I’ve spent $400 in the last two months, seeking running shoes that won’t hurt my injured knee. At the start of the search, I prayed for guidance, but the answer that came seemed so outrageous and counter to all reason that I could only shake my head.
I read shoe reviews, compared features, and asked questions, only to be disappointed time and again. Finally, playing the last card in the deck, I bought those “least likely” shoes, and they’re working fine.
Lately, I’ve been keeping my attention at the point between the eyebrows while I run. I’ve had some remarkable experiences with this practice. I was running in the woods on the Stanford campus the other day, bringing my attention patiently back, over and over, to the “spiritual eye,” when I began to feel a powerful vortex of energy there. My forehead felt magnetic, as if it were glowing with electricity; and my thoughts and mood matched the textbook descriptions of prefrontal-cortex activation: life seemed very good, filled with wondrous things that were worth accomplishing, and I was confident that I could accomplish them. A smile spread itself in my heart. Entering a woody area with rough footing, where I normally slow to a careful jog, I sped through the tall grass and foot-snagging leaf piles, light as air, feeling boundlessly positive.
The following Sunday, I was sitting in church, feeling deeply exhausted. I was casting about inwardly for some positive thought, some foothold on which I could climb out of the swamp of fatigue, when a tiny switch tripped in my brain, the merest feathering of divine encouragement. I felt a spark in the prefrontal area of my brain, and I remembered that Stanford run. I thought, “I don’t care how tired I am–I feel as though it might kill me to pray, but I simply don’t care. I’m roadkill anyway, and I might as well die happy!”
Drawing on the dim memory of that positive, life-affirming center of consciousness at the point between the eyebrows, I took all the energy I “didn’t have” and poured it into praying for a friend, and soon I was praying with a willingness that had dynamite inside of it. In a short space, I found myself feeling completely at peace. Not spiritually peaceful, which is different, or the peace of a divine blessing, but a kind of ordinary peace, a return to my self-respecting humanity.
I had fought a battle and won, yet I hadn’t felt God’s pleasure. I wondered about this, and I asked Him frankly, “Why am I not receiving a blessing, if what I’m doing is expansive?” And the answer came: “What you’re doing is the blessing.” I realized: Yes, in rising above the swamp of the subconscious, I was free.
