In his wonderful book, Running With the Legends, Michael Sandrock describes the speed workouts of the great Moroccan miler, Noureddine Morceli. Friends of Noureddine describe how he’ll be talking and laughing before he begins a track workout, but how the moment he steps on the track, he’s all business, 100 percent focused.
The great ones in all fields are the focusers, intent on what they’re doing, making each moment count. I decided to be that kind of runner today – I would pay attention.
I asked God to show me how to please Him. I wanted to mean business; I didn’t want to be one of those “dissociating” runners who allow their thoughts to drift, satisfied with the random scraps of inspiration happen to float their way. I wanted to be an “associating” runner, intensely aware and striving with purpose.
Knowing that the physical center of focused attention is in the forehead, between the eyebrows, I put my attention strongly there. If my mind began to drift, I brought it back patiently to the business at hand. I wouldn’t allow anything to keep me from doing the best I could – not the sight of other runners, or the hundreds of people wandering about a university campus at the noon hour.
Yet, gosh, it all seemed so pressured, so forced and meaningless, plodding along mile after mile with no lightness in my heart, no joy, no love, no delight.
- No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! – November!
– Thomas Hood
Why bother? Why not, instead, do something that might stimulate enthusiasm, that would hold a promise of opening and expanding the feelings of my heart? I recalled a period, years ago, when I’d prayed in anguish to know why my running and my life had taken a particularly sterile turn, and how the answer had come as a quiet intuition: “It isn’t expansive.”
I’d had enough of hardbitten effort. While perhaps necessary and appropriate at the start of a run, to keep my mind from wandering, I had carried it too far.
While holding my attention gently at the spiritual eye, I fell into a calm, repetitive prayer:“Bless them, bless them, bless them.” Anything, to break the cycle of self-concern, escape the prison of ego, and expand past the little self into the wider inward skies.
How terribly alone the mind is, without the things that make us feel alive: warmth of heart, love, and kindness. The mind is a prison when purged of feeling. To rise by the heart takes heart-means. You can chant the words, but the sense, blood, and living of them comes with feeling.
I finished the run in a wonderfully positive frame of mind. What held me back during the first miserable hour? No surprise: my mind. A logical conception of how I should run.
Certainly, there are useful techniques that help calm the mind – breathing exercises and such. But the richest treasures of spiritual practice come by heart-methods: singing, loving, serving, blessing, dancing, quiet, trusting conversation.
I once asked a respected spiritual counselor for his advice; I wanted to know how to open my heart. I thought he might suggest that I move to a third-world country and serve the poor, or return to school for a medical degree. Instead, he said, “Buy some flowers for your girlfriend. Take her out to dinner.”
I believe it was Gandhi who said: “Nothing that you do is important, but it is important that you do it.” It isn’t important that we open our hearts spectacularly, but it’s vital that we begin to open them.
