Over the last five years, I have been offering workshops that blend a range of mindfulness-based practices with running and explore what it means to bring a mind orientated towards present moment awareness into physical activity.
My work in this area in fact began in 2017 when I co-created and supported a five-day WCF retreat led by Jake Lyne, which we called Zen Meditation & Running. Based at Barmoor in the wild terrain of the North York Moors, the programme followed the basic structure of a Silent Illumination retreat, but we included a daily trail run starting with 45 minutes and building to over an hour and a half towards the end of the retreat. Participant feedback was extremely encouraging and I took confidence in the fact that it is entirely possible to engage in serious Dharma practice when introducing what we would consider to be less conventional activity, involving sustained aerobic effort, into a traditional retreat programme. As one participant shared:
I loved the running…although I found the vastness and beauty of the moors quite impossible to contain in my awareness and had to settle with the earth beneath my feet and swinging arms and legs. Maybe once, we reached the top of a hill and stopped to look around, I saw the sky and the grass and the sheep with clarity. My mind was quiet enough to ask nothing and just see – ‘ordinary mind, wanting nothing’.
Since this time, I have trained with Bangor University as a teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and now use the framework of contemporary mindfulness-based interventions for my current teaching.
Firstly, let’s consider what it is that defines a run as a mindful run. To explain what is meant by mindfulness to newcomers to contemplative practices, I use Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness as ‘the awareness that arises through paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.’
Paying attention on purpose
Running with mindfulness firstly has to do with actively choosing to pay attention to both body and mind, and specifically the body in effortful motion. That's a very different starting point to how we can often find ourselves switching into a state of automatic pilot when engaging in a familiar activity. Instead we are running and knowing that we are running.
Paying attention in the present moment
To pay attention is to be present. We are present with our embodied experience – knowing the difference between the body in stillness and the body running; present with our mental and emotional state – knowing what thoughts may be present, recognising our prevailing mood; present with our environment - sensing the terrain beneath our feet and the unfolding landscape before our eyes.
Pay attention non-judgementally
In being present we offer the possibility to be open and receptive to our changing moment to moment experience. Such openness can be characterised by a growing capacity to embrace all of our experience as it arises without reactivity, whether pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. For example, we might experience the arrival of rain on our run as simply ‘raining’ rather than an irritant that is somehow impairing our experience.
Having established a sense of what mindfulness is in running it is worth considering why bringing mindfulness to such an activity might be of value to us.
My coaching experience in recent years has brought me in to contact with a broad range of runners from the highly experienced to complete beginners. A common theme that comes up for people is how running can sometimes be a struggle, both mentally and physically. Others notice that their enjoyment and pleasure in running have diminished over time and this is something they are keen to rediscover.
One of the key benefits of applying mindfulness when running that I like to focus upon and explore with others is how we can cultivate the capacity to engage in an activity that can be both physically and at times mentally demanding, with more joy and equanimity.
As regular runners will know, sometimes when we run, the body feels great and the mind is focused and relaxed. Other times we may be battling negative self-talk and bodily discomfort. It can be a real revelation for people unfamiliar with mindfulness and spiritual practice to consider and experience that these are all temporary states that will come and go. Recognising these facets of experience as being transient by nature may be something which we can all intuit at some level, but I've learned not to underestimate the value of realising this personally for those who may never really have considered this before.
If we can meet all of this with a mindful attitude, we learn to contain the full breadth of our experience without judgement. This is the view of equanimity. True equanimity does not deny or disregard the difficulties that will arise when we run, nor does it cling unnecessarily to the joys of running. Learning the skill of establishing a mind that inclines towards the present moment without judgement can then begin to open a doorway to a greater sense of calmness, composure and stability.
To sustain our liking or disliking of these fleeting moments only takes us further away from our direct experience. In the words of Rumi, we “welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows…”.
Equanimity, in allowing us to drop any grasping at or aversion to our experience, has the taste of freedom from the judging mind. This is what it means to find equanimity in our running. We can learn how to cultivate this quality simply by paying attention in the ways described above when we run. With practice we can begin to run free of judgement, with mindful awareness and attention as the key.
Joy as a naturally arising state of mind
I have described joy as another potential benefit that we can experience when running, particularly through the application of mindfulness. How can this be supported when knowing from my own experience that on some occasions when we run it can be largely experienced as dissatisfying?
We have just considered the fruit of equanimity as offering a sense of freedom that transcends the dualities of good and bad, liking and disliking. As we develop our muscle of mindfulness we are learning to become a broader and deeper container to hold the never-ending flow of our experience. In growing our capacity for the mind to become less troubled by judgements of this or that, we can begin to look more deeply at the qualities of our natural state of mind. We may associate the unperturbed mind with feelings of clarity, focus, ease and rest, which in turn can bring forth a natural sense of joyfulness.
The Buddhist view of the mind’s true nature identifies joy as one of its fundamental qualities, and the cultivation of mindfulness is offered as a means to more readily access such innate attributes of the mind. As we train ourselves in becoming more mindful in all of our day-to-day activities, we can begin to more regularly experience this quality of joy as naturally arising.
If joy is therefore recognised as a natural quality of the mind, then applying mindfulness when we run offers an access point to the joy which is always present and available to us. Joy can arise when we learn how to establish the mind of equanimity. We learn to let be and let go of the busy judgemental mind. We learn how to get out of our own way.
This takes me back to the wide-open moorland landscape of the North York Moors. The same participant reported before the retreat feeling “like a wandering head-on-a-stick, a ‘teetering bulb of dread and dream’ looking outwards through dimmed eyes and looking rapidly inwards. But during those few days in Yorkshire something seemed to drop down, or drop away. I could feel gravity through my bones and cold air on my skin and fantastic, open stillness.”
Having spent much of the last half an hour running steadily up a long, shallow climb, when we paused on our run, causes and conditions seemingly offered an opening to ‘ordinary mind, wanting nothing.’ I sense there was something in this person’s experience which echoed qualities of equanimity.
I make no particular claim for running as a spiritual practice per se, and yet it is an entirely natural activity, intrinsic to being human – at least for those that are fortunate enough to be able to run – and indeed fundamental to our survival once upon a time. There is something about its completeness, the way in which running fully engages both body and mind, and which can frequently test body and mind at their edges, which I believe lends itself as a gateway to practice if we’re prepared to look and to engage, and from which we can derive great benefits to support us on the path.
Stuart McLeod leads the Kent Chan Group and is the founder of RUN:ZEN which offers mindful running coaching, workshops and retreats (https://runzen.co.uk).
