There comes a time for all of us when words fail.
I started running out of necessity. I’m an equestrian, and in early 2020 when lockdown began and I couldn’t ride I needed a way to keep my body moving. And I also desperately needed to get out of the house. Since outdoor exercise was encouraged, and all I needed to run was a pair of shoes, I began training for my first 5k at 43 in the middle of a pandemic.
Spirituality has always been part of my life. My earliest memories are of crawling under the altar of our church to curl up in the lap of God, of walking through the forest feeling the earth breathe all around me, of singing to the songbirds in our yard because I felt certain we were making music together, of snapping photos with an ancient camera to try to capture the fleeting Beauty I saw all around me.
But I didn’t start running as a spiritual practice, far from it. I started running to get some time alone, to move my feet, to keep from turning into a ball of anxiety.
Relearning Rest
If you are a runner you know the first few weeks are miserable. Everything hurt, and with every step my lungs and heart told me they were going to explode if I didn’t stop right now. Now I’m an experienced spiritual practitioner, I know about habits. And I was determined to master this running habit so I ran daily. (Experienced runners are cringing now.) And I tried to increase my distance every day.
It didn’t go well. A couple weeks in I was totally exhausted, one of my feet had developed horrible soreness, and running felt just as hard as it had at the beginning. I had forgotten about rest. As someone who teaches the necessity of sabbath I should have known better. Finally some experienced runners suggested I run every other day.
Within a week everything changed. Running started to feel easier, each run was a little better than the last, and I felt better overall. Running, like any other exercise, requires rest. We must let our bodies recover and rebuild when we’ve asked them to do something hard. And we have to create the space (rest) for them to do that.
This isn’t just true for running. It is true for your brain and soul as well. You need rest, real rest and you need it regularly.
All In My Head
Once I’d realized I needed rest and my body began to get stronger I realized something else, my actual limits were far beyond my comfort zone. My body quickly told me that my legs were sore, and my lungs were burning, and my heart rate was too high and I should just stop. But if I didn’t (please know I had a clean bill of health, do not ignore your body if you have not had your wellness checked by your doctor), if I kept going things got better, not worse. The ache in my legs eased as they became fully warmed up. And it turned out, lungs don’t actually explode.
So much of what we believe to be true, what we are convinced of because it feels comfortable, is in fact not the whole real world. But we’ll never find that out if we don’t meet the person who is different from us, try the new meditation, read the book, research the data. Without the willingness to endure discomfort and to chose to move through it we remain stuck in the same place. We cannot grow.
Rabbi Abraham Twerski talks about stress (difficulty) and lobsters. Yes lobsters. You see as it grows a lobster fills up its shell, it becomes tight and uncomfortable, the shell literally puts pressure on the lobster. And so the lobster hides away somewhere safe and sheds its shell and grows a new one. If the lobster didn’t feel the pressure of its old shell constraining it, it would never shed that shell and never grow!
We too, when we feel constrained, tight, uncomfortable have to be willing to shed the old and to grow into something new. You will never run further if you don’t push through the discomfort. You will never learn if you don’t accept the discomfort of not knowing something, of being potentially wrong.
One Foot At A Time
But my spiritual running, or my running as spiritual practice really took shape the week two beloved friends had surgery. I was running while one of them was in surgery, our friend’s group had sent all the texts early that morning and I put on my running clothes and started my music and began slapping the pavement with my feet.
The world of course is on fire. It always is, but right now it really is. With pandemic, and police violence, and protests against systemic racism, wildfires, a collapsing economy. Tiny I ran in the early morning, knowing my friend was doing this incredibly hard thing right at that moment and I could do nothing about the fires burning, large and small. And in that moment every stride became a spiritual practice. Every time my foot pushed off from the earth and propelled me down the trail it was a prayer.
For my friend.
For the burning trees my body cried out a sorrowful apology to the woods in which I ran.
For the melting ice.
For the hundreds, thousands of people killed by those who would have protected them.
For the black and brown citizens of this country struggling to breathe.
For the hundreds of thousands we will lose, unnecessarily, to this horrible disease.
For a thousand other pains I cannot fix myself.
And this is the strangeness of our common life. While I cannot look away from the hurts of the world, must not pretend I am not part of the pain and the hurting it is also true that I in this moment cannot solve any or all of the problems above.
And so I run, or light candles, or sit still for prayers. As I’ve said before, prayer isn’t so much about asking a Divine Being to solve all our problems for us; prayers is meant to change us into the sort of people who act. If in spiritual running each footfall is a prayer, each pump of our arms a physical mantra then this too needs to change us. One foot at a time.
Fuel & Action
Our spiritual practices are like the food that fuels our bodies, they fill us up and give us the energy to empty ourselves back out into a world that desperately needs our love, and our action. If I feel my feet drumming out the name of a friend while I run, I need to also text that friend afterwards and find out if they need me to drop off a dinner (or some other practical help). If my feet are drumming out the pain and suffering of climate change, or racial injustice I also need to give money, march, and join organizations that are doing practical work for change.
It helps me integrate my life to think about spiritual practices, especially physical ones this way. After all, to make my body strong and healthy I have to feed it, and by feeding it well I have the energy to run, and my running can be (if I am so intentioned) fuel for my spiritual self. And my spiritual self is what motivates me to care for my body. It is a cycle of care that is ongoing (and it isn’t just people who can run for whom this is true!).
Letting it Be
Spiritual running reminds us to let our practices be what they will be. Sometimes my run is about seeing the beauty of the world around me. The morning sun glints off the scuffs in the road where traffic has worn off the top layer of blacktop and exposed the aggregate underneath, it shines like a path of diamonds. Sometimes the odd neighborhood cat needs attention, or a bluejay is showing off on the dewy fence, just for me. These are spiritual moments because they remind me of the beauty that exists all around me.
Other days each of my footfalls, hard earned, remind me of those who cannot safely just go out for a run because of where they live, or the color of their skin, or because of illness or physical disability. This awareness is also a spiritual practice, an important one because it takes me outside myself and reminds me to be aware of the other.
Sometimes it is a practice simply because I have to chose to get up out of my comfortable bed, lace up my shoes, and put one foot in front of another. Spiritual practices are not always the shiny cool thing we want to do. They are sometimes the things we eat because they’re good for us, not because we want to.
So, if right now your running practice is one of these things, or all of them, or none of them; that’s OK. Keep your eyes open, pay attention and see what happens.
