Knowing When to Keep on Going and Knowing When to Stop…

I had fun today in my (barefoot) Spanish lesson, Maricarmen, my teacher, is very embracing of my ‘differences’, and welcomes my, now very brown, bare feet into her classroom…

I love the mountain goats here, and she laughingly told me that in Spain they have an expression for an eccentric person ‘Ella es como una cabra’!

We have taken to spending the two hour lesson speaking almost only in Spanish… Last week we talked a lot about death and this week it was about hombres y mujeres… About our own relationships with men and women, how our relating differs, and how we perceive this…

We explored the importance of validating the differences… Fully acknowledging and integrating the qualities we project onto males and females in the external world, into one whole, rather than perpetuating the concept of there being two…

As we investigated together the idea of there only being one, we went on the talk about embracing and being fully in touch with our own inner male and female.

We talked about how through validating and recognising differences in others, we are in a position to integrate within us what we perceive as a difference… How rather than rejecting difference as something we don’t understand, seeing instead that this ‘different aspect’ needs reclaiming for our own inner balance and wholeness…

We recognised too, of course, that we can experience difference in same sex relating as well as in opposite sex relating.

The ‘battle of the sexes’ is a term, but in truth it is about an inner battle where we are not happy inside ourselves; and so the war within is projected outside…

However, if we are aware that every single relationship is an opportunity to balance the yin and yang, the creative and destructive, the male and female within… then the battle ends and true unity occurs

Yes, I did all this in Spanish!

It has to be said that Maricarmen speaks at my pace and helps me a lot, and corrects and guides me, and ‘allows’ the odd English sentence when I need to express something that I can’t find the Spanish for…

And –  that it would be completely impossible for me to have the same conversation at Spanish speed…!

I shared with her that I am at the stage in my Spanish where I feel like I know less than I did, that it seems that the more time I am giving to my Spanish the worse I am getting… I told her how I was running alone a few days ago and thought to myself…  ‘This is the point I could just stop trying to learn Spanish…’!

However the fortunate thing about being an endurance runner, is that I know from experience that when it looks as if nothing is happening – and that you might even have got worse – is often the time that you are just about to really improve… So this is the time to keep going!

She assured me that this ‘stage’ is normal, and that it is my perception and not the truth… And that it is a common pattern and plateau…

This is the same process that Anadi is engaged in with his business… It has taken longer than we ever imagined, maybe nearly two years longer!  (not that we actually imagined anything in truth…) But recently he read an article written by a very successful entrepreneur, which stated that the main reason entrepreneurs fail with their new business ideas is that they give up too soon….

Once again it comes to listening to our inner voice. The more clear we are and the more we are able to listen to our own true knowing, the more we can listen to our inner compass which will lead us wherever we need to go…

For of course there are times to keep going and there are times to stop and change direction – and it is only we who will know the difference….

Anadi has always known to keep going with his business, and I know I must keep going with my Español! ?