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Often people get trapped in a rip current without realizing it. If you don’t look for the signs you can be caught up in one before you even know how it happened. Once in many think the only way out is to keep pushing and swim through it. Swimming against the current. They push and they push until exhaustion sets in. It’s only when calmness sets in do they often realize that the best way to escape the current is to not to try to swim against it but parallel to it until you get out of it. Once out, you can swim back to shore.
The secret is remaining calm. It is to think about what is happening. It is about accessing the situation and it is about finding a way out. Up until recently I have been doing the same thing with my running. I have been going against what my body needed. What my body wanted. I had been pushing and pushing and not paying attentions to the signs or the way out. I have finally found the edge of the rip current I have been fighting and now am comfortably able to swim to shore.
All this time, I kept thinking of it as giving up. That I was taking the easy way out. I didn’t realize that I was taking on water and pushing myself to brink of exhaustion because I refused to truly listen to the signs. Just like you need to respect a rip current, you need to respect the limitations of your body. It’s about learning to swim with the current instead of against it. Most of all it is about knowing if you want a different outcome, you need to change what your are doing. You need to be willing to look at ways to do the same thing over and over again. You need to be willing to float with the tide.
As you know I’ve been continuing on my 30 days of Yoga with Adriene. The other day in practice she gave a mantra that really struck me.
Allow…. Release… Let Go
Seems easy enough, but is oh so hard in life. Often we hold onto things that no longer serve us, but we can’t seem to let go. Continuing to push when we should pull. Holding on when we need to let go. When we finally…. allow…. release…. let go; we wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.
As I’ve continued on my walking, I realize that for now this is serving me. I can go longer distances. I can go daily. It doesn’t drain me. I can go faster that I thought and further this way. I can and will train for a marathon. For me, it is better to be able to continue to keep going forward to achieve new goals than it is how I get there because sometimes if you don’t find your way out of the current you could end up exhausted to the point of giving up. I’m not one to give up but I am no longer fighting the current.
What rip currents have you escaped in life?
The Accidentally Running Mama 