All The World's A Stage
My legs are itching because of the magnesium spray I have just put on them... I don't like the feeling at all, but I am willing to bear the funny sensation, because I know it will fade.... And I trust it is doing me good!
I have always had the orientation that if something is 'doing me good', I am willing to endure the not so good bit of it...
This can range from drinking concoctions resembling pond water, called 'super food', to the itchy leg thing with magnesium, to painful acupuncture needles in my body, and painful deep tissue sports massages on my body...
It has been a lifelong 'quest' of mine to learn how to 'let go of the body', and shine my essence through it, rather than thinking I am it... My quest is to know it as a vehicle for expression, rather than becoming too attached to it, believing I am it... And then not knowing who I am without it, when the time comes to leave it, and before that too... Like now!
It seems I chose to 'come in' with my body as my instrument for my creative expression through running, and so I suppose it was inevitable that I would become attached to at some point, as part do the process of letting it go... I was brought up with the phrase, 'The body is the temple of the soul...'
My father looked after his body well, through daily exercise, a healthy diet, keeping hydrated and whiskey to drink every evening... Which he believed an important part of his regimen....!
Over the years I have discovered that the body speaks, the body has a wisdom all of its own... It speaks of the emotional pain locked within it, and it speaks as to what it needs in any given moment ...
If we can listen to our body, and look after it, we will find out answers to many things....
It is the 'learning to listen' which is the journey....
Later...
I am on the tube, I feel like I am in a film... I have the Gayatri mantra playing in my ears, and around me are the other characters in my film... We are journeying who knows where, but the plot will unfold in the next couple of hours, if we stay and watch and engage...
Like any film, we can choose to simply enjoy it for some entertainment, or learn some valuable life lessons as we watch the characters acting out their lives on the screen in front of us....
The train is filling up, the plot is thickening... More lives, more sub plots unfolding. Which lives will cross over..? Which already have..?.
The Crusting Pipe again...
'Are you an actor...' I asked our waiter... Wends - my friend who I first met when we were at nursery school - and I, were inside in the Crusting Pipe ordering our lunch... He had already guided us to share a blueberry muffin for our elevenses, having first emphasised that the fruit in muffins couldn't be counted as part of our 'daily five...'
And now he had now accurately (almost anyway, enough to count as spot on...) guessed what we would choose for our lunch...
'All the worlds a stage ' he had said in response to my question, and then went on to tell us about himself... We discovered that Alex was in fact a scuba diving, financial compliancer, with an orientation towards living with a Buddhist philosophy of kindness and compassion... Acting as a waiter!
I had just told him about my work, and my own model for working with people... That I believe the most important aspect, is in working to clear my own stuff from any unresolvedness... This is my core commitment to my work with others. I continued that 'unresolvedness' will always show in any tiny reactivity in the body... A shadow passing across the light from our hearts...
'Well', he said... 'Until we love ourselves, we can't truly love with an open heart...'
