What Are You Running From?
Updated: Sep 8
David is a Contemplative Psychotherapist, transformation advisor, and sacred journey leader whose work explores the psychological and existential dimensions of human suffering and transformation. Integrating Buddhist psychology, relational depth, and contemplative practice, he guides high-functioning individuals through processes of inner transformation, psychological integration, and immersive sacred experiences.
Movement is not the enemy. The compulsion to keep moving is the question. Blue light radiates perpetually from skyscrapers and screens, pervading our minds. Highways pulse with cars, Ubers, buses, and delivery trucks. Traffic blares. Podcasts leak into the night. It is no wonder the noise in our minds rarely settles.
This compulsion to increase productivity has become a cultural phenomenon. We live in a world that rewards momentum, availability, and output. Yet amid this relentless pace, an important question remains. What are we moving towards, or escaping from?
A runner moving with the wind may be expressing athleticism, freedom, and vitality. Or they may be defending against the discomfort of standing still.
A person may work from an inner drive to express creativity and passion. Or work because the thought of stopping feels intolerable.
We may travel because we are genuinely curious about the world. Or because staying where we are brings us too close to feelings we would rather avoid.
Even meditation can hold this tension. We may practise to meet the mind with greater compassion, or we may use it as another way to get rid of suffering.
Movement itself is not the problem. Human beings need activity, connection, creativity and purpose. The question is one of intention. Is our movement an expression of life, or protection from what might surface if we paused?
When busyness is excessive, it moves beyond a response to life’s demands. It becomes a habitual way of relating to ourselves, a rote modus operandi that keeps us occupied, distracted, and at a safe distance from difficult inner terrain.
When we slow down, feelings can arise that productivity has kept at bay. Anxiety. Grief. Restlessness. Loneliness. Uncertainty. Anger. Questions about identity, direction and meaning. We may begin to notice the adaptations, assumptions and roles that once helped us survive, belong, function and feel secure.
Then comes a more fundamental question:
"Who am I when I am not doing?"
Thich Nhat Hanh, author of Peace Is Every Step, wrote, “The first practice is to stop running, come home to our bodies, and recognise our suffering.”
Stillness is not simply being alone in an empty room. It does not require the world around us to become quiet. It asks us to become more present within the body, the physical vessel through which we experience our lives. Stillness is less about controlling the external world than changing our relationship to the activity within us.
British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described the “capacity to be alone” not as isolation, but as the ability to feel contained within a reliable relational environment. This matters because stillness is rarely easy when we have learned that being alone with ourselves is unsafe. Our capacity for stillness may depend, in part, on our ability to stay present without immediately needing to escape, perform, or seek external reassurance.
What might happen if we stepped, even briefly, outside the momentum of ordinary everydayness? Stillness does not necessarily ask us to change our whole lives. It asks us to develop a different relationship with movement. When stimulation feels ceaseless, we can pause long enough to notice what is happening around us, and within us. That pause can become a small but meaningful act of intentional living.
Stillness invites us to pivot in how we meet the inner experience that “busyness” may have been helping us avoid. In stillness, we may enter a liminal space, a threshold between an older stage of life and a new way of being. Identity can pause because the future has not yet crystallised. We are no longer fully who we were, yet uncertain who we will become.
This in-between space can be uncomfortable. It asks us to release the mask of “knowing” and loosen identities formed to survive and feel secure. Yet it can also bridge knowing and being, between the old self and the emerging one.
Contemporary society persistently asks, “What are you doing?” Shifting this orientation contemplatively, one may rather ask, “What is arriving here now?”
The shift from doing to being is not passive surrender. It opens into new possibilities. It is a way of living that does not treat every experience as a problem, project, performance, or identity to manage.
German social psychologist Erich Fromm asked, “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?”
If our only relationship to the world is ownership, achievement, and acquisition, we remain in the mode of “having,” rather than being. Stillness offers another possibility. We can encounter an experience rather than react to it as a means to an end. We can notice, feel, observe, and remain present. The situation itself may not change, but our relationship to it can shift as awareness deepens.
Stillness acts as a kink in the machine of modernity. It interrupts automatic living and invites us to pay attention to how we regulate ourselves, where we seek meaning, and how we understand our place in the world.
Yet even stillness can become another achievement project. Yoga studios are filled with bodies moving through collective asanas. Carefully curated meditation techniques played over wellness retreats can become another form of striving, an attempt to attain an imagined version of peacefulness. The point is not to perfect stillness. It is to recognise when we are running.
Why do we find it so difficult to stop? If we paused for a moment, we might encounter what is already here. Stillness offers the brave an opening to remain present when there is nowhere left to run. Perhaps, in that pause, we discover that what we were escaping from has already arrived.
Read more from David Starlyte
David Starlyte, Contemplative Psychotherapist & Retreat Leader
David is a Contemplative Psychotherapist, Naturopath, transformation advisor, and retreat leader specialising in psychological suffering, complex trauma, identity, and meaning. With Master’s degrees in Applied Buddhist Studies and Mental Health, formal naturopathic training, and over 25 years of international experience, he integrates psychology, spirituality, and contemplative practice to support meaningful transformation. He also develops premium retreats and sacred pilgrimages for deep psychological and existential integration.
