Living Well

The Living Well Archive will grow each month into an online resource containing; reflections, thoughts and simple self-help ideas. Click below for more pages from the archive:

An Emotional Storm - Beginnings - Running Free - The Hazelnut Shell - Letting Go
The Scratched Diamond - Help! I've Lost The Plot - Joots - The Flashback - Food... For thought

Running Free

I found this story in a book recently, and it reminded me of how it is possible to go on living in a ‘mental cage’ even though right now we are free to live expansively.

Martin (the author of this story) likes to walk through open fields to exercise and settle his mind.  He writes:

"Not infrequently I would see a man walking his four Kerry Blue Terriers.  These were amazing dogs.  Bounding energy, elastic grace, and electric speed, they coursed and leapt through open fields.  It was invigorating just to watch them.  Three of the four dogs did this; the fourth stayed behind and off to the side of its owner, and ran in tight circles.  I could never understand why it did this; it had all the room in the world to leap and bound. One day I was bold enough to ask the owner.

“Why does your dog do that? Why does it run in circles instead of running with the others?” He explained that before he had the dog, it had lived practically all its life in a cage and could only exercise by running in circles.  For this dog, to run meant to run in tight circles.  So instead of bounding through open fields that surrounded it, it ran in circles."

This is a powerful metaphor of the human condition.  For indeed we are free …. but the memory of the cage remains.  And so we run in tight, little circles even while immersed in open fields of grace and freedom’.

We can make our cages very comfortable, and even though imprisoned, we can feel secure in there.  Fear can make us reluctant to walk free even though the door is standing open. Sometimes it is by rehearsing beliefs over and over that we are worthless, stupid, cowardly, and unlovable that we build and maintain the bars of the cage.  Martin goes on to say; ‘We believe this lie, and our life becomes a cocktail party of posturing masquerade in order to hide the anxiety and ignorance of who we truly are’.

The real truth is that you are lovable, worthy of being your true self, and if you are looking at my website and other sites for help to release you from a cage, then you most certainly have courage and behind it, the will to run free!  May you find the help and the freedom that you are looking for.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss how psychotherapy can help you to step out so that you can enjoy running openly and freely in your own mental and emotional fields.

From: "Into the Silent Land - The Practice of Contemplation"  Martin Laird.
Published by DLT.