Om Mani Padme Run! - Mantra Running

For half of my life I was truly blessed. I lived in Australia, a country where day to day, the weather remained seasonally predictable and each day unchanging. Of course there were the freak days where it may have rained or even hailed, and we would all marvel then get on with enjoying the sunshine. Then we moved to the UK where we discovered talking about the weather is the number one conversation topic, very occasionally bumped to number two which is how long it took to drive to work or various routes to get there. Had I known that talking about the weather is a national sport in Canada I very nearly may have not moved here (if you thought the national sport was hockey, I am sorry you have been misinformed).

For me the weather is simple; days I can run outside and days I really should not. The rest of the time I am curious exactly how cold or how deep the snow has to be before I cannot run outside. I had my first taste of this when the frost hit us hard. It was -1 Celsius and I was running in shorts and my mudra was disintegrating before my eyes. Only then did it occur to me that maybe I should actually have paid attention to all this talk about weather. Running in the cold is hard work. All my usual well honed distractions were not working. The only thing that did was mantras.

Essentially a mantra is a repeated word or phrase. It may be chanted or sung. For the most part, while running, I do it silently in my head. It is shorter than a prayer, but just as a revealing. By meditating continually on one mantra a meaning can come bursting out at any time. My favourite, and probably the most common, mantra is “om mani padme hum” which translates to “the jewel in the lotus”. The interpretation that inspires me the most is all about discovering and unleashing our innate potential. Nothing is more sacrilegious than seeing talent go to ruin. So this is the mantra I used on this cold, cold, cold run. It is hard not to digress into talking about the weather....it is in my blood.

Quickly my step began to run to the mantras beat and it morphed into “om mani padme RUN!” What ever works to get me through the run I will do. Meditating on this mantra I had this revelation: you may or may not know this scene from Absolutely Fabulous (not very Zen but stay with me) when Eddie (who has a slight pudge) says there is a skinny woman inside her screaming to get out. Well behind this beetroot face non-runner there is a REAL marathon runner sprinting to get out. She is the jewel in my lotus. Most importantly she is effortless, well clothed and very warm. Smartly she started her running journey in Australia.

I was discussing this run with a friend saying how I can “only do 5km slowly.” The sort of daft things people who are becoming runners say. “Still faster than someone laying on the couch,” she responded. Which is very true. I would rather be the slow “only-can-do-5km-runner” than a couch potato. Especially a couch potato talking about the weather.