Our Secret Mission on Earth
Trent Park, a magical fairy tale woodland delight… Dappled shade, dancing beams of golden sun, flashing like swords through the trees… Guiding me on my mission… The secret mission on earth, that I am only discovering and uncovering through living and listening to my intuition; following the clues…
The secret mission that I came here to accomplish and knew not what it was, is revealing itself… step by step, paso a paso…
By taking the next turn and the next, finding another clue and stepping deeper and deeper into the forest, the path winding its way through the trees… Trusting the messages as I go.
This is the same for us all, if we care to listen, to trust our gut and dare to follow.
The woodland floor was ‘ouchie’ today, too ‘ouchie’ for me to run without tensing up. I ran for awhile, and it was relentless – the rocky stony path of pain! It didn’t feel good for my body or my feet, so I stopped and walked…
All tension left my body and I padded through the woodland path…
I love being barefoot and I am trusting that being barefoot is all part of the secret mission… It planned itself and this is often the way to know we are on the right trail… It unfolds seemingly of itself…
I surrendered my running plan today and instead walked for awhile through the woods; until I happened upon some grass. My feet jumped for joy and were off again… Lapping the slippy smooth silky turf, up the hill to Cleopatra’s needle, down and round again… Running free, sun shiny Sunday fun…
Anadi and his friend Andy joined me after awhile and we lapped the grassy plain together, like ponies in a field.
Anadi’s feet are better with ‘ouchie’ ground than mine; but he too said it was very ‘relentless’ and different to how he remembered the terrain 9 or 10 years ago, when he and Andy ran around the park barefoot together – ‘Kung Fu friends’…
We work life out as we go, by watching what happens, in every moment.
It is through reflection that we learn and make meaning to what is occurring… As Soren Kierkegaard says ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards…’
However…
The more we stay in the step, the more we flow with and adapt to what is truly happening… Then in every step we can ‘work out’ our patterns, free ourselves from their constraints… See in the moment, stay in the moment and then our patterns can clear as we work them out rather than simply living them out, again and again… round and round.
Staying in the moment, being with what is happening rather than trying to push for what we want to happen… And life reveals itself from our truth, our essence, our silence; free of any patterns at all.
I had ‘planned’ to run three laps of Trent Park, totalling 10.5 miles! In the end I walked for 2 miles in the magical woods and ran for 6 miles on the grassy loop… Beauteous to my feet…
Sometimes what we want may not happen, but something better and in truth quite similar can unfold…
If we dare to trust and ‘let go’…
I have been running all of my life – it feels I was born to run. In the running step I experienced freedom and my true expression. I came to see that I needed to ‘get out of the way of myself’ and let my energy flow through the running step; allow it to express itself in the dance and the motion of running. I ran for England and GB for some years. My first international was in 1979, a three mile cross country race; and I continued to run at international level until 1993. Two of my best results were first place in the Dublin City Marathon in 1985 and 7th place woman, 3rd British woman in the 1986 London Marathon in a time of 2.36.31, which gained me selection for the Commonwealth Games.
As a little girl I ran barefoot for many years, and then I put on shoes to race around the world. Fifty years later I am travelling the world as a nomad with my husband Anadi and I have taken off my shoes and I am running barefoot again….
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