Run With Mu

Continuing with this somewhat free form series (here’s parts 1, 2, and 3), you finally pulled on your running clothes and shoes and are headed out the door. Except you probably want to head out to the back yard, or to some quiet place. And you’re not going to run. Not quite yet.

So you’ve found your secluded spot – your fenced back yard, your big spare bedroom, wherever – and you’re standing there in your running clothes and shoes.

Take a breath. Take several, and just let them come and go on their own, much like meditation. Feel your running clothes hanging from your body.

Now, flex your toes. Feel the muscles in your toes and calves expand and contract, the ends of your toes pressing lightly against the inside of your shoes. At the same time, maintain awareness of your breathing, the space around you, all of the sounds that appear and disappear. Do this for a minute or two.

Now, as you breathe in and without forcing the breath, lift your foot and take one step forward. Feel all of the muscles that have to work to make this happen, how it affects your balance, your breathing, your thought patterns. The soft press of your foot, landing gently on the surface just beneath it. Feel the difference in your balance and posture, now that you’ve taken that step. Look around and see how taking that one step may have changed your perspective, what you can see and how you view the space around you.

A single step. That’s all. So much has to happen for that step to take place. And so much follows, so many things can change, just from taking it. A step is a small miracle, a modest agent of change.

Continue to take one step after another, slowly, timing your steps with the coming and going of your breath. You are going slow, slow, slow. You are feeling every muscle used to take those steps, all of the tension and release, the press of your foot against the surface of the earth. If you’re doing this outside, you might notice even the slightest dips and changes in the texture of the earth’s surface.

What you’re doing is a form of kinhin, or walking meditation. In Zen practice, we engage in kinhin to stretch our legs after long periods of zazen, or seated meditation. As part of our running practice, it is a profoundly simple way to re-engage with the basic act of taking a step – the moment that just precedes the step, the moment of taking the step, and the moment after the step is taken. It reconnects you with the surface beneath your feet and, like yoga, reacquaints you with your body. It can also heighten your walking/running awareness, making you more mindful of the many dozens of tiny things that have to happen for even a step to take place.

Will you practice kinhin when you actually run? Not consciously. But if you practice a few minutes of kinhin before and/or after each run, you might find it seeping into your running practice. You’ll be more aware of the ground beneath your feet, the changing environment around you, your muscles working to propel you forward, your perception being transformed as your direction and the light changes. Will it make you a better runner? It might help make you a more aware runner. And that’s a big part of what Running with Mu is all about – bringing awareness back to your running and to your life.

When we are truly aware, being fully present with every step, we reconnect with our bodies, our environment, and our running, and realize how they work closely together. We begin to understand how even the slightest change in pace or incline affects our breathing and our body rhythm. Without adding in a lot of extra thinking to the equation (although, as with seated meditation, you might be a little self-conscious about it at first), we become more understanding of just what happens when we run, an understanding that goes deeper than the blinking numbers on our stopwatch. Your running world begins to widen a bit.

Okay, enough kinhin. Now go for a run, in any direction you please – don’t worry about a specific route or time you have to be back. Remember, you’re not wearing a watch (or carrying a cell phone or iPod, I hope), so just go … any pace you’d like, even walk some if you want. Go until you begin to feel pleasantly tired, then head for home.

Back home, be sure to take a moment to practice kinhin at the end of your run for 3-4 minutes and see how different your breathing and muscles feel now that your run is over. Take a few minutes to feel how running transforms your body, your breathing, how you feel, even your thought processes. Take a moment to relive your run and then, just let it go. Whether you thought it was bad or good, it was just one run of hopefully many to come. One day’s run cannot define you. That’s something else we’ll perhaps eventually learn by Running with Mu. One step at a time, one breath at a time, one run at a time, one day at a time.

I’ll try to post more on Running with Mu later this week.