The month has whirled around again and now it seems summer is starting to bloom, another cycle emerging. My months now include a trip to somewhere new, as Running Free magazine's roving reporter. As I walked off the aircraft yesterday, having flown back from Riga, I noticed that I felt changed and could feel the differences within me from the last time I walked into the terminal - when I had just arrived from Malta. Adventures and travel require that in travelling to somewhere new we travel further into ourselves. It is our orientation to go in cycles, out from a place of comfort. Originally from the safety of our mother's womb to explore the world - to find out what we need to know.

I recorded a podcast with Nick Miles last week. Nick talks about the joy of going on an adventure (specifically, across the Alps on a 3-speed bike!), of pushing beyond previously unexplored limitations and in so doing finding out more about ourselves and living with a higher level of energy, creativity and enthusiasm. His podcast is worth listening to - an inspiring man!

If we do not discover and develop and grow, if the energy is repressed, then we go backwards within ourselves. This is against the natural rhythm of birth, death and re-birth. We can see this cycle reflected in the seasons and at junctures within our lives. Both Fi and Jim explore this, encouraging us to go with the flow - but to reflect as we go through these new phases on what we have learnt and to understand the loss involved in movement and change, and what we will bring with us to be open to the new. Unless we are prepared to embark on our own unique life journey and find out our life purpose - then we can get caught in patterns and scripts, rather than developing and growing and completing a cycle that takes us to the next level. Every time we embrace the challenge of the new and uncharted, we can get nearer our centre, which is also the centre of the universe and at the core of our being, the diamond - the still point within us which reflects the whole universe and is our true authentic self.

But to know this place we have to journey out and embrace all that is there for us. To explore the pull to spiral out at the same time as wanting to return to the core of our being. This is possible only by expanding and exploring and seeing within the cycles in our own lives what it is we need to bring forth from the shadows, which then has the power to transform and heal us.

Vena courageously asks that we commit to ourselves and do not seek the answer in another. She explores how we find the courage to face ourselves rather than seek to avoid ourselves, and to see relationship as a mirror for our personal growth. She challenges us, if we want to leave one relationship, not to expect that a magic wand will be waved by looking for another, a leap to so-called safety...

All of the writers in this newsletter express an authentic wish that we be true to ourselves and that we never avoid facing ourselves on our own road ahead, that we are prepared to look in that mirror that is everywhere we look in the universe. Everything we relate to has the power to reflect ourselves back at us and show us where we need to grow and heal -  and of course it follows that in seeing ourselves we must accept responsibility for each step we take and each breath we breathe.

We are called to the adventure of life - and as I write Mark Cooper is running through Europe adventuring to discover more about himself as he runs, benefitting the lives of those who have been tragically altered, who are now being asked to find strengths they didn't know they had.

We all have more within us that we ever knew.

I was inspired by Chris McDougall, author of Born to Run, when I interviewed him for the coming edition of Running Free magazine. I asked him what he had found out about himself that he didn't know before in training for and running 50 miles across Mexico's Cooper Canyons - and he replied 'that I could do it'...

With love,

Julia