The first enemy you will meet with on this road to wakefulness will be your own body. It will fight you until the first cock-crow.
Gustave Meyrink


So I'm hanging out in my new regular Body Balance class at the gym, and there's just no flow. Everything is tight, my piriformis is, as Damon commented, being a pain in the arse, and worse still, the pain has spread into the hip flexor and around down the front of my quad.

The tension that I feel in the strength poses extends right throughout the rest of my session. The imbalance in one part of my body spreads into my balance poses, the stretches, the relaxation. I get frustrated and feel I am at war against this body of mine. Then it occurs to me, why am I fighting? What's with all this mind-body separation crap? Wasn't I the one who wrote my thesis on gender identity in cyberspace, and argued that it wasn't possible to leave the body behind and exist solely in the mind? Here I am, back here again, at war with myself...
Enough already!

So what am I afraid of? That this body will throw another curve ball at me and I won't be able to train for the half-marathon in October? So? It happens sometimes. I'm certainly not going to get anywhere if I slip back into this old adverserial mode again. It's not 'this body', it's me. What am I putting in my way?

Last night this body ran 2.4km in 12 minutes and 28 seconds. I missed the new police college admission time for my gender and age group by three seconds. And I wasn't even going full out. That's pretty good for someone who couldn't run from Te Papa to Fergs Kayaks a few months ago, who took twelve minutes just to get from Freyberg to the point, and then nearly died doing it.

Yay me!