A Guide to Mindful Running
Ah, running—that dreaded act by which so many people try to lose weight and improve their fitness. If only it were easier, you could motivate yourself to do it regularly and have the washboard abs of your dreams.
I happen to love running—as do many others—but the non-runners I know can never understand why. To them, running feels like torture, whether it's due to chronic shin splints or simply not having much cardio endurance. Not everyone can get themselves to enjoy running, but I've found that it takes a fair amount of practice before your conditioning improves enough to you to start enjoying it. Until then, even short runs can be difficult.
All runners struggle as they push themselves to ever greater distances or shorter times. You're constantly meeting and exceeding your perceived limits, pushing through exhaustion that would seem to presage a collapse. Training helps you recognize your limits better and know when you're actually in danger and when you're just wimping out. You become aware of what your body can actually do and to what degree your mind gets in the way. However, the learning curve can be steep at the beginning.
Anyone who pursues running develops their own techniques for persevering through tough spots in their training. Since I also practice mindfulness meditation, I began to wonder if I could bring the calm awareness I cultivate on the cushion into those moments during a run when my legs scream for me to quit. But before I get into that, lets take a detour through the theory behind it.
Buddhism and Suffering
“‘All created things are grief and pain,’ he who knows this and sees this becomes passive in pain...”
All things are grief and pain, you say? Sounds pretty bleak. Well, it's not as pessimistic as you might think.
The keyword in this quote is the term dukkha—from the Pali language of the oldest Buddhist scriptures—translated here as "grief and pain," but most often as "suffering." For our purposes, it's best understood as unsatisfactoriness.
Dukkha is the first of the Four Noble Truths, which is believed to be the first teaching the Buddha gave after attaining enlightenment. According to the second Noble Truth, dukkha is caused by clinging to fleeting desires.
When the Buddha said "all created things are dukkha," he meant mainly that we can never really accept experiences as they are. You cling to pleasure, but pleasures are fleeting, and as soon as they end you set about trying to get them again. You dislike pain and try to escape from it as quickly as possible, but it always seems to come back. You spend your life running to and fro between these twin poles of clinging and aversion, never really content with the reality of any particular moment. This is dukkha. This is also what makes you want to quit things when they get difficult—like running.
The fleeting nature of experience—anicca, or "impermanence," in Pali—together with dukkha and anatta—Pali for "non-self"—make up what Buddhist's call the Three Marks of Existence. Every being, and every mental and physical event they experience, is said to be characterized by the three marks. The enlightened sage is said to be constantly aware of the three marks in all phenomena he perceives. Part of the training in insight meditation includes learning to see the three marks during meditation sittings.
Meditation and Mindfulness
To understand and use the technique I'm about to outline, you need to have some experience with meditation. If you've never tried it, I can't guarantee that any of this will make sense to you. This article by meditation teacher Jack Kornfield can help you get started on a daily practice. You'll at least need to understand mindfulness and be able to concentrate your mind to some degree. But why do you need to do this?
“Underneath [the ordinary mental perspective] lies another perspective, a completely different way to look at the universe. It is a level of functioning in which the mind does not try to freeze time, does not grasp onto our experience as it flows by, and does not try to block things out and ignore them. It is a level of experience beyond good and bad, beyond pleasure and pain. It is a lovely way to perceive the world, and it is a learnable skill.”
Meditation is a skill—a set of skills, really—used to calm the mind and allow you to see reality more clearly. When you first begin to meditate, you quickly realize how chaotic your mind is. It might even frighten you to suddenly become aware of this fact. However, with practice, you'll find things begin to slow down and settle. A famous Buddhist metaphor likens the development of the mind through meditation to a progression from a raging waterfall to a running stream, and finally to a still lake.
When the rush of thoughts and feelings slows down, you're better able to isolate particular mental events and follow chains of causation. You might suddenly become aware of thought arising at the moment it arises, followed immediately by an emotion reacting to that thought, which then leads to more emotions and thoughts. These patterns in your mind occur constantly and you rarely become aware of them. You might rant to your partner for half an hour before it even occurs to you that you're angry! And upon reflection, you might not even know why you're angry.
In a concentrated meditative state, the key mechanism for observing experiences is mindfulness.
“Mindfulness is nonjudgmental observation. It is the ability of the mind to observe without criticism. With this ability, one sees things without condemnation or judgement. One is surprised by nothing. One simply takes a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states.”
With mindful awareness, you observe your experiences objectively and become aware of just how your mind works. At this point, you will notice something peculiar about your mental events.
Let's say you have an itch. Normally the moment you perceive an itch, you move to scratch it. Why? Because of dukkha. When you examine a sensation like itching through the lens of mindfulness, you'll notice two distinct events. First, you experience the bare sensation of itching. Then, you experience the desire for it to end. You see, there is nothing inherently "bad" about the itch, but you've somehow become conditioned to not liking that feeling, so you started scratching any area of your body that itches to make it stop. It became a habit, and now you scratch yourself all the time without even thinking about it.
But, so what? What's the problem here? Well, this experience is a small demonstration of the hold dukkha has over your life. At practically every moment, you're compulsively trying to escape from uncomfortable feelings, often unconsciously. You scratch your itch. You adjust your position in your chair. You think about having a beer when you get home because you don't want to be at work anymore. You're constantly trying to escape from what you're experiencing, and you never will escape because unpleasant things never really stop happening. The more you allow yourself to seek an escape, the more trapped you become.
Mindfulness teaches you a way out of this cycle by accepting your experience.
When you're given mindfulness instructions, whether by a guru or a blog, you're told to simply observe your experience as it is. The instruction is deceptively simple: how is simply paying attention to things going to change anything, let alone "enlighten" me? Because the unspoken corollary to this is that, simply by paying attention, you're actively fighting against the desire to "fix" things. In our itch example, you're allowing yourself to be aware of the itch and the desire to scratch it, but not allowing yourself to take action about it.
And even if you give into the temptation to scratch, you accept that, too. By accepting all of this, it ceases to be such a nuisance. You realize that you don't have to react compulsively to all stimuli. You can choose how you want to act and accept whatever the outcome is.
“This ‘bare attention’ aspect of [mindfulness] has an intriguing potential, since it is capable of leading to a ‘de-automatization’ of mental mechanisms. Through bare [mindfulness] one is able to see things just as they are, unadulterated by habitual reactions and projections. By bringing the perceptual process into the full light of awareness, one becomes conscious of automatic and habitual responses to perceptual data. Full awareness of these automatic responses is the necessary preliminary step to changing detrimental mental habits.”
I had all this on my mind as I started to experiment with "mindful running." Walking meditation is a common practice among Buddhists, so why not running meditation? I began to incorporate concentration, mindfulness, and observance of the Three Marks—particularly dukkha—into my running sessions, particularly during the most troublesome stretches late into the run. Here's what I came up with.
The Run
Start by bringing your attention to your body in motion, especially the feeling of your feet hitting the ground. Mentally repeating "left, right, left, right" along with the corresponding footfalls will help you concentrate your mind, as will focusing your gaze on a particular point or distance ahead of you.
Next, bring your attention to all the sensations you experience as unpleasant—your heavy breathing, the sweat stinging your eyes, the cramp developing in your left calf—and hold those in attention.
You want these sensations to end. You want to stop running so that they'll stop and you can return to pleasant equilibrium. You want to take a shower and eat ice cream. Anything but this! But by holding these sensations in your attention, you can actually decouple the bare sensations from the longing for them to stop. You can allow yourself to exist alongside them.
Just pay attention to the unpleasant sensations. Do they intensify? It might seem like it at first, but inevitably they pass away, like they were never there. You never had to escape them because they end on their own, even if they are followed by other painful sensations afterwards. By holding them in bare attention with a concentrated mind, you'll find that they will cease to bother you.
“The Buddhist view of the mutability of the reactive emotions has always rested on this phenomenon... not that the emotions necessarily disappear... but that the life goes out of them as the feeling of ‘I’ is found to be so much less substantial than was first assumed.”
You enter a state of mind where you are no longer bothered by exhaustion. You'll feel a vague sensation of lightness and feel your mind and body working together in perfect unison. You're not avoiding the unpleasant feelings, but accepting them so radically that the cease to be unpleasant. You're still aware of everything that's happening and will know if you're actually pushing yourself too hard. Unless you have an actual medical condition, you're almost certainly not.
In this state of mind, your sensations feel outside of you, as though "you" were really just boundless space with sensations and thoughts floating in orbit around a point of awareness. Your movements seem to happen automatically, especially now that they aren't held back by your desire to quit. Once "you" are out of the way, everything chugs along more efficiently. Who is actually running, or is "running" just happening without anyone's help?
“Pain, negative emotions, and other internal states portraying parts of reality as undesirable can act as causes of suffering only if they are consciously owned. A system that does not appear to itself cannot suffer, because it has no sense of ownership.”
Suddenly you glance at the time on the treadmill and realize how long you've actually been running: almost invariably, not as long as you thought. And as soon as you're pulled back into temporal awareness, you're also pulled back into suffering. All at once you're struck with the full brunt of the exhaustion accompanied by dukkha and you immediately want it to stop. You slow down, but somehow this pace feels more difficult than the faster one did a moment ago.
You won't be able to remain in the mindful state for very long, although this may depend on how concentrated you're able to keep your mind. Meditation experience will make a difference here, but even seasoned meditators sometimes find themselves planning the next day's outfit for ten minutes before remembering that they're trying to meditate. We're only human—it comes with the territory. Since this state is also fleeting, it's best to save it for the particularly difficult segments of your run.
Beyond the Run
We started off trying to get a beach bod, and now we're entering altered states of consciousness and feeling our sense of self dissolve. Where are we going with all this?
I want you to ask yourself why you want to run in the first place and why you're reading an article about how to make running easier. Are you running from something—a boring lifestyle, a body you don't like, other people's opinions about that body—or running just for the experience of running?
We often pursue things like this as merely a means to an end, for a reward that justifies that effort. In Buddhist parlance, we do it out of suffering, and we end up perpetuating the cycle that leads to more suffering. It's like trying to fill a bucket that has a hole in the bottom: all the water you put in eventually drains out, but you resign yourself to continuously refilling the bucket. A pointless endeavor.
All this is to say that I'm talking about how to live better, not merely run or look better. Running is an excellent testing ground for the principles of mindfulness since it exposes you to difficult sensations and tests your mental fortitude, but many other activities can do that as well. In fact, ideally you can bring mindfulness to all aspects of your life, not just in your quiet moments or when you're struggling. Mindfulness is about developing awareness of everything in your life, unifying the disparate parts in order to understand who—or what—you really are.
After much of this mindful introspection, you may find that you don't really know who you are anymore. This may be a frightening ordeal, but it need not be. You've just realized that there's more to you than you previously allowed yourself to know, and reaching this place of "not knowing" is a fertile ground indeed for self-knowledge. Even if you never get to the bottom of this, you'll find yourself transformed along the way.
