Run Faster and Feel Better!

If you want to run faster, spend less time on the ground.  Literally, bounce off the earth and allow the force of gravity to launch you forward.  You need to feel the earth, but you don’t need to spend much time there, just enough to get you bearings.

Its the same for feeling good.  If you want to feel better, happier, more alive, more vibrant, more you, spend less time feeling bad.  You have to feel a little bad, a little conflict, to get your bearings and then go in the other direction.  Both take practice and may be elusive, but are quite simple.

 To rebound you need a few things:

1. You need to sense, the moment you are contacting the earth — to recognize conflict.
2. You need to be able to engage the structure of your foot, using the lever action to turn the downward force into upward force — to structure your focusing to help point your attention away from feeling bad towards feeling good.
3. You need to be able to convert to kinetic energy of your landing into potential energy briefly stored in the twisting of your spine, — to give yourself permission and allow yourself to feel good without looking to others for approval.

If you are using the muscles inappropriate to the task it is wasted effort, which is tiring.  Worse than that it leads to a diversion of the force generated by your landing.  When the force isn’t following the path through your skeleton the connective tissue and muscles around your joints have to kick in to hold yourself together.  Rather than converting the force from kinetic (moving) energy to potential energy, you change it, through friction, to heat.  This is what damages joints.  This is where joint pain comes from.  Joint pain isn’t inevitable.  It is avoidable and doing so is simple but requires attention and help from others.

If you focus on the things that make you feel bad, you’ll end up noticing more of those types of things.  When couples get pregnant they often report suddenly seeing pregnant women everywhere… there aren’t really more of them, its just that they notice them now.  It is the same in your experience, you have the capacity to focus your attention away from the thing that makes you miserable to the thing that makes you joyful (that can be hard if you are feeling miserable, so lets say, “less miserable”).