---

Combine Your Exercise Routine with Meditation
and Prayer

---

To exercise or meditate; to exercise or pray? For years I thought of this as an “either or” choice. There were only so many hours in the day, after all. Much more often than not, prayer and meditation won out. Not exercising made me lumpy and overweight, but when I failed to pray and meditate, but my whole world immediately became unbalanced.

And yet, I’d try and try again to develop an exercise routine, starting with great hopes and expectations, only to stop, yet again. Last year, however, I tried again, this time combining in place walking with pilates. At first, I exercised to music, but then I started to incorporate prayer and a meditation mantra technique. I’ve been exercising faithfully ever since. My doctor has applauded the results. Not only has my weight decreased, but my cholesterol levels are just where they should be. In addition, my prayer and meditation practice is stronger than ever. It is the combination that has made the difference. Exercise alone did not work for me.

Hmmm … I wondered, I can’t be the only one who has discovered this connection. I went on line to check it out. The search of Amazon.com was disappointing. None of the books that came up during my search addressed this specific issue. The search on Google.com was far more productive. First of all, it is obvious that the East is once again ahead of the West on the topic of combining body and spirit.

The Qigong entry in the “Traditional Chinese Medicine” section of the Index-China site (www.index-china.com) states that medical qigong involves qi exercises combined with meditation. The qi exercises bring one to a state of meditation. Distress and anxiety will be driven away during the meditation. Through these exercises, one gains control of the body. There are more than 70 million Chinese practicing qigong, some for treatment and most as a physical exercise.

The “Exercise and Meditation” section on the Holistic Health Centre LTD site (www.holistichealth.co.nz) states that Tai Chi “is more than just a physical exercise. It is a discipline that brings about harmony of the body energy to develop health.” The Lifewise site (http://www.canoe.ca) calls Tai Chi “meditation in motion.” Dedicated practitioners know that yoga combines exercise of body with meditative breath and mind.

But what about more standard forms of exercise, like walking, jogging, or aerobics? There is growing awareness that these, too, can be fruitfully combined with meditation and prayer. One of the first to recognize this was Sri Chinmoy, a spiritual guide to students in 60 countries who encourages a balanced lifestyle that incorporates the inner disciplines of prayer and meditation with the dynamism of contemporary life. A visit to the Sri Chinmoy website (www.srichinmoy.org) reveals that, for Sri Chinmoy, exercise is considered “the heart rose.” Exercise in this context means both the exercise of meditative and prayerful practice and of the body. Friends of mine who have practiced the Sri Chinmoy techniques have stressed the idea that exercise, especially running, becomes part of the meditation. Sri Chinmoy states, “Both outer running and inner running are important. A marathon is twenty-six miles. Let us say that twenty-six miles is our ultimate goal. When we first take up running, we cannot run that distance. But by practicing every day we develop more stamina, speed and perseverance. Gradually we transcend our limited capacity, and eventually we reach our goal. In the inner life our prayer and meditation is our inner running. If we pray and meditate every day, we increase our inner capacity.”

Two other easterners, Yogi Bhajan and Gurucharan Khalsa, have developed a technique called breathwalking that integrates breathing, walking, and meditation into specific exercise patterns that create vitality. They have written a book about the technique entitled Breathwalk, Breathing Your Way to a Revitalized Body, Mind and Spirit and there is a website where you can find out details about the technique and its benefits (www.BreathWalk.com). In the section, “What is BreathWalk?,” the technique is defined as the science of combining specific patterns of breathing synchronized with your walking steps and enhanced with the art of directed, meditative attention.

There is evidence that westerners are beginning to get their own sea legs when it comes to combining exercise with prayer and meditation. Barbara S. Green, for example, has written a book entitled Jogging the Mind: How to use Aerobic Exercise as Meditation. I couldn’t find the book at Amazon.com, but it is available at http://halldiets.com/fitness/65.shtml. This site features some reviews of the book including by the NAPRA Review that states that Green “shows how the ‘runners high’ may be simply another road to the mental elevation achieved by many practitioners of meditation.” Green doesn’t stop at running, but extends her theory to bikers, walkers, Nordic skiers, dancers, swimmers, skaters, etc.

Some Christian sites, too, are recognizing the connection between exercise and prayer. ParishWebmaster.com has a section called “Prayer in Action” which points out that for some people, quieting the ruckus in their minds is much more easily accomplished not through stillness, but through motion. Exercise is viewed as a way to open your heart to the Lord. The Christianwomentoday.com site features an article by Cyndie Hamley entitled “Praying With Our Eyes Open.” Hamley and her husband were having a hard time fitting prayer into their lives until it hit them: “What about praying while we walked?” The technique enriched both of their lives.

An excellent article, “Meditations in Motion” by Barbara Bartocci, appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of Spirituality & Health and can be accessed at the publication’s website (www.spiritualityhealth.com). Bartocci distilled the practice of combining exercise and mediation into six steps:

1. Create intention: Consciously choose to let exercise be your path to spiritual energy.

2. Stay Focused: If you find your mind rambling, gently bring awareness back to what you’re doing, whether it’s lifting a tennis racket, taking a walk, or paddling a canoe.

3. Repeat a power word: This is similar to saying a mantra. Bartocci suggests choosing a different word each week. For example, one week it might be “compassion” and the next it might be “love.” Quoting Thomas Powers, author of Invitation to a Great Experiment, she points out that repetition is one of the most powerful methods of creating continuous prayer.

4. Listen to your body: Take an inventory of your body by asking, “What’s happening in my gut? Is my stomach tight or relaxed? What sensations are in my chest? What do I feel in my throat? Is my brain chattering?”

5. Extend yourself: Extend your power by reaching beyond your usual comfort zone. For example, the first time Bartocci bicycled she was winded after five miles. Now it feels like nothing for her to bike for 40 miles.

6. Don’t push so hard that it becomes counterproductive: She quotes Quaker author Richard Foster who wrote in Celebration of Discipline, “God meets us where we are.” The idea is not to try too hard, but rather to let the exercise become a natural meditation, an unself-conscious flow.

Bartocci’s advice is great. I’ll certainly combine some of these points with my own exercise/prayer-meditation technique. However, the goal is to design something that works for you. For me, for example, walking is combined with prayer, while the pilates are combined with focus, feeling, and a mantra. The whole exercise session is usually followed by a non-physical time of meditation and prayer. It works for me. Now, with a little thought and experimentation, I know that you can discover the right combination for you.

---

Mary Montgomery-Clifford is a certified web author and developer. Her company, Montgomery Media Enterprises ("Freelancing with Finesse!"), specializes in public relations, events, promotions, writing project and web authoring, development and publicity. Ms. Montgomery-Clifford has a Master's Degree in religious studies from Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) in June 2002 and is working on a Ph.D. with a focus on the new scholarship of Unlimited Love and the Other Regarding Virtues in the Fall of 2002. She is also in the process of completing the Morris Pratt Institute Course on Modern Spiritualism. Contact her via e-mail at Monty764@aol.com, by phone at 773-235-8821 or at her web site at www.montymedia.com.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page