Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A Book Recommendation

Throughout the course of the last couple of weeks, I've been fighting some sort of stomach bug that finally got the best of me. As a result, I've been on quarters for the past two days. Since one can only sleep so many hours out of the day, I decided to pick up where I left off reading Sakyong Mipham's "Running with the Mind of Meditation".

As military members, we are most likely all running as part of our physical fitness requirements, and as Buddhists we are all probably engaged in a meditation practice. This book, although quite short (less than 200 pages) wonderfully outlines the correlation between the stages in mental development as you practice meditation, and the stages in which you develop your body as you train by running. As the leader of the Shambhala tradition the Sakyong draws heavily from the Tiger, Lion, Garuda, Dragon concept, but the underlying messages of appreciation, cultivation, and progression will not be lost on the practitioner of any Buddhist tradition. I'd recommend it to those who are not Buddhist, and non runners as well, since these concepts can be applied to any activity in which you choose to engage.

In these two short days, this book has had a profound effect me. I share this with you all in hopes that you too may share in its' delight.  Here is the link:  http://runningmind.org/ 

Ki Ki So So!

- Veronica

2 comments:

Miguel said...

Thanks for that post. I am trying to improve my level of running and meditation. This sounds wonderful.

There's another running book, of a completely different nature, though introspective as well, by Haruki Murakami which you may be interested in: What I Talk about When I Talk about Running. It's a wonderful long essay about Murakami's entry into the world of running and the psychological side of the activity. Great book.

Hope you're feeling better.

Christopher Mohr said...

Speaking of running, I am working (still) on Buddhist running cadences. I gave that out as homework for our PT group of chaplaincy students at U-West. I will post them as soon as we have some developed (probably to the "granny was 9x years old" cadence to start with).

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