402: Day 01 - Hold Onto the Love
November 30, 2009
by Jeffrey Pierce
Day one. A single mile – that’s my goal. It’s almost 5:30 am here on the west coast of North America and I’m getting ready to go outside. Do I have to go? No. Actually our bed is much warmer than it is outside at the end of November and I’m wearing shorts. A dozen excuses immediately flood into my mind. I’ve just gotten over a week’s worth of the flu and a touch of pneumonia. Bedtime came about an hour later than expected last night. It’s cold. It’s wet. A dozen reasons not to step out the door.
But I do it anyway.
Before I leave our front porch I queue up the first song on the world’s oldest surviving MP3 player. (I bought the top of the line back in the day; it holds 640 times less music than a similar iPod today). The opening strains of Seal’s “Beginning” off of his first album reach my ears. I’ve ran to this album on and off for eighteen years, through three different formats of media – cassette, CD, and MP3. Much like symbolism when we’re doing deep manifestation work, the track acts like a flash card to my brain.
Run. Run. Run. The bass line and my feet almost immediately get into synch and I start out at a pace much faster than my body is ready for. Heart thumping. Throat burning with the cold mist of a winter morning.
And I’m only a block from home.
I slip into a state my high school track coach referred to as “the zone” and which I’ve dubbed “road trance” over the years. Your mind shifts instantly into a meditative state. The lines between your body and the world around you blur until the cadence of your feet, the beating of your heart, and the rhythm of the music become a much a part of your reality as the shadows around you and the concrete beneath your feet.
Shamans typically use trance states to open themselves up to the subtlety world around them. When I was studying with Nukah, I was taught to use dance, drumming, chanting, and rhythm to achieve a deep trance state in order to slip from my body and interact with the spirit world. Running and an MP3 player are simply the modern tools to reach that state.
I leave the road behind, gently rocked by the rhythm of the run. My mind drifts elsewhere. Fears, worries, dreams, hopes, stress and joy become almost tangible things, surrounding me like a bubble of shadows, not dark and oppressive, simply near but not clearly seen. My intuition can hear messages floating around the edge of my conscious mind. That’s my cue. I shift my perspective slightly, maintaining the trance state but moving to a place of lucid observation.
And there’s Seal, chanting over and over again.
“…round and round and round… hold onto the love…”
In my own work, I’ve been charting what can roughly be described as the road to enlightenment. One of the souls that I’ve shared my world with for more than a decade asked me to share the process. There are only a couple of key steps to learn. Once those steps are understood, the path simply spirals, climbing higher and higher, touching each of those concepts again and again, allowing those insights to further refine your spiritual evolution. Once you’ve reached a certain altitude, it’s clearly seen. The challenge is not just explaining it to someone who hasn’t climbed high enough to see the landscape for themselves, but in drawing a map so that they can follow without your guidance.
That spiral path, the continual refinement, the opening to love and wonder has been constantly in my mind. How to teach it? How to make it simple enough to understand?
“….round and round and round… hold onto the love…”
One mile. One day. One lesson.
And tomorrow will be something new.