Since childhood, I’ve grappled with life’s biggest questions:
Where did I come from?
What am I here for?
Where do I go after I die?”
I remember being especially obsessed with the second question as a kid growing up in India. I was born in a Hindu family on the outskirts of Mumbai. Growing up in the 80s I had no idea what spirituality is (can’t say for sure I do today either 🙂 ). At the time, I put all the big questions, everything that I did not understand, in the Unknown bucket which I loosely tagged with “God and religion”.
I would often ask my parents, teachers and other elders in the community questions like “ Why don’t we see God? Has anyone seen God? If God loves everybody equally why does he allow bad things to happen to some people and good things to some others? There were a few other questions that I would ask to which I never got any satisfactory answers. Being from the popular Hindu culture, most answers I got hinged on past life karma and reincarnation — something I could not digest but pretended to accept.
As I grew up, I started to voice my disapproval of the concept of God itself — Hindu or otherwise. By the time I was 18, I was a self-proclaimed Atheist. I still followed, enjoyed and participated in Hindu festivals but I very reluctantly performed any religious, priest-directed rituals. And as I got older, I outright refused to do them. And that became the reason for not getting along well with my mom which continues in some form even today 🙂.
The only exception I made was my thread ceremony at age 12. A thread ceremony is a hindu ritual performed to commemorate a boy’s rite of passage when he is believed to be formally ready to learn about his hindu heritage. I tried to find answers to my questions in books written by philosophers, scientists and famous personalities from all walks of life. In hindsight, those books taught me a lot and broadened my perspective about life. However, they still did not give me any convincing answers to those tough questions. Unlike today there was no YouTube and podcasts and Kindle back then. So my exploration was limited to the few books I had access to in my school and community library.
Fast forward 15 years and I find myself married with a wife and a 3 year old and settled in the US. My curiosity about that second question was always with me all those years but it got pushed into the background as I got busy with my career and my family. But at this point in time, I realized that despite making it to the US and having a relatively comfortable life, I had a void that I could not put my finger on.
I felt incomplete and unfulfilled within myself. It seemed as if I did not spend enough time exploring the truth about life. That is when I decided to pick up where I left off my original journey back in my early 20s. I started reading and following spiritual figures from the past and present like Sadhguru, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Sri M, Deepak Chopra, Eckhardt Tolle, The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gurdjieff and a host of others.
This time I felt like it was important to also read and follow some other authors who had ideas that were more rooted in science. I intentionally sought authors whose views differed, and in some cases were polarly opposite to those expressed by experts from the first group. So I researched and looked for experts and authors who explored life, philosophy, the economy and religion in a more modern and scientific manner. In this group of prominent authors were Sam Harris (an atheist), Daniel Kahneman, Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Markovits, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek and a bunch of others.
I was super intrigued and thoroughly enjoyed reading the exemplary work of all of these authors. Every once a while I would run into people who had read some of these books. Invariably, I would start asking them their views on those books and what often followed was a very engaging and long discussion. I never actually joined a book club but those ad-hoc conversations about those books and authors were quite enriching. They prompted me to dig deeper. Eventually I also read the Bhagvad Gita, the Quran and the Bible. By this time, I had consumed a huge volume of so called spiritual* content — content that I thought tried to address life’s toughest questions in a myriad of different ways.
(*After initially being obsessed with the word spirituality, I now almost hate it because of its abuse and overuse as a swiss-army-knife. I still had to use it for lack of a better alternative)
While in the midst of all this, I started 2 more things : I started running again and I started meditating. I ran track in grade school back in India and I’ve always enjoyed running. However it wasn’t until now that I actually started running regularly, multiple times a week. Interestingly, I found that running and meditation complemented each other nicely. I know — in terms of physical activity, Running and Meditation could not be farther apart. So how the hell can they complement each other ? Bear with me, I’ll tie the two in a bit.
My foray into running evolved and turned a little more serious than a few weekly runs. I gradually started training for and participating in races. This meant that I had to formally train and run longer and more often. I eventually ran 14 marathons over a 4 year period, progressively improving my finish times for the most part. I also felt like I was making progress with my experimentation with meditation. I became more patient. I found myself less agitated and less reactive compared to how I was a few years ago. My meditation sessions were about 20 minutes daily and were a mix of guided and unguided silent sits. Occasionally I experimented with longer sits of up to 40–60 minutes when I could.
When I started running I ran in the middle of the day. I meditated in whatever 20 minute window I found during the day. Eventually I moved both my runs and my meditation to early mornings. Of course that meant I sacrificed my sleep by an hour to 90 minutes — but I was able to do that while still having enough energy to last for the day. Now that, in and of itself, was a huge win and went against conventional wisdom i.e 8 hours of sleep is mandatory to function satisfactorily for the remaining 16 hours.
What’s more I was able to get by with less sleep despite running 4–5 days a week. Now that really went against conventional wisdom. So the 8 hour mandatory sleep requirement turned out to be a myth which I was able to bust experientially. I love exploring and busting myths. I plan to write about it in a separate post hopefully soon.
Now for the tie between running and meditation. Well during my silent sits I mostly focussed on my breath as the anchor and that seemed to work most of the time. When I say it worked I don’t mean I experienced superconsciousness or I levitated :-). I mean it helped reduce the barrage of thoughts at least temporarily. I was able to redirect my mind towards the alternating inbreath and outbreath. Thoughts, for the most part, moved to the background. I used ear plugs, I closed my eyes and did my sits early AM in a completely dark room to minimize any distractions. The drastic reduction in the flood of thoughts and a relatively calm mind is the best I could achieve in all my years of meditation. After initially aspiring for a lot more than that, I now feel that is more than enough. I no longer obsess and long for those so-called higher meditative states.
Anyway back to running — Right after my silent sit, I would change into my running gear, get outside and run — rain or shine. At the time I lived in Seattle which is in the beautiful pacific northwest region of the US. It is generally wet and cloudy most days and I got used to running in those conditions, even enjoying it. Eventually and instinctively I started paying attention to my in and out breath during my runs as well, just like I did during my sits. After a few weeks of doing this, my run itself started to feel like meditation.
Running comes very naturally to me to begin with. I feel the most free and light when I do 2 things — when I run alone (particularly on trails in the wild) and when I sing alone. Occasionally this natural act of running seemed to evolve to a zoned out, spiritual experience where it felt less like a labored run and more like gliding on auto-pilot. I think this might be the so-called flow state or being in the zone about which so much has been spoken and written about.
To be clear this only happened a few times and only during my long runs which were 90 to 120 minutes long which I only ran when I trained for my marathons. But this was the first time in my life I had experienced it. Up until that point, I felt like this state was reserved only for celebrities and experts in their own fields. Well, I take that back — I mean the part about that being the first time in my life. I did experience the flow-state a few times in the past when I sang alone and still do occasionally. I lose the sense of time in those moments and they don’t come by too often.
The wrap : In my ongoing seeking journey, what I have learnt is that it’s not answers to life’s big questions that give us peace, but rather learning to be fully present with our lives as they unfold. Whether through meditation, running, or even singing alone, we glimpse something profound when we let go of trying to solve life’s mysteries and simply live in them.
I encourage you to find your own “flow,” whatever form it takes, and to explore spirituality as a personal, evolving experience rather than a destination.
In the end, I’ve come to realize that my journey with spirituality isn’t about answers but about living deeply with questions — and maybe that’s the most profound journey of all.
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