Why Working Out is Meditation. Part 2.
To bring context to this post you might like to read Part 1 of this story, it’s just a 4 minute read according to Medium. If not, I’ll bring you up to speed.
When we work out, our mind regularly tells us to stop. But most of the time we don’t listen and we persevere. This non-reaction to thought is the very essence of meditation. And as we learn to ignore the persistent negative self-talk of our minds, this resilience of the mind carries over to the rest of our lives.

I mentioned that you might like to turn off your music on your next workout to see what happens when we turn off the distraction? (Insert your favoured method of distraction here, it may not be music.) It gets harder yeah? But what’s gotten harder? Did our muscles suddenly notice the absence of beats and feel like the party was over? Or is our mind acting up at suddenly noticing its level of discomfort?
For the sake of clarity let’s give this voice that tells us that it’s all too hard a name. For want of a better name let’s call him the Stop-Monkey. Or he may be the Stop-Gorilla in some cases.
Turning off the tunes might be a challenge at first. Our minds are very powerful. So try turning off the tunes for 5 minutes tomorrow. Once that feels ok — go for 10 minutes and keep pushing out the interval. Why? Give it a go and see how it feels, but give it a good crack — say for about 10 workouts.
But in response, I propose that when we stare this Stop-Monkey right in the face we notice that he isn’t as powerful as we once thought. If you feel like you’re struggling and you feel like stopping, notice where in your body that hurt is. Are your quads screaming at you to stop? Are your lungs on fire? Notice this feeling. And is it the banshee scream of a toddler who didn’t get his way? Or the howl of genuine pain. And depending on which it is, we can react accordingly.
And let’s just be clear at this point. I’m not proposing that we never stop a work out, and over-exert ourselves. If you want to end your workout, end your workout. But just check whether it’s YOU deciding, and not your screaming toddler of a quadricep deciding for you. And if it turns out to be the latter, you can laugh, and fight that battle again tomorrow!
These workouts we do are about endurance. And I don’t know about you but I always thought this just defined extended-duration athletic pursuits. But the root of the word is endure, which means ‘to suffer something painful or difficult patiently’. What!? We are such masochists us endurance athletes, we literally enjoy suffering. Or, is it that we enjoy the fact that we can suffer greatly and just take it in our stride? (Pardon the pun!) We can know how loud the Stop Monkey is yelling, and not take any notice, at least in this area of our lives!
What might happen when you bring awareness to the pain you are feeling is that it’s not as bad as you initially thought. And for me, within a couple of minutes my mind has gotten bored with watching the pain in my quads and is back recalling happily how I once gave my brother an ironing board cover for his birthday as a Simpsons reference. And when I notice that my mind has wandered, I check back with my quads… Yep, the pain is still there… But where did it go whilst I was in Simpsons land? Did it disappear? And what does that mean for the nature of my pain? Is it real, or is the Stop-Monkey screaming louder than is warranted?

I said in Part 1 that our endurance on the track carries over to our day to day life and our ability to sit patiently to our 6 year old’s story. Incidentally I had to do this yesterday as I taught Grade One students… I think I’d prefer a 10km brutal mountain trail! But I sat there patiently remembering that I wrote a blog about this so I’d better practice what I preach.
However, listening to the podcast Invisibilia (The episode was ‘Emotions Part 1’ if you’re interested) I was struck by something that has been becoming clearer to me. The idea that we have more power over our emotions than we realise.
This is a pretty radical idea so stay with me, but one that I have been grappling with in my formal meditation practice. It’s actually one of the main philosophies of the type of meditation that I do.
The idea is that our body is always feeling sensations both at the conscious and unconscious level. And is forever reacting to them and identifying them as either pleasant or unpleasant. Our conditioning, or constructs as referenced in the podcast, determines whether it is one or the other. I.e. a loud bang for a Vietnam vet causes unpleasant sensations in his stomach and brings about fear and anxiety. For a sport shooter the sensations are pleasant and a reminder of happy times with his training buddies. And the Stop-Monkey wants to avoid unpleasant sensations and have more of the pleasant sensations, hence the desire to stop your workout and sit down on the couch with a beer and a slice of pizza.
When we work-out we feel powerful sensations. And the reason the Stop-Monkey tells us to stop is that it finds this unpleasant. And maybe we give in and stop. But if you’re an athlete, most of the time you don’t stop. Otherwise you’d never even lace up your shoes and get out the door.
And the lesson we slowly teach our brain by exercising is that these sensations are not pleasant or unpleasant, they are just sensations. I say ‘start to teach’ because our mind is a powerful beast and we’ve all found ourselves ‘overcome with emotion’. We can only consciously endure the feelings we are aware of, and many lurk below the surface. And for these ones we just have to ride the wave.
But when the little ripples arise that we can bring awareness to like “don’t do another lap, you’re done” We calmly say “not today!” and keep on running.
And know that slowly those bigger waves below will also arise as ripples at some point. That 50km ultra marathon that once seemed like a nightmare is now just a small ripple. Or that 5km run that you never dreamed of being able to do is suddenly within your grasp — whatever your level. Vygostky, if you know your educational theorists, calls this the ‘zone of proximal development’. Give us something just challenging enough without it being out of reach and we can do it, with effort. Give us something too hard and we just won’t bother, or, we’ll try and fail.
And also with life, as we gently deal with the little struggles within our awareness (I say little, but they still require endurance, which as we now know means that we need to suffer patiently!) the ones that previously seemed too big will gradually seem smaller until they too are a ripple that we can absorb.

You probably even heard the Stop Monkey as you read this article — after paragraph three you might have noticed your mouse or thumb move over the address bar to type in facebook as feelings of boredom washed over you. Well done for showing him no mind and reading to the end of the page.
So, keep running, lifting weights, playing hopscotch, whatever, with your monkey on your shoulder. Know that he is there and sometimes tells you things that you need to hear, but most of the time is behaving like a small child. And children still need to be heard, lest they start behaving worse. But we can hear the Stop-Monkey, acknowledge his concerns, and calmly say “not today” and keep on running into the distance.
