With the Comrades Marathon only a few weeks away, I can only imagine that most of the entrants would have been out on the road this past weekend for one of their last long runs. Having run three Comrades back in the 1990’s, I know the amount of training that is required to condition your body and mind for this grueling double marathon through the Valley of a Thousand Hills between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, South Africa. We all have a reason for entering a race, and mine was to follow in the footsteps of my father, Peter Blem, who was one of the early enthusiasts of long distance running in the late sixties. One of the big life lessons he taught me was the value of self-discipline, being up well before first light every morning to complete an average of 20km before he went to work.
Now days, I apply the same discipline to ‘nurturing my nature’, which involves a series of daily practices focused on my body, heart, head, and soul. I believe this has played a massive part in restoring peace, freedom, and joy to my life. I want to encourage you, that if you want to run your best race and realize your destiny, then you need to be disciplined in your approach to daily living. Unfortunately, we have all been socialized and conditioned by culture to be slaves to certain societal norms and values, so the idea of now having to be disciplined about a whole list of new activities will probably sound like a bridge too far. But, if what you are doing every day is not bringing you into the sense of abundance you previously hoped for, then it may be time to revisit your roadmap for living and realign your daily practices.
So much of our education has been about doing things – reading, writing, and arithmetic. We were encouraged to get our heads into our books and become learned individuals. We learnt about many wonderful things, as well as inordinately boring things that made no sense to us. But in good faith, we went to school and finally matriculated to continue our journeys. What they failed to teach us in all our years of formal education was how to understand ourselves, and how to decipher our inner sensations, emotions, thoughts, and aspirations. For this we were left to our own devices, stumbling our way through discomfort, pain, confusion, and disempowerment, until finally reaching a point of total surrender, playing it safe, and staying under the radar. Instead of being the whole, wild, and free creatures we originally believed ourselves to be, we were tamed, timid, and tiny slaves, conforming to the pattern of a world that so dominated us.
It’s time to reverse the course of history in our lives by learning to nurture our nature. You still have a destiny, a chance to really live your life, but you are going to need to be disciplined about spending time with a most important person – you! Through learning to consciously breath you will be reconnecting with the energy grid that keeps your lights on, you will be boosting your immune system, and you will improve your gut health. Through learning to emotionally self-regulate, you will gain access to the full range of human emotions that you need to direct you to certain mental constructs you are currently imprisoned by. Through learning to practice mental flexibility, you will gain the ability to think about your thinking and liberate yourself into new and creative ways of seeing reality. And finally, through learning to meditate, you will gain mastery of your own mind, instead of being a slave to your own machinations. All the above are practices of presence, of entering into the eternal now, and simply being, which is enough and necessary if we are ever going to do the right stuff and run the right race.