Be Your Own Best Friend...
I have been working all day on the Terrace with 'Dog from Petrol Station' lying nearby!
This morning it was raining when we woke up... The air was cool, but once running we were warm and the miles flowed by easily. The road was dark wet grey; and the whole scene seemed dark wet grey, and cloudy ... A watery sun occassionally filtering through...
Running further, as I am regularly now, allows for more expansion of conversation.
'I'm loving this run' I said to Anadi 'I'm loving it too', he said, 'but I think its because I'm loving the conversation more than the run', I agreed... 'I love being fitter and running further again for that reason'.
Conversations on the run are the best thing... There is nothing to distract, no phone or computer or even food to be eaten... There is simply the space between one another, and the conversation existing in that space... The dialogue twisting and dancing and weaving and creating in that space...
Everything is created through dialogue, whether that be a new idea, a plan, an adventure to embark on... Orr whether it is delving into patterns, and issues, and places where we are blind, and another can see.
Conversation at its best transforms and uplifts and creates something in every moment, makes something new, opens up new possibilities...
Once something is spoken it has power, it is 'out there' and sometimes the shifts then just occur...
Of course this is not always the case, sometimes the words are locked into the behaviour patterns. For instance someone might profess that they will do something they have no intention of doing...
When the words do not match the inner intention, then there is a jarring to the flow...
When our inner and outer match one another then magic can occur with each breath and each word we utter. Authentic words have a power to them, words from the heart, and from our truth affect us more profoundly than when we suspect that a person is not speaking 'the truth' or 'their truth'.
As we ran into the last three miles of our nine mile run, we heard a tapping of nails on Tarmac... We had a friend following us!
Once we reached the main road, near Ipsos, to Barbati, he was still with us and so I had the brain wave of splitting up to see if that 'worked' in shedding him....
Anadi ran off and he followed him!
I set off and as I was passing the petrol station 'Dog from the petrol station' ran happily out to greet me! He ran up the road with me and when Anadi and I eventually arrived back here at Stefanos Place - we had two dogs....
One had gone when I came done here to a FaceTime with Athena Jane - but 'Dog from the petrol station has remained'!
Anadi looked up 'dog' in animal totem, and this is what he found:
'Dog can be a reminder that you should always be loyal and truthful to yourself. You should make a point of being your own best friend. By having self respect and self value you can love yourself first. This is essential for you to be of great assistance to others. Having self respect will assure that others will respect you.'
It reflected much of what we had been exploring today on our run... And later Athena Jane commented that it resonated for her too... As Jane and I worked together today, with me sitting on the step at Stefanos place, 'Dog from the petrol station' was lying nearby!
I was asked by Punya, the editor of Osho News, to write about running, using my own experiences and my own running journey to offer some tips and guidelines and so here it is - my tips, guidelines and learning from fifty years of running!
Thank you Micah True for summarising so wonderfully all the wisdom we need to enjoy our running; his words Punya picked out for the title of my article...
“Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t care how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When you’ve practiced that so long that you forget you’re practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one – you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”
Thank you Jalal The for the photo in the article, and here, of me finishing Kassios Dias last year
