Meditation Practice: Love the Journey
When we go for a run, we are on a special type of journey where the aim is not necessarily to get somewhere. The journey itself is the purpose. We are in motion because the body loves motion and thrives with movement—our muscles are flushed with blood and fresh oxygen, the nerves tingle, we say hello to the world and rejoice in our ability to traverse it. If we pay attention, during each of these journeys, an entire world of meditative practices opens up to us.
As you cross the threshold from your home to the path, what is the first thing you notice? Is it the quality of light at dawn, the coolness of the air, the smell of trees, the sound of traffic, the tightness of your shoelaces? Every step we take invites us into the practice of sensing the universe around us. Running is great for meditative alertness because it does away with the stereotype that we are supposed to sit still, make our minds blank, and be “mindful.” Mindfulness can be thought of as paying attention to the news the senses are bringing us in each moment. When we run, hike, or walk the dog, we can develop awareness skills to help us navigate our inner worlds.
When I step outside in the morning to watch the sky turn from dark to light , the first people I see are usually runners. They are trotting, striding, and gliding along by the water, savoring the morning air, radiating the joy of movement. Runners tend to be the more alert people around, because many things out there are bigger than them and moving faster. Each car and bicycle that shares the road or an alley is a potential threat to be avoided, so there is a continuous scan of the all these other bodies as runners move through space. Runners engage with many types of alertness in quick succession: pleasure, awareness of time, awareness of the path, getting into a zone, and sometimes careful scrutiny of bodily sensations: Is that a cramp coming on? At all times, runners need to be able to switch, in a fraction of a second, into wariness and caution: Is that dog going to chase me? Does that driver see me?
Whenever we are moving through space, while running or walking, we must notice the uneven surfaces—each brick, curb, and patch of gravel. There may be places where a tree root has lifted the sidewalk, creating a raised crack to catch our toe. The brain tracks and responds to all this subliminally, so we can function on automatic much of the time. But when we add our conscious appreciation to the process, something wonderful happens—a sense of grace emerges. We become engaged with our senses more intimately, and the continual, skillful adjustment of our stride and the placing each foot can feel automagical. [Whoa, is that a word? cool]
Play with the senses.
The human body comes equipped with many sensory pathways that tell us about the world within our skin, as well as the world in the outer environment around us. We can sense acceleration and balance, body position, temperature, hunger, thirst, taste, smell, and blood carbon dioxide levels. We can sense sound waves (hearing), and light waves (vision). Unless we have some visual impairment, the visual sense lets us see straight ahead, also to the left and right, and above and below, so we have a spherical visual field we are running through. Our kinesthetic intelligence integrates various inputs: from our feet, ankles, knees, legs, hips, and all the joints of the body, with information from the inner ears along with signals from our tendons and muscles to give us the ability to move through the world in balance. No matter who you are, you experience your life through your senses.
To make a game out of the senses as you run, you can use the name of each sense as a mantra, and notice it for a few breaths as you go: seeing, hearing, feeling. I am seeing the path in front of me, I am hearing the whoosh of the breath, I am feeling my feet touching the ground. Or you could use breathing, balancing, accelerating. Take your pick of sensory inputs that interest you and rotate between them. Simply honoring one or more of the senses as you run or walk, even part of the time, can make for a more refreshing outing.
Another dimension of running experience is the relationship of our bodies and the body of the earth below us. There is a mysterious attraction, called gravity, between all physical bodies. Gravity is not an obstacle. We are nourished by gravity—it actually allows for our muscles and bones to grow stronger. The astronauts floating around in the space station work very hard to keep their muscles from atrophying, but no matter how much time they spend exercising, their bones weaken in a process called spaceflight osteopenia. For every month spent in space, astronauts lose 1% of their bone mass. The calcium just dissolves into their bloodstream.
For us here on Earth, when we run in the gravitational field of this planet, we are engaging our entire skeletal system, making it work, and this keeps the bones healthy. We have the word “gravity,” but we could just as well call it love. The earth loves our bodies and attracts them, and our bodies are in conversation with the earth. Every step is a conversation with breath and balance.
Play with gravity.
Notice each foot as it rises off the ground, and follow its arc until it reaches the height of its lift, then switch to the other foot as it rises. In this way, you are savoring a moment of lightness or levitation several times a second. Track the momentum as each foot leaves the ground and zooms upward. This is a teeny tiny awareness, and it can be very interesting.
A beautiful Sanskrit word for journey is yatra, (“journey, march expedition.” The a’s are long, so it is yaatraa). Runners know, as well as dog walkers, hikers, strollers, and joggers all know, that the body loves to journey and is enlivened by it. You can love every step, because being right here, in movement, is the aim of the expedition.
The yoga tradition teaches that all the meditative techniques you need are already inside you. Explore and you will find them—already there in your most intimate spaces. Your senses, all of them, are marvels of engineering, created by the universe to perceive itself. The more you attend to the senses as you venture on your yatra, the richer your experience of embodiment becomes.
Dr. Lorin Roche is the author of The Radiance Sutras, a fresh version of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a classic yoga text describing 112 doorways into meditation. Lorin trains meditation teachers worldwide and works with individuals to fine-tune their meditation practice to go with their physical, emotional and spiritual constitution. Visit radiancesutras.com. With Dave Stringer, Donna De Lory, and Joni Allen, he has just released Elixir, a musical album based on The Radiance Sutras.
Dr. Lorin Roche began practicing with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra in 1968 as part of scientific research on the physiology of meditation. He has a PhD from the University of California at Irvine, where his research focused on the language meditators generate to describe their inner experiences. He is the author of The Radiance Sutras and Meditation Made Easy. With his wife, Camille Maurine, he wrote Meditation Secrets for Women. A teacher of meditation for 46 years, Lorin’s approach centers on how to customize the practices to suit one’s individual nature. Lorin leads the Radiance Sutras Meditation Teacher Training, a 200 hour certification program registered with Yoga Alliance. Lorin teaches regularly at the Esalen Institute and around the world.