the run

Inhale

Exhale.

The first strike of the drum. Inhale. Exhale.

The second that drum sound hits the air, something ancient wakes up within me every time. Not any drum. This one. The one of my teacher.

The rhythm begins to build, like a deliberate, conscious heartbeat. A different kind of pulse starts to run through my veins, a more primal pulse. And it locks my being into the rhythm. 

I remembered the reason I am here. To transform. To shed the weight. To honour the pure, untouched fabric of my soul and finally set myself free. My only prayer, my single intention, was to melt into the great, silent awareness that holds everything.

But this type of journey is simply too big, too complex to hold in your mind all at once. So, I made a choice to make it simpler. I gave my mind a picture it could actually grasp.

Just a path. And a bright light waiting at the end of it.

I would run. Every single step would be a deliberate, fierce push toward that light.

I stood there in the vast space of my mind. I felt the ground beneath me. I found the start line. I pulled every scattered piece of myself back into my chest, packing all my truth, all my power and all my will into one breath.

I held it.

Go.

I start. Running straight for the sun.

And I ran. I kept running with all my speed, all my determination, throwing myself toward it, trying to keep my focus sharp on that goal, trying to be fully, fiercely present in the run.

While running, I remembered something.  Enjoy the road. Enjoy the journey.

I remembered that just a few minutes ago we were talking about this. The memory started to be painted in front of my eyes. I could see us outside, deep in conversation about this subject. And how interesting it was that the topic even came up. I hadn't mentioned before how focused I was on this specific idea, or what a strong intention I have to reclaim my lost joy for the process; I even wrote about it just last week. And somehow my teacher, without knowing anything about this realisation of mine, picked it up from my being and articulated it for me as a teaching…

And suddenly—I remembered the run.

Wow. 

I had been completely swept away. Completely forgetting. It was like I was transported to an entirely different reality.

Remembering felt almost brutal. Like physical snap. It was so clear just how far away my mind had drifted.

So I focused. I pushed back into the running. This time I will let my thoughts just fly by and I will not let myself be swept away with them. And it worked. I was able to do it. 

I was able to focus for such a longer stretch, that a realisation hit me: in theory, I have infinite energy to do this run. In my being’s world, there are no earthy limits, no exhausted muscles. I could run like this, at maximum speed, sustaining this maximum effort all the way to the light. 

But in practice, in my every day life, I am aware there are many things slowing me down. Things tiring me out from inside out. 

I set the intention to see those things.

Then, it hit me. A deep, heavy emotion. Disappointment. A profound, generic disappointment with the world. It appeared first as something outside my running body, something trailing just behind me, and then it slowly moved in, and I started to truly feel it. 

It was so deep. 

I remembered moment after moment when I was disappointed—by my friends, by my colleagues, by random strangers, even by myself. From that deep, powerful emotion, all those images encompassed me like a 360-degree cinema screen. I was staring at them intensely, trying to understand the message, trying to decode the pattern hidden in all those faces and failures.

And suddenly… I REMEMBERED.

Like yanking the power cord straight from the projector, the images vanished. I saw myself, faint, somewhere in the distance. Running.

Oh my god. I had completely forgotten about the run again. I snapped back, even more mesmerized by how utterly, brutally I had been swept away from my goal.

I kept running. Faster. Pushing my maximum effort, trying even harder to grip my focus and force my presence. And as I did, I focused more and more on the sheer speed. How fast I was running. How I moved my body. How my internal power could forge this kind of absolute maximum effort. Left, right, breath, stride.

And then, in a sudden flash of clarity, I realized I had completely forgotten what I was running toward. I was still running, but for a long, long time, I had been running with my eyes locked on the ground. I had completely lost the light in front of me. I lost the purpose of the run. The goal.

Maximum effort for nothing.

Another brutal wake-up. I fixated fiercely on the goal again. I ran even harder, fighting to keep my maximum effort, my absolute presence, while gripping that end goal as my one and only direction.

At some point, my perspective started to shift. Before this, the practice was like a first-person game—seeing straight through the character’s eyes. But now, my point of view floated out, shifting into a third-person setting. I was running, yes, but I could see myself doing it from the outside. I held that image for a long period, imagining this was still the initial practice of running toward the light, but something felt off. Disconnected. I made an effort and pulled myself back inside. First person. I managed to hold it, but only briefly. The perspective kept sliding outside, automatically.

After trying over and over, I finally realized what this pattern was. This was my presence, moving. I wasn’t "observing myself" like they teach you in spiritual schools. What was actually happening was that, having maintained the run for so long, I had gotten the hang of it. The running had turned into an automatic action. Like when you learn to drive a car: at first, you are intensely present, focused, careful about every tiny move and command. In those first lessons, you must be fully there, because if you aren’t, you lose control. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes an automatism. You can drive absent-mindedly. You can get lost in a hundred other thoughts and suddenly wake up at your destination with no idea how you drove there. The body did it for you, mechanically.

This was exactly what was happening with my running. I could keep the pace, but I had turned it into an automatic movement. That allowed me to float outside, to look at it, to hold the image, but it gave me "space" to think of other things. Space to analyze the run while my body did it without me.

No. This mechanical running without presence was clearly not the practice. So I fought. I kept trying to get back inside the run. Losing perspective, pulling it back, losing it, pulling it back, until—click. I locked in. And I stayed there. Maximum effort. Maximum focus. Maximum presence. For the longest period yet.

And finally being able to hold it felt good. I felt powerful. I felt inspired. I felt present. 

Something changed. Then I hear the change outside. 

The shaman stopped the drum. 

A moment of silence, and I hear:

'It is time for you to take it.'

He hands the drum to me.

If until that moment I was being carried through this process by the rhythmic sounds around me, the sudden silence was deafening. Handing me the drum completely unexpectedly—forcing me not only to keep my running, but to actually do something physical with my body, to create the space for myself—this was a whole new level. For a few seconds, it took me completely by surprise. I briefly lost my running. But because I had built the strength to hold it for so long just moments before, I wasn’t going to let this unexpected external event break me.

A strong, fast internal decision: I will adapt to the external conditions. I will hold my run.

I took the drum. I connected with it. I gave internal thanks for it arriving in my process, and I asked the spirits for guidance. I started to breathe. I reconnected with my running. I held the presence, the effort, the goal. And slowly, slowly, I started to incorporate the drum beat into my process. Like adding a new tool. A power-up for this character running in this game.

Then, the beating of the drum and the rhythm of my running became one.

Every beat was a breath, powering up my effort with fresh oxygen. Every beat anchored my presence, acting like an invisible external force, creating resistance against that old tendency to drift outward. Every single beat drew a line in front of me for my next step, ensuring I would not lose focus on the goal. Beat. Step. Beat. Step. I did this for a while. Keeping the run. Keeping the pace.

Until something amazing happened.

The drum started slowing down its rhythm. It was as if its spirit knew something I did not. It didn't derail my running at all, but I watched, mesmerized, as a completely new dimension of my practice unfolded.

The drum beats became slower... and slower.

And while I was still running at maximum speed, I was intimately connected with this drum that was slowly reducing my pace. I was holding both at the exact same time. The absolute maximum speed AND the reduced pace. I was somehow encompassing both states of being. 

The drum grew slower. And slower. A continuous progression that allowed me to sustain both realities at once—the sprint and the deliberate slowing down.

Something happened to the dimension of time. It was as if time flowed forward with my running, and backward with my slowing down. And I was outside of time.

I could see all at once every possible position I would ever occupy on my run to the light. These images created like a solid ray of energy stretching all the way to the sun.

And there I was. At the beginning. Present. Perfectly still. Perfectly connected with the SUN through this ray. The ray of my power and speed. The ray of my maximum effort. The ray of my maximum focus. The ray of my presence. 

All of my running toward the sun, and me, standing perfectly still. 

I held this image. I stayed there, suspended in it, for a while.

The drum had stopped long before.

And it was silence.