402: Day 02 - It’s Always About Love
December 1, 2009
by Jeffrey Pierce
If there was a word that sums up the second day of running when you’re just months away from 40 it’s, “Ouch.” If there were two words that sum up the second day of running on the first of December when you’re months away from 40 they would be, “Ouch” and “C-c-cold.”
As I lay in bed this morning, pondering the idea that, “Yes, Jeffrey, you really do need to get up and run,” and being terribly distracted as my wife, Bri, murmured something half-awake and curled up closer, sharing our body heat with one another, I realized it was much easier to catalog the places on my body that didn’t hurt.
“The bottoms of my feet… my knees… my hips… my right elbow…” Everything else was some variation of stiff and sore, some stiff, some sore, some body parts being overachievers and deciding to adopt both varieties of complaint.
When we manifest a shift in reality, the first thing we have to do is create a relationship with the other party. Want to work magick? You need to develop a relationship with the flow or the Universe, traditionally through a ritual (also known by its technical term of “a symbolic gift of energy”). Want to heal? You need to develop a relationship, offering enough love to that illness, body part, distress, or disease, that it accepts the version of reality that you wish to create over the flow of its own.
Want to convince a somewhat chunky, out of shape, forty year old body to turn into enough of an athlete that you can run two marathons back-to-back while crossing a range of mountains?
You need to develop a relationship with that body and offer it love.
So I lay in bed for a few moments, talking to my body in my head, consciously letting it soak up a few more minutes of heat before heading out the door to run. I talked to my legs, showing them images of what they will look like when they’re in shape, what they’ll be able to do, how happy they’ll be to experience reality by bounding and leaping and running without a second thought. Each ache, each complaint, I offered the same love, the same images to, until my body finally came around to my way of thinking and we rolled out of bed and into the cold, hurrying to get dressed and start our morning.
This morning, I was exhausted. I worked a fourteen hour day the day before, didn’t make it to bed until about 11 PM, and “road trance” was simply a state that I don’t know how to achieve from that place. The concept of doing shamanic work when you’re sleep deprived stems from the idea that you’re releasing your physical body’s hold, not taking it to the point that your focus is on keeping your physical body awake and moving. Flipping on my brontosaurus of an MP3 player, I skipped right passed the mellow strains of Seal and went for something a little more energetic.
The opening strains of “Ramp! The Logical Song,” a electronica-infused dance number from who knows how many years ago hit my ears and the opening lyrics sang in a voice that cut through sleep even better than coffee.
“When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful…”
I had to laugh.
Life? It’s better now. I wouldn’t trade it for “when I was young” no matter what you offered me. It just takes a little more love to get started in the morning.
So I ran. In the middle of the night, someone replaced my springy quadriceps muscles with lead rods, which, as you can probably imagine, are heavy and not springy at all. Yesterday’s run was a revelation. This morning? A challenge. Sometimes life is like that.
I reached the end of my mile and kept going. One of the fundamental principles in spirituality is that real growth doesn’t happen when things are easy. It takes place when things are hard. When the challenges before us are the hardest for us to face, we find that we’re also positioned for the most rapid growth, the greatest leaps in our soul’s evolution.
The physical and the spiritual are pretty good mirrors of each other. It’s one of the founding principles of countless mystical paths. So I ran. And ran. And ran. Okay, I only ran an extra quarter mile, but that’s about a half mile more than I thought I had in me this morning. As I finally pulled to a stop, turned around, and began to walk toward home, lyrics from a song by K-7 hit my ears.
“Life brings you surprises. Sometimes you don’t realize ’til it’s right before your eyes.”
From being told that things were easier when I was younger to a renewal of hope all in one playlist. And the key in the middle of that message, that was the constant from one extreme to the other?
Love. It’s always about love.