Runner's High

Meditation Log March 3, 2020:

 Early morning run, on the return leg nearing home, I looked at the sky and my mind soared.

I began to marvel at the reach of vision. In a vaguely vertiginous moment I felt the enormous volume of atmosphere above me. And then my gaze fell on two birds on a pole.

There was a feeling of oneness. I perceived the creatures as similar to parts of my own body that I don’t notice until some sensation brings them to the fore of the mind.

I started to notice my senses as fields of varying sizes. Sight, sound, smell and touch. The last of these is restricted to arms length, but the others can be far reaching indeed. And what they touch becomes closer; deeply associated with my identity in that moment.

I recall that when I started to develop myopia in my teens, I felt a level of distress and anxiety that went deeper than the minor loss in ability itself. It blurred out details that I used to be able to perceive and left me feeling that my world had shrunk.

The feeling of oneness lingered for a few hundred metres. I registered another bird vaguely, out of the corner of my eye, similar to the many thoughts and sensations that float around the periphery of attention. The oneness expanded even to trees; their life and existence seeming to have a common quality to mine.

The moment passed, but it left an imprint of how I may be able to experience the world through mindfulness.

 

_{Photo from justrunlah.com}