Dancing Your Run…
A new day dawning on a new landscape… Twelve days in the UK have passed in a mixture of London’s lively vibe, misty rainy beauty of the South Downs, watery sun rising over the English Channel, daffodil yellow spring popping up along the paths in the Park at Buxted and a bright sunny morning with Tigger, Roo and Poo in the Ashdown forest…
Today I woke with the Atlantic sea just across the road, and Famara beach inviting me to run. The tide was quite high and the sand soft, so the beach was about two miles long instead of its low tide three.
One of the benefits for me of running barefoot is that my feet are in charge, they are dictating the path and the process of running.
It is as if I have never run before, all the miles and miles I have run have gone, they do not exist except in a story book of my narration.
Now I have a new running life where my feet cannot yet run as far they did before. The place I am in now lends itself to listening more acutely to my body. I am in a space of not knowing what will unfold on the running road…
There is nothing hiding my perception in ‘shoe form’, and whilst I am not knocking the value of protection to our feet, for me being barefoot has taken me to a place of letting my feet dictate the pace and the path they wish to take…
And so there is no plan.
Zen is truly happening as my experience, rather than a concept of my mind… I am reminded of the author of ‘The Zen of Running‘ words, Fred Rohe who wrote “There are no standards and no possible victories except the joy you are living while dancing your run. You are not running for some future reward-the real reward is now!”
This is true of the Zen of living too of course, there is only now… Being fully here and now, without looking to an imaged future where we will find what we are looking for, brings huge rewards.
This doesn’t mean not working towards a goal or learning a new skill; it simply means staying in the moment whilst the process unfolds.
This allows for unexpected changes, or outcomes, or new people appearing who might open another door or show us another route…
In truth, the more we live in the moment, goals will cease to have push energy, instead any necessary stretching is just that… A stretch towards a new experience, a new possibility, to the discovery that we are living more fully than we ever ‘thought’….
If we are here and now, aware of the still point within each breath, aware of the silence within… Our life will emerge from this place, rich in joyous joy…
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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