Last year, I had a job that involved lifting as much as 3000 pounds a day. I was continually on my feet, always on the move, and when I left I was lean and strong. But then I took a sedentary job, and I began to get flabby.
As a distance runner, the thought of lugging an extra 5-10 pounds is mildly nauseating, yet I wasn’t eager to begin a diet. Gosh, did I have go through the whole weight-loss rigmarole again? I gritted my teeth and began eating less fat, simple sugars, and starchy carbs. And, to my astonishment and chagrin, instead of losing weight, I began to gain.
I thought I could hear the Universe chuckling, but I wasn’t enjoying the joke. And I finally did the only thing that ever seems to work. I went for a long run and asked a higher power what the dickens I was doing wrong. Whenever I reach a point where I’m able to put my whole heart into my prayers, I always receive an answer. I was running in the hills and praying, and after sharing my frustrations frankly and forthrightly, the answer came. It was a quiet intuition that said: “You’re not thinking expansively.”
I knew what “expansion” meant, from a wonderful book by J. Donald Walters called Education for Life. As I mentioned in Chapter 3 (“The Five Dimensions of Fitness”), Walters explains that there are five instruments through which we can experience happiness: body, feeling, will, mind, and soul. When we use those tools “expansively,” our happiness increases, but when we use them “contractively,” we suffer.
The message rocked me. “I’m not thinking expansively? How so?”
Continuing my run, I asked God to show me how to use my running to help others. And, once again, I sensed an intuitive response, but this time it didn’t come in the form of words. I had started the run feeling sluggish and vaguely ill, and a freshness now entered my legs, and I felt increasingly light and happy.
In the days that followed, I tried to think of ways to run “expansively” while I continued to pray for understanding. I thought I might be guided to give fitness classes, or share in some other outward way. Instead, my entire thinking about fitness subtly changed. Instead of fretting and planning and caring deeply about fitness and weight-loss, I discovered that I was naturally and happily doing the things that brought weight-loss and fitness in their wake.
I ran happily and regularly. I hiked with Mary Ellen on beautiful mountain trails. I worked out at the gym. I ate a healthy diet. And because I was exercising well and happily, my happiness began to spill over to encourage and inspire others, with little conscious effort on my part.
I concluded that happiness doesn’t always come by “figuring it out and doing something.” It can come as the result of a lifting of our overall energy and mood, as we form a volition to broaden our outlook.
I’ll surely continue to study the science of running, and I’ll work on my running form. But I realized that the best form is a whole thing, where body, heart, mind and will are aligned with the larger Self. If I adjust my shoulders, straighten my back, tighten my stomach, or change my cadence, it’ll be in service of a state where “efforts end in ease,” where I’m in touch with a happiness that radiates outward from within.
I know how joyful that state is. When I’m there, the details of running fall naturally in place. I may not be in deep prayer and meditation, because that isn’t possible while I run. But I’m running as close to God as I can get.
