Osho on Running Meditation
[A sannyasin asks: I’m a runner and when I run each day I get a feeling very much like when I’m doing dynamic meditation… Can I use it as a meditation?]
Osho – Yes, use it as much as you can. If you can run then there is no need for any other meditation – it is enough! … Any action in which you can be total becomes meditation, and running is so beautiful that you can be totally lost in it. And you are in contact with all the elements – the sun, the air, the earth, the sky; you are in contact with existence.
When you are running your breathing naturally goes very deep and it starts massaging the hara centre… which is in fact the centre from where meditative energy is released. It is just below the navel, two inches below the navel. When breathing goes deep it massages that centre, makes it alive. And when you are running, you are throwing all carbon dioxide out of your lungs. Carbon dioxide makes people dull, dead, frozen, blocked.
Carbon dioxide is good for trees and very bad for man. We are in mutual agreement with the trees: they inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen; we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That’s why as there are becoming less and less trees on the earth, man is becoming less and less alive, because the partner is dying. That’s the whole meaning of ecology: we are together! You breathe out, the tree breathes in; the tree breathes out, you breathe in. The tree purifies you through oxygen, you nourish the tree through carbon dioxide.
When you are running, the whole carbon dioxide is thrown out and your lungs are full of oxygen. When they are full of oxygen they purify the blood, they purify the whole system. That’s what purity is; it has nothing to do with morality. Purity has something to do with biology, it is a biological concept. When your blood is pure and is not hampered by poisons and used garbage – it is red and alive, full of joy and each drop of blood is dancing in you – you are in the right mood to catch meditation. Then there is no need to do it – it happens!
Running against the wind is a perfect situation. It is a dance of the elements. And while running you cannot think: if you are thinking, then you are not running rightly. When you are running totally, thinking stops. You become too earth-bound, the head no more functions. The body is in such an activity that there is no energy left for the head to go on and on; the thinking stops.
And in those moments of non-thinking, your existence is pure, you simply are, you don’t know who. You don’t know if you are Indian, German, English, Christian, Mohammedan – you don’t know who you are. All is forgotten, you are unburdened of the head… you are again an animal! In that moment – when you are again an animal – there is a possibility to contact god.
This is my message – that before a man can contact god he will have to become an animal, never before it… because man is a false entity, not authentic at all. Before we can rise high and reach the ultimate we will have to become authentic, as authentic as animals. Through running that authenticity happens…. It is perfectly good, and now it will be coming more and more because now you know what meditation is.
And both these things will help each other: in meditation you will again and again come to those moments which come in running, and in running you will come again and again to those moments which come in meditation. By and by both methods will become one. Then there will be no need to do them separately: you can run and meditate, you can meditate and run.
Sometimes try one technique…. Just lying down on the bed, imagine that you are running. Just imagine the whole scene: the trees and the wind and the sun and the whole beach and the salty air. Imagine everything, visualise it, make it as colourful as possible. Remember any morning that you liked the most – when you were running on some beach or in some forest. Let it fill you completely… even the smell of the trees, the pine trees, or the smell of the beach.
Anything that you have liked very much, let it be there as if it is almost real; then start running in imagination – you will find that your breathing is changing. Go on running… and you can do this for miles. There is no end to it, you can do it for hours. And you will be surprised that even doing this on the bed, you will attain to those moments again when suddenly the meditation is there. So if some day you cannot run for some reason – you are ill, or the situation does not allow, or the city is not worth running in, you cannot run – you can do this and you will attain to the same moments.
Source: from Osho Book “This is It”