20. Stay On The Path

If you have made some progress with your initial jogging, you might even start training for a marathon. During marathon training, during long runs, after one or two hours at the earliest, you often reach a point where everything suddenly becomes easy. You float effortlessly above the ground. No pinching, no pain, just relaxed ease. The cause of this feeling of happiness is the endorphins. They are something like endogenous drugs, not unlike opium. Endorphins are secreted by the body after a certain state of exhaustion to overcome it. What became difficult is suddenly very easy and you just want to run. Keep on running, keep running. Runners call this happiness the runner's high.

Even with our exercises of concentration, mindfulness and meditation it will take some time to find your way in, to find your path. Also, in meditation, after longer training, similar experiences as in running occur, where a border is overcome and everything seems to be very easy and simple. Again, these feelings are caused by the body's substances, such as the neurotransmitters anandamide and oxytocin. This high feeling lasts, like any drug high, unfortunately not too long. Some consider this high feeling to be the goal. But the hardest part is yet to come.

Long-distance runners know not only the Runner's High, but also the "Man with the Hammer". The performance drops rapidly, you can't go on, you want to stop immediately. The reason for this is that our most important fuel, the carbohydrates, is completely used up. Like a hybrid engine, our body must now switch to another energy source, fat burning, to supply energy. Even during a longer meditation, we experience moments again and again in which our body or our mind rebels. They want to stop, do something else. As with running, you have to overcome your "inner bastard". We will succeed in doing this better and better over time, but only until we meet the hammer man here as well. This time our mental energies are exhausted. However, no special drinks or gels, which every long-distance runner carries with him/her on long or decisive runs, help us here. We cannot absorb the additional energies we need in meditation to overcome this limit from outside. They come from our inner being, from our center, from silence. To overcome this limit, we must learn to use the energy of silence.

To reach silence, we must become silent. We must learn silence, the inner silence. The louder we are, the more energy we consume. If we become calmer, our thought stream ebbs away, our energy level rises. Long before the discovery of brain waves and EEG, Patanjali wrote in his Yoga Sutra: "The highest state of consciousness, the state of yoga, is the coming to rest of the ever-changing mental patterns. Patanjali also described how to control these mental patterns, the brainwaves, and bring the mind to rest. This practice is called Abhyasa in his writings and means constant practice, constant engagement with something, training and habituation. All exercises to control the thoughts and calm the mind are Abhyasa. So, we can do something ourselves to progress on our way to silence. Let's not them stop us. Let's get on with our exercises. Let's stay on the path.