Last Sunday, during reflections shared in honour of the fifth anniversary of the passing of Shinzan Roshi, I spoke about something that has become deeply important in my own practice: Zen Running.
As someone who has always felt deeply connected to sport, I was fascinated when I first learned that Shinzan Roshi used to run every day. For some reason, that touched me profoundly.
When I first encountered Zen practice, I imagined someone sitting silently on a cushion in a meditation hall. And of course, that image is not entirely wrong. But over time, I discovered it is only part of the picture.
When most people hear the word running, they think of movement, effort, goals, performance, competition, achievement. Running is often associated with pushing forward, improving, overcoming.
At first glance, zazen and running seem completely opposite.
One is stillness.
The other is movement.
And yet, inspired both by Shinzan Roshi’s daily running practice and by the way Daizan Roshi spoke about Zen Running, I became increasingly curious. I genuinely wanted to understand what this practice was really about.
What I slowly discovered surprised me:
the inner experience of running and the inner experience of zazen are deeply connected.
In fact, in some essential way, they are not different at all.
In zazen, we sit still and meet ourselves.
In running, we move and meet ourselves.
On the cushion, the legs hurt.
On the road, the legs hurt.
In zazen, the mind becomes restless.
In running, the mind becomes restless.
And in both practices, many times, we want to escape the present moment.
But the practice itself is astonishingly simple:
return.
Return to the breath.
Return to the body.
Return to this step.
Return to this moment.
Again and again.
Rediscovering the Body
There was another discovery too — one that, for me, felt almost extraordinary.
I discovered I had a body.
That may sound strange, but for many years my relationship with sport existed almost entirely inside the head:
times,
targets,
self-image,
ambition,
fantasies about success,
ideas about toughness,
the refusal to stop no matter what the body was trying to communicate.
The body itself barely appeared in the picture.
Usually, I only noticed it when something went wrong:
injury,
fatigue,
pain,
exhaustion,
the need to slow down.
And very often I blamed the body for failing to keep up with the ambitions of the mind.
But through practice, something gradually reversed.
The body stopped being a machine carrying out mental ambitions.
It became something to listen to.
Something to inhabit.
Something alive.
Something wise.
Running became less about imposing an idea onto the body and more about entering into relationship with it.
Feeling directly:
the breath,
the rhythm,
the tiredness,
the changing energy from one moment to the next.
And strangely enough, the less I ran chasing an image of success, the more intimate running became.
Less heroic perhaps.
But much more real.
Much more present.
The road itself slowly stopped being an obstacle standing between me and some imagined achievement.
The road itself became practice.
An outdoor meditation hall.
Sometimes difficult.
Sometimes joyful.
Sometimes completely ordinary.
But alive.
This Body, This Breath, This Step
What zazen and Zen Running both seem to teach is this:
to stop living exclusively inside the head.
To rediscover direct experience.
To embody completely what we are doing.
To be running rather than thinking about running.
To be breathing rather than managing or controlling the breath.
To be fully inside this living moment rather than constantly projecting ourselves into imagined futures, goals or fears.
This body.
This breath.
This step.
Not tomorrow’s body.
Not tomorrow’s personal best.
Not the imagined self.
Not the successful runner we want others to see.
Just this living reality, exactly as it is now.
Feet touching the road.
Lungs opening and closing.
Energy moving through the organism.
The simple intimacy of being alive in this moment.
And from this direct experience of the body, another dimension of inquiry naturally began to emerge:
What is this organism?
Who does it belong to?
What is this mysterious and extraordinary process we call “me”?
I never found final answers to those questions.
But the inquiry itself — the curiosity, the openness, the willingness not to conclude too quickly — slowly softened some of the fixed ideas I had carried about the body, the self, and life itself.
And when fixations soften, life itself can begin to soften too.
A little more space appears.
A little more gentleness.
A little less conflict between mind and body, between effort and acceptance, between ourselves and the world around us.
The Mobile Meditation Hall
For this reason, I feel deeply grateful to Shinzan Roshi, whom I never met in the conventional sense, but whom I somehow meet whenever I relax into life exactly as it is.
Beyond ideas.
Beyond fixations.
Beyond the constant attempt to control experience.
Through his running practice, he inspired me to investigate another dimension of Zen practice:
not only on the cushion,
but in every activity of life.
Running.
Walking.
Typing.
Washing dishes.
Breathing.
Living.
There is a body doing all these things.
And this body can become a kind of mobile meditation hall — a place of practice wherever we are, whatever we are doing.
Best wishes in your practice.
Zen Mindfulness Cambridge Zenways Italia 