Abstract

Can a lonely long-distance run instantiate a meditation? Based on personal experience with running, I develop an affirmative answer to this question. First, I distinguish contemplation from meditation, proposing that the former is a non-reflexive activity focused on the monitoring of one’s own body, and that the latter is a reflexive activity that includes a “self” in memories of episodes from the personal past as well as in episodic counterfactual thoughts and in episodic future thinking. Next, I suggest that meditation, by its characteristics, promotes a distancing from the sensorimotor contingencies of the present and that such detachment is dependent on our linguistic abilities. Finally, I question whether these remarks shed light into the debate about the embodied status of language.