It All Begins Within...
Yesterday I wrote of the joy of running free of pain, speeding over the ground, feeling fluent and fast...
Last night as I lay in bed, I was aware of a stiffness in the arch of my left foot... I didn't pay that much heed to it, I hadn't felt it in the day, it had come out while I slept...
But today it hurts, and my foot didn't want to run one step!
So Julia's not gone running today!
I have long since learnt that we must listen to the 'slowest part of the body' - the 'limping bit' and give it the space to heal and catch up...
It will also be carrying a message for me, and so I must give it the space to speak to me of its pain...
On a biomechanic level, I do a funny twisty thing with my left foot when I run, and it is particularly noticeable when I run fast; it comes from the hip I believe... And yesterday I ran faster than in some time, because the rest of my body felt so good....
My foot will catch up and I will heed its pain...
So, instead of our planned trek across to the Azure window we walked again across the cliff top to our beautiful lagoon...
Swimming did me good, the foot hurt to flipper while practising front crawl, but if felt better afterwards for the movement...
Anadi says that the Shaolin monks believed in mobilising the body when it was hurting..
He is a black belt in Kung fu and spent ten weeks in 2005, training with the monks in China...
The work was arduous - a 5.30am start, running up hills and a 9.30pm finish... If someone had pain in their body, the monks would say 'go running, you go running' as they believed the pain had arisen from an emotional place, and the best way to clear it was to run...!
I can hear and see their reasoning and their wisdom, but for me, swimming and walking and regularly 'drawing the alphabet in the air' with my foot throughout the day has felt mobilising enough to help me clear whatever has arisen...
We swam about for longer today, the waves less churny and washing machine making, than yesterday...
The open sea invited me to swim out, as there seemed no currents in our lagoon... But I know the sea has a spirit all of its own, and we were protected in our bit of water between the rocks, and I am keen to stay awhile longer on this planet!
I clambered out and lay on my back in the sun... 'I am more like a lizard than a Lizard' I commented... 'basking in the sun...'
I lay in the 'corpse position' with my eyes closed, and decided to imagine I was dead... I could still hear the sea, in its forever movement, and then Anadi coughed...
Life went on....
And soon I too got up from my 'corpse meditation', and we went back across the cliffs to the busy port, to get money from the cash machine and to the super market for water and milk, and the ferry came in, and a ferry went out....
Saturday morning at Mgarr Port, Gozo unfolded before us.
Last week we were in London running around a green, brown burnished red, autumn English Park, today we are plunging into the Mediterranean sea...
As we walked back, we talked... About Einstein and Wilhelm Reich, we talked about energy and how Einstein had split the atom to create huge amounts of energy and was disappointed about how it had been turned into a weapon....
We also talked about my foot! :)
Anadi concluded, by confirming the way we both see our journey here...
'It's why I am of the philosophy that if you want to see changes on the outside world, it all begins within...
