You’d Better Run

Do we dream to escape or to become more fully realized? Or both?

Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs

 When stress signals the body to react, do we fight, flight, or catch the signal in crossfire and take deep breaths? How do animals react to stress in their bodies? These are all questions to be mindful of in your life and in the lives of animals you relate to. If we can catch breath of the stresses going on in our bodies, we can formulate a routine and pathway to release them so they don’t go on to cause suffering. When I was young and stress fired my sympathetic nervous system, instead of releasing it any old way I developed a highly specialized therapeutic approach: running with dogs and racing with horses under the big fading sky around dusk time. These therapeutic romp sessions with animals always made me laugh and breathe so deeply with joy that every worry in the world would disintegrate beneath my feet.

During the most trying time of my life when I was faced with a lot of pain hurting those around me, I was fortunate enough to be able to escape with animals. As long as I couldn’t stop what wanted to happen from happening, I learned from animals how to follow the path of least resistance. Animals have a unique ability to sit with pain without having to let it become suffering.

Suffering manifests in so many ways that we could dutifully spend our entire lives studying every root cause of its manifestation and working to prevent it in any capacity. I like Ayurvedic medicine and philosophy so much because it teaches that no matter what suffering exists. It’s one of the Four Noble Truths. Can’t deny that, so might as well come to learn how to deal with it! Accepting its existence, we can learn to dig its roots out of the terrain we walk on. And better yet, we can learn to run light as a feather over the terrain that guides our path, regardless of the suffering that exists in it…with animals guiding us safely.

No rights to picture

Catching your second wind is what I equate to holding onto inspiration, a natural protection for us against stress. So long as we are inspired and our fires are stoked, we can release and manage stress in productive and therapeutic ways. Our level of inspiration and motivation changes naturally every day like high and low tide, making something as simple as staying inspired seem like damned never ending work. A wise old saying goes, if you love the work you do, you’ll never have to work another day of your life. For many of the people I know, this saying is a punch in the nose because they know while they don’t love their work, they can’t just quit. So what then? Well, to begin with, if we want to maintain a blissful amount of inspiration in our lives we have to look at our perspective of love and work. The only pain in this old saying is that people don’t think that love and work are interrelated. They see pleasure as the winning lottery ticket and work as they price you’ve got to pay to stay hopeful even when you’re only buying losing tickets. They think their passion is dependent on them working hard enough to earn the time off or the better living wage to pursue it. But what if we started looking at pleasure differently? Imagine that pleasure is a beautiful woman with a bored mind and work is an average man whose mind is on fire with passion. Maybe, just maybe pleasure and work are two imperfect beings made to come together to become one harmonious creation.

The way animals see it, pleasure is in the running like mad to catch prey, pleasure is in the resting and ruminating, and pleasure is in the learning from members of the herd or pack. The way humans see it, work is in the running like mad to get to work on time, work is in the taking a lunch break because we wish we were at home making waffles, and work is in the lessons from teachers and professors, because we don’t understand why we can’t just study what we want to learn about. We’re burned out on working so hard and we’re too parched to be inspired by our jobs when even holding onto inspiration takes work to endure. My question is not, why do we work so hard and stress ourselves out, but rather why are we making work void of pleasure? When work meets pleasure, a slight breeze blows your way. And when this wind passes you by, let it fill you up and inhale deeply and ask yourself what do I want to create tomorrow?

Photo Courtesy La Abeja Herbs

Inspiration is passionate like an animal who loves you even though you keep them locked up for most of the day, en yet elusive because as soon as you open the gate, even if you’re holding the other end of the rope that’s tied to them, true inspiration will always run away with you. Better yet, inspiration is a brilliant tease, as it’ll only provide you with enough information as to where it’s taking you to get you to take the next leap of faith. And when you take this leap, it won’t be about working towards tomorrow, or feeling pleasure from the past.

Better yet, even if we’re just dreaming here, let’s imagine that whatever we want to create tomorrow is running towards us. Boom. Here’s even another old saying to top you off, what you are seeking is seeking you. Sounds like a Beatle’s lyric I know, but it only means that its time for pleasure and work to come together and produce a beautiful inspiration that will shine such radiant light upon your life that will make you think you’re a little girl running with dogs and racing on horseback. You will wonder if you’re dreaming, but then at least you will know we do not dream to run away, but to run into what is wanting to run into us.