Pratyahara in motion

Lately I've been biking most days and when I've been running, my legs feel heavy and thick and wooden, like I have lost any and all spring in my legs. I plod and it feels terrible which is why I have been biking or when I do run, being aware that I need to rest so running really easily, not thinking about time or distance but just enjoying being in motion and stopping or walking before anything starts to hurt or get really tired.

Since I moved, I've been getting up early and running in the park (and it's the best thing to start my day early and surrounded by so much beauty).

Pratyahara is the fifth element of the 8 stages of Ashtanga Yoga and is recognized in other disciplines. It means "withdrawal of the senses." In meditation, it is not being able to feel the boundary between your body and the world around you. It sounds like it would take years and hours of meditating to get there, but after I went through my Reiki attunements, it was so much easier for me to go deep in meditation--and I reached the state of pratyahara without even trying. It felt like being liquid in a liquid environment. Time both ceased and speeded up. I felt both whole and a part of all that is. I wanted to stay there forever and sat, that day, for hours.

There are times when I am giving Reiki sessions where it feels like my hands disappear. I can both not tell the delineation between my hands and the person's body I am working on or the boundary between my hands the air around them. It is not them going numb because numbness has the distinct feeling of absence and anxiety, the exact opposite of this happening. I call it pratyahara of the hands, half joking, and when this happens to me, it feels like my hands are both present but in another dimension or on a higher plane or something but wherever they are is where I would like to be.

Anyway, I give all this very odd background to say that while I was running yesterday, the same thing happened to my body from the waist down. My hips and legs and feet were moving beneath me, but it felt, again, like they were liquid in a liquid environment, themselves but also a part of the air around them. I was breathing hard and working, but even so, my legs were light and I ran all the way to the beach and back, more than twice as far as I have been running, without any pain or heaviness and though I ran with effort, I also ran with seemingly endless amounts of energy. I have had days when I have run and it has felt effortless, easy and I could run really far and fast. These other occasions have been purely ones of physical readiness. Yesterday, it was spiritual. And today, I don't feel sore or tired or worked and better than that, the sensation of running on wooden legs is completely gone.