heart center and diffusing through the body. The breath-body can be experienced as a chord of energy or light entering the heart center, gathering the energy of the environment and distributing itself evenly through the body. (The sensation of this "comprehensive" pathway is very akin to the actual physiology of what you are doing in that moment.)-Tim Noakes, "Lore of Running", Part One.

Chapter 4: The View of Awake Running

Practicing awake running means relating to one's own body, including one's ideas about one's own body-- about what we think it is, was, or should be. This is the very beginning and the foundation of how to work with the relationship between mind and body.

Most people can get sidetracked by running's reputation as a way to get in shape or lose weight. We might be used to thinking of strenuous activities as physical training, in the same way that studying for an exam is mental training. That aerobic exercise is a "stress reliever" is well known and documented, but we are not talking about physical activity as a salve for mental tension, which may surprise some readers.

To approach meditation (in this case running meditation) as a curative or theraputic activity, although valid, is not correct from the standpoint of the Buddha and what he actually taught. Yes, the lessening of our own suffering (and by extension that of others) is a key part of Buddhism, but the notion of some technique or strategy to "feel better" is not part of this tradition's central teachings. Meditation, as taught by the Buddha, is a way of relating to our world that is without ambition or speculation about "something else". Whatever we think we have "found" or acquired through meditation is usually simply a temporary aspect of our experience.

This instruction on how to regard our own experience, whether it be pleasure, pain or some combination, is fundamental to what the Buddha called "Right View". These teachings were the Buddha's way of orienting his students' outlook properly so that they could fully engage the path to liberation, as he taught it.

A fundamental pillar of the teachings on View is the notion that all we can really know is contained within our own personal experience. Another way to say this is that nothing exists outside the realm of the sense perceptions. Even thoughts, with their rich and dizzying complexity and ability to take us far away, are an aspect of our mental activities. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said it very well: "This whole world is mind's world, the product of mind." (Heart of the Buddha, Ch.3).

The Buddha was clear on this point because he was trying to save his disciples the arduous trials and errors he himself underwent to discover the futility of looking for anything outside his own experience. His method of direct observation led him to understand the logical impossibility of a "self-other split". The Buddha certainly realized the potential to improve one's understanding, but any concept, ambition, description, analysis or speculation about one's understanding is in no way separate from the object of one's understanding.

So too the awake runner needs to be alert for any notion of self improvement, physical fitness, credentials or outcome. Because the practice of awake running is to simply look at our perceptions while running, ambition or physical idealism are just more perceptions. The awake runner does not "train", per se. She merely runs and observes. Distance, speed, leg strength, V02max are all biproducts of that running and that observation. Because the runner and the observer are the same, the practice of awake running is its own goal.

For new runners, the lack of traditional running experience can be a benefit. Former or current competitive runners will be asked to tame their impulse to "improve" as runners. Awake running does not preclude the practitioner from being fast, or even being a champion, but that is but a bi-product and is not an indication of an qualitative results in relation to the contemplative aspect of running as meditation..

In the Buddha's foundational teachings on mindfulness we find specific instructions on how to regard one's body. These instructions encourage the practitioner to let whatever thoughts, ideas, aspirations, images and the like, of her own body slip away and allow ourselves to feel our bodies in real time. This is the experience of the body that comes before any judgement- before "I'm winded" or "I'm feeling strong". It is simply the raw sensation of our physical selves while running.

Ch. 3: Embodied Spirituality

Jesus's apostle Paul writes in the New Testament, "For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live" (Romans 8:13). Like many biblical quotes, the intended meaning of these words is open to interpretation. But the notion that the body and its functions are somehow separate from the spirit is deeply imbedded in Western Judeo-Christian cultural sensibilities.

Although it can be argued that the essence of the early Christian philosopher Augustine has been misinterpreted, his notion of Original Sin as the basis of Man's confusion and suffering is fundamental to traditional Western sensibilities. Augustine believed that unbaptized infants were destined to end up in hell upon death because the corrupted inheritance of Adam and Eve's bad decision was integral to their very souls, and that only the forgiveness of that sinful nature through priestly intervention could erase this «stain».

That the temptations and habits of the body are gateways to sinful indulgence has made it sometimes into an enemy, a barrier to what we wish to become. This outlook has informed a pervasive and reflexive attitude toward our bodies in many cases. The body is still often seen as separate from the soul, that upon death the spirit is «freed» from the body, which is a corrupted and earthly impediment.

Beyond the obvious examples like the medieval practice of «The Mortification of the Flesh», in which people actually harmed their physical bodies as a means of enlivening the spirit, this pejorative attitude toward the body shows up in subtle ways in our contemporary culture. We are still focused on fixing or improving our bodies. Much of modern medical treatment is disease-oriented. Although the pursuit of physical health through exercise and diet are important and worthwhile, there is often an undercurrent of fixation in the way we pursue this. Our cultural obsessions with physical appearance and how «working out» can bring our bodies closer to the narrow ideal of beauty is well known. But these physical ideals are highly conceptual, based in how we think others prefer to perceive us, based in avoiding or fixing some aspect of ourselves that we see to be wrong.

It is interesting to learn that anthopologists have identified culturally specific psycological disorders dealing with profound anxieties or warped perceptions regarding the body. An example in our own culture is Anorexia Nervosa, an addictive behavior in which a perceived lack of control over one's life situation is channeled into obsessive self-starvation. The disorder is believed to be fed by ideals of thinness that are propagated by popular culture. Although complex and difficult to overcome, a simple description of Anorexia is that the sufferer is making war on his/her own body.

We citizens of the scientific age are «results driven», we are conditioned in many ways to strive for tangeable outcomes with expedience. Often process exists only in service of outcome. Surely "getting in shape" or "being healthy" is sometimes an ambitious pursuit like many others- make money, find a mate, die rich. Go to any gym and look at the faces of people churning away on the machines, grimacing and squinting at the bank of televisions, enduring sessions of self-imposed discomfort and boredom to shed a few pounds or tone certain prized muscle groups.

Our relationship to our bodies is often at the center of our confused and habitual limitations. The glorification of the body by judging ourselves and others based on physical critieria, or the denial of our physical selves through the compulsive pursuit of ascetic "self improvement" disciplines, or even the pervasive ambivalence many modern people have toward their physical well being through sedentary neglect or mindless eating of processed foods and empty calories-- each are simply different styles of expressing the same basic neurosis: a conceptualized and limited relationship with one's physical self.

Physicality is often associated with "lower" social hierarchies. Sedentary jobs pay higher than physically demanding ones. "Work" as it relates to agricultural and industrial process, is seen to be an expenditure of life force, something that wears us down. Certainly the grueling repetition and long hours that manual labor requires can be injurious and burdensome. Few look at photographs of the work gangs who dug the Panama Canal with pick and shovel with nostalgia. I was recently interrupted in a conversation with a fellow urbanite as we opined about the wane of "traditional" agriculture by someone who grew up on a family farm who pointed out "the good old days of working on a farm from dawn til dusk with a plow and mule were no picnic and I'd never want to go back to that."

That we find so little joy in physical activity is perhaps understanding, but also tragic because in our physical selves lies who we truly are. Each mental function, emotion sensation lives in the body. We might inhabit different states of mind, but we never in our lives cease inhabiting this body. "This" body is not some idea or ideal for our bodies, rather it is the very truth of the body in each particular moment.

Ch. 2: Ancestors

People who regularly run long distances are often greeted with remarks like “How can you go out and just run for hours?” or “Don’t you’re knees hurt?” Many people proclaim to detest running, or claim to have inborn physical limitations to running, usually knees or perhaps the lower back. Flashbacks to football practice, gym class or that time a friend dared them to run a 5K race are evoked. Runners enjoy this, and tend to play along with the notion of running as being some strange and painful display of stoic tenacity. Runners like to be categorized and admired as a “special breed”.

The truth about running is actually quite different than the non-runner’s notion of arduous pounding. And the runners who feel pride that they can pull off what most people think is beyond their own limits are a bit disingenuous in taking credit for being “special”. With the exception of people who have specific and acute limitations brought on by traumatic injury, or very old people, the vast majority of us are perfectly suited to long distance running. Our upright posture, skeletal geometry and proportion, musculature, skin, glands, metabolism and cardio vascular system are all better suited for the job of distance running than any other animal.

Science tells us that we humans are most closely related to chimpanzees. This means (among many other things) that we have no primate relatives who share our ability to walk and run exclusively on two limbs. This ability is fundamental to who we as a species are. 5 million years ago, the fossil evidence identifies a clear diversification between chipanzees and austrolopithacus, a human ancestor who walked exclusively on two legs. Many scientists agree that 3 million years ago our progenitors were as adept at bipedal locomotion as are modern homo sapiens.[1] Homo sapiens proper did not emerge until 250,000 years ago and therefore represent only the most recent 8% of the history of perfected bipedal locomotion in primates. More strikingly, homo sapiens only gave up its hunter gatherer life style and strong dependence on nearly constant pedestrian travel around 7,000 years ago, which represents only just less than 2% of the whole of human sapiens’ history. In total, we have been divorced from our deep history as runners for slightly more than one-tenth of one percent of our perfected bipedal history.

Our evolution to bipedalism was an adaptation to environmental changes around 5 million years ago that caused the vast subtropical forest of Africa to dry up and become patches of forest surrounded by open savannah.This was result of the onset of a global ice age which created an expansion of the Sahara Desert and a drier climate in Sub-Saharan regions where humans evolved. Tree dwelling chimpanzees found themselves peering out from forested enclaves, across high growing grasslands, perhaps to other forested patches, perhaps to distant bodies of water. The urge to spend more time on hind legs and peer across the hot, dry meadows overtook certain of these archaic chimpanzees, triggering an adaptation toward a taller, upright profile, shorter arms, squared shoulders, and a head that balanced between them on an elongated and vertical neck.

So begins homo sapiens’ life as traveling species, suited to cover distance in ways that the knuckle walking chimps could not. Front and rear limbs became specialized, with the arms now free from the job of forward propulsion. The open, flat terrain of the African savannah invited longer and longer trips, enabling the ability to seek more varied foods over a wider range. The hairless skin and increased sweat cooling capacity meant that the body temperature was better controlled, enabling the increased metabolic efficiency necessary for prolonged strenuous effort. The powerful fast twitch muscles of the chimp were replaced by a higher proportion of slow-twitch fibers which are particularly suited toward long steady effort.[2]

Homo sapiens can outrun just about every other species over prolonged distances – even a horse. Other animals, though faster in bursts than we are, do not possess the physical capacity to travel over miles and miles for hours at a time. They fatigue and are eventually exhausted and unable to evade human runners. Besides our cunning and opposable thumbs, endurance running was a signature advantage to early man. Early hunters loped along at five or six miles an hour following a heard, killing the animals that dropped back from fatigue. Memory and language allowed goups of hunters to cooperate in strategy, steering herd animals to obstacles, or toward other hunters who waited with fresh legs to take up pursuit. Stone tools allowed the kill to be dressed and divided, for skins and bones to be fashioned into clothing and “hardware” for making shelter and weapons. The innovation of cooking allowed early man to more easily consume and digest meat.

The running hunters’ quarry also provided the nutrients that fed the development of the human brain. Early bipeds like Austrolopithicus were much more like apes in the size and cognitive capacity of their brains. Several million years of hunting and eating animal protein in quantities that were much greater than their chimpanzee forebears was a crucial part of the emergence of one of evolution’s most complex and adaptable systems- human cognition. The plant forage available on the Aftrican savannah of 2.5 million years ago would have been insuffient to provide the calories and amino acids necessary to support the quantities of energy that proto-humans required to develop the complex cognitive and social faculties that were blossoming during this period. [3]

The human brain is a big user of food energy. Humans use 25% of their resting metabolism for the maintenance of brain activity, whereas other large primates use around 8%, and non-human mammals use only 3-4%.[4] In this way, we can see that our minds are a direct extension of our bodies, and that the ability to travel long distances on foot made basic human traits like memory, language and the spectrum of our emotional lives possible. The chicken/egg relationship of the mind and body is clear from a historical standpoint.


Rather, the facts about our evolutionary history help us separate what is fundamental to us versus what is recently acquired, the overlay specific to our place and time. In this spirit, it is important to explore what the spiritual world of our ancient running forebears was. The pre-agricultural spirituality of hunter gatherers is often dismissed as “superstition” or only the expression of stone-age people’s lack of scientific understanding, as if ancient people simply invented stories and beliefs to explain what they failed to understand through empirical knowledge. This point of view portrays stone age people as supremely ignorant, almost like children who are lost in their world, frightened and grasping at simplistic myths as a means of coping with the bleak terror of their ignorance.

This point of view fails to understand a key aspect of pre-historic man’s consciousness: a sense of deep and universal connectedness to their experience. No better example is the spiritual culture of native Australians, who until very recently lived as they had since coming to Australia some 70,000 years ago. The oral epoch known as “Dreamtime” encapsulates much of the essence of traditional Aboriginal belief.[5] This concept links past and present in a seamless field of connectivity. The entire world, including one’s perceptions and history are part of Dreamtime.[6] Mudooroo, an Aboriginal writer says, “The Dreaming' or 'the Dreamtime' indicates a psychic state in which or during which contact is made with the ancestral spirits, or the Law, or that special period of the beginning.”

This notion of “connectedness”, is common to most pre-agricultural belief systems, including Native Americans. This notion of connectedness does not explain the world in the absence of science, as academia so blindly proposes, but rather serves to decentralize the individual’s field of perception. To see one’s self as truly connected to one’s experience, without separation between what is perceived and who is perceiving is what Buddhist philosophy might call “egolessness”, or the absence of self/other split.

Because early man lacked complex scientific and culturally layered explanations of what his experience was, he was much more reliant on (one might also say intimate with) his direct experience. The dawn of empirical knowledge, of scientific discovery and analysis, was also the beginning of our mind/body split. Was this because science prevailed over superstition, or was it because when we stopped our nomadic wandering, our “running”, we also started supplanting the activities that connected us to our world with activities that, although useful in improving our physical comfort, also divorced us from our physical selves?

Discovering what lies behind the “mask” of our own individuality, our name, our job, what we look like, what we think—this is central to the spiritual path as the Buddha experienced and defined it. It is said that on the night of the Buddha’s awakening he was able to perceive his entire karmic history, to look back on all past incarnations and see clearly the causes and conditions that brought him to the present moment. (need source here, not just Herman Hesse) This understanding was not just a form of intuitive acrobatics, but like all the Buddha’s wisdom, derived as a practical antidote for the fixed concept of self that is the basis for our confusion and suffering.

We often hear that we are all “part of the human family”. Like so much well worn and cliched wisdom it sounds true but also trite, like one of many positive affirmations meant to convince us that “it’s all going to be okay”. But the notion of “family”, of inheritance, of ancestor—is central to many spiritual traditions. In Chinese spiritual culture ancestors are venerated because our physical bodies are entirely derived from them. This belief is heavily rooted in Taoism, a collection of teachings that emphasized the union all phenomena. Taoist teachings present the human body as a microcosm of the universe, with the organs of the body directly correlating to basic natural phenomena like the seasons, the elements and spatial directions.[7] In this way, relating to our ancestors, our bodies and our environment are actually one in the same.

The spiritual runner should understand that he or she is engaging in a long lineage of runners who perfected the activity over millions of years. Genetic science and the Buddha’s teachings on karma are synonymous is some ways. Karma is the simple cause and effect dynamic that governs phenomena. Genetics is a mechanical explanation of how beings are compiled from the characteristics of their forbears, or ancestors. Our bodies contain the bodies of those ancient runners in a very literal way.

Ch. 1: Running in the Tradition of the Buddha

The question “What is spiritual practice?” can be answered in many ways. From the sacrificial rites of early civilizations, to what myriad faiths and sects call “prayer” and supplication to an all powerful God, spirituality is more than what we believe, it is also what we do. Why? Could it be that we want something more than our thoughts, something beyond belief, something that does not flinch from the uncompromising quality of our mortality? All world religions prescribe specific and requisite routines that adherents do regularly as a means to more clearly understand. Spirituality, in whatever form, is “practiced”.

To further define the term “spiritual practice”, it is accurate to say that it is repetitive, rhythmic. The linguistic root for rhythm is akin to name of the Rhine river, and in its essence seeks to convey a notion of flow or continuous replenishment. Whether it be daily blood offerings of Mayan priests or the Roman Catholic mass, the Muslim’s call to prayer or the hours of clicking from a Vajrayana Buddhist’s mala beads, all spiritual practices harness the energy of renewal that dwells within us.

A third aspect of spiritual practice is that in whatever form, it endures and has its roots imbedded in one or other ancient traditions. A certain sifting is required, wherein the practice dwells deeply in the fabric of its time and place, but has the enduring power to not be swept away by the vagaries of cultural and political upheaval.

This book lies within the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness/awareness meditation, a refinement of the ancient contemplative traditions of Hindu sages dating back to 5000 BCE. In establishing and conveying this powerful and ancient body of wisdom Prince Siddharta Gautama, known as the Buddha, or "awake one", applied an elegantly simple approach: observing his own immediate experience. After unsuccessfully trying to overcome the difficulties of the human condition through the many spiritual techniques that flourished in the late Vedic civilization he inhabited, including extreme asceticism and the cultivation of supernatural powers, Prince Gautama dropped all hope of transcendence and simply looked unconditionally at his own experience for seven years. The very act of looking at the present instant, again and again, was the skillful means for his awakening. He spent the remainder of his life imparting what he learned to his disciples and died a mortal death.

Legend tells us that due to the supreme quality of his awareness, the Buddha said that he would return and offer techniques of contemplation that would benefit beings in other times, other karmic situations. The legendary Buddha Maitreya is one of several "manifestations" of the Buddha, is a time traveler, and who happens to be the embodiment of compassion. This acute level of prajna or "compassionate knowing" and upaya or "skillful means" characterizes how the Buddha's wisdom trancends the limits of historical or even personal specificity. It might be presumptuous to speculate on "how would the Buddha tell us to practice today?", but surely our particular situation would inform his instructions to us.

The present age is one of great possibilities and also great distraction. We moderns can be apprehensive to engage in the discipline of classical contemplative practice, whatever tradition it comes from. We often approach the quest for meaning and depth the way we approach other challenges: with our rational minds. We are “up in our heads”, and can even think our bodies stand in the way of deepening our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Running, like other “somatic”, or body-centered disciplines, including the Buddha’s technique of sitting meditation, brings the practitioner back to his/her body, the basic ground of our experience. Some of us may need more physical exertion than just sitting meditation affords. Just as our cultural proclivity is to “check out” through activities that allow us to disassociate from the body, so too can meditative practice be “heady” or detached from the physicality of our embodied experience.[1] The relatively strenuous and “grounded” quality of running can counter both the physical symptoms of the modern person’s sedentary malaise and his or her tendency to try and “think through” every personal challenge and the accumulation of adrenal biproducts from modern life's speed and complexity.

That millions of people run regularly does not mean they are tapping its potential for deep spiritual transformation, even if running for health is extremely beneficial. Just as sitting under a tree in the conventional sense is unlikely to be what experienced masters call “meditation”, running for the purpose of true personal discovery requires specific instruction, which this book seeks to provide. The book is divided into two parts: the view, or philosophical and scientific aspect of becoming an awake runner, and the actual practice that allows the aspirant to use running as a tool of personal transformation.

Neither instruction in spiritual philosophy or practice alone are sufficient to deliver transformative effects, and the Buddha cautioned against relying on only one. He understood that one cannot simply start applying techniques for examining and taming the mind without some understanding of how our minds work.

Part One of this book is mainly historical. Modern Human Beings’ find themselves at a crisis, personally, socially and ecologically. The roots of this crisis lie relatively late in our species’ history, and are predated by a long period of deep and complete connectedness to our world. Distance running was an integral part of this period and of our pre-human evolution. If approached correctly, it is a way of accessing a significant part of our birthright as humans.

Part Two explains how approaching our running as a means of self discovery rather than a means of self improvement is fundamental to using our daily run as tool for understanding who we are rather than becoming who we want to be. It is important to separate the spiritual practice of running from the contemporary habit of “working out”. Certain conventional assumptions need to be questioned, not just about our bodies and ideals about beauty and physical health, but about the how we experience the world. Cultivating one’s motivation and approach through learning paves the way to making our running into more than just a workout, and places it appropriately within the tradition of the Buddha and the enlightened beings who followed in his footsteps.

Part Three is a detailed manual on how to use a regular running routine into a tool for taming our minds and expanding our awareness. This progressive approach is designed for both the beginning runner and the veteran.

That experienced meditators and runners alike will find some of this book familiear is no coincidence. I have been a regular runner for over 25 years, a regular meditator in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition for almost 15. When once the two activities competed for my time, I am increasingly loath to compartmentalize them. This book is the expression of that co-mingling.

Perhaps you have glimpsed at things while running (or riding the bus) that you would like to examine more intensively, but usually find running to be painful and boring. Perhaps you are an accomplished runner who wants to use this hard-won skill as a way to explore the patterns and habits of your mind. Perhaps you are already doing some form of contemplative practice, but would like to add a more body-centered practice to your routine. This book is presented so that any of these types of readers can cultivate a “spiritual” running practice. It is important that the readers not “skip ahead”, particularly in Part II. Just like learning to play a musical instrument, failing to learn and master the fundamentals will stunt the student’s progress and lead to recurrent frustration. A lack of proficiency in the basics will prevent the spiritual runner from being able to follow more subtle and “advanced” techniques. Just like cooking a gourmet meal, no one step is difficult in the process of becoming an “awake runner”, the trick is putting these steps in the proper order.