Running Into Myself

Book excerpt: While celebrating her 26th birthday, Thea listens on as her thirty-something friends discuss their lives. Their conversation leads her to realise she’s been drifting through life and hasn’t grown up. In addition, she can’t tell where she ends and her mother begins. The realisation gradually takes its toll and several months later, she’s diagnosed with depression. Refusing medication, she leaves her soul-constricting job and pursues a more meaningful path.Along the way she discovers spirituality – in particular, Japanese Energy healing – but with a fragile sense of Self, lacks the confidence and belief required to cross the threshold to a new life. Instead, she unquestioningly accepts others’ views on life and slides back into a mundane existence.Three years later a terrifying nightmare provides another wake-up call. This time with no game plan, she sells her house, leaves her 9-5 job and embarks on a relationship that takes her to Santa Fe (US). Once there, she encounters several mentors who introduce her to Jungian psychology, Greek mythology, BodySoul work, fairytales, folk tales and alchemical symbolism.Soon after, overweight and unable to run more than a few metres at a time, she impulsively signs up for three marathons – New York, Rome and Athens – with the first only months away.What unfolds over the next eighteen months is an inspiring rite of passage into conscious womanhood: an unintentional pilgrimage healing old wounds, and a revelatory experience with her deep Self. The book is a personal narrative accompanied by examinations of myth and depth psychology, in which life illuminates ancient tales and archetypes find form in modern experience.