Cycling is the king of the high stimulation meditations. It will get you focused, pumped, and calm all at once, and it will also get you into great shape with minimal wear on your body.
Settle in for a long climb, or find a long flat and buy some aerobars. Warm up for a few minutes until your heart rate and breathing are stable. You are aiming for zone 2; the easiest way to gauge this is whether you can get by with just nose-breathing. You do not need to breathe through the nose while riding, but this is the effort level to hold. Do not use data devices.
Cycling is excellent for alternating between attention and awareness while never losing sight of either.
Settle into the saddle and get your hands loose but firm on the bars. We are aiming for total stability in our pedalling: around 80-90 rpm for your feet, and using your gears to ensure that there are no surges or drops in cadence or power.
Focus on your legs and pedal in circles, with equal pressure through the entire loop. Allow your breathing to settle in, so you are taking one breath every 4 to 6 rotations; whatever is right for you.
I use music when I am cycling: it helps you keep a solid cadence, takes the edge off the sound of any passing traffic, and provides nice little dopamine spikes every now and then. I’m currently hooked on the Buddha Bar compilations and recommend the Sony Linkbuds which have a hole in the middle so you can still hear the traffic; the sound quality is surprisingly good.
Settle in and feel it all; you are a gyroscope, completely balanced and completely stable in its rotations. Breathe. Have your eyes a few metres in front of you looking at the ground, but half-closed and half-focused so that the cracks in the asphalt flow over you like code in the matrix.
When you feel calm and settled, release your focus of a while. Expand it to your entire sense-sphere. Look up at the world around you; the greens and blues and whites and yellows. Smell the air and taste your tongue. Allow yourself to feel the universe flowing through your eyes, ears, temples and face. Feel your legs, still going steady, guaranteeing that tick tick tick of dopamine. If you get any flushes of ecstasy, good. That is dopamine. Lean into it, but do not let your power surge. The scenery is always changing and so are you.
When your mind drifts to a thought, reel it back in to your legs and start over.
A lot of deep emotions will come out if you cycle like this. Do it solo; you might end up crying. As things come to the fore, stop your bike and text yourself to get them out of your cmem. Cycling is an exceptional way to loosen up the junk in your mind because of how the physical work increases tonic dopamine.
Be careful to keep the effort to zone 2 or lower. Do not spike your power. Feel free to stand up to ease aches, but do not crunch and grind if you do. Your aim is constant moderate effort and nothing more. Spiking your power will spike your phasic dopamine and this is not what we want.
Cycling is an incredibly good on-ramp to the subtler forms of meditation and I highly recommend it. Running and swimming work too, but running can be hard on the body and both of them require a higher level of full-body awareness.
Remember to enjoy. The cycling is your exercise, your meditation, your therapy and your experience of reality all rolled into one.