Photo: Grateful thanks to Brian Erickson on Unsplash.
I posted this first on a sister website, Joyful Athlete.
Don’t ask me how, but my dentist and I somehow fell into a conversation between drillings about the meaning of life.
He was brought up in Germany and attended Jesuit schools. I suggested that people have always been looking for the same thing: increasing happiness and freedom from suffering. The rest is details — working out which actions, thoughts, and feelings give us more of the former and less of the latter.
The meaning of life is simple, but of course that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The secret is that our happiness expands when we use the human tools we share with all people — body, heart, will, mind, and soul — expansively. Which, in turn, means actions that increase health, love, strength, wisdom, and joy. The nature of those expansive actions is the foundation of true teaching: compassion, kindness, consideration, love, etc.
Speaking as a writer and editor for 53 years, these simple truths have been pure gold. I often feel that I could pick up just about any subject and write about it, based on this simple understanding of life’s meaning. And I confess it’s been the framework for everything I’ve posted here.
I’ve published six books in the last 10 years, starting with Joyful Athlete. The other titles include two on education.
The remaining pair of books were the ones I published most recently. Both concern my “other” life as a spiritual seeker. The first is Conversations With Ananda: How We Serve. Seventy Pioneering Ananda Members Tell Their Stories. It’s 630 pages of talks with people who’ve made spiritual principles practical in their lives.
The second is Swami Kriyananda Stories: Encounters with a Direct Disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda. Swami Kriyananda has been my teacher for — well, I suspect it’s been a very long time, not just in this life. He was a liberated soul who, in life after life, Paramhansa Yogananda brought along with him to help complete his mission — which most recently was to show people how to make their religion practical and scientific.
It’s a pressing need in our time, thanks to certain infortunate misinterpretations of scientific discoveries that have led millions to believe that life is meaningless and that it has no inspiring purpose or goal.
I seem to have been born, in turn and in part, to help people understand how to tie their sports training and their spiritual life together.
I remember jogging into Ananda Village, which is located in the Sierra foothills 20 miles outside Nevada City, CA, at the end of a long run. In the preceding 30 years I had run thousands of miles in search of spiritual sports, and while I’d made good progress, I was feeling a tad downcast that I hadn’t plumbed the art to its ultimate depths.
In the silence of my mind I prayed, “I’ve been looking for the keys to spiritual running for so many years, and now I’m wondering if it isn’t all just crap.”
Then I heard the voice of my teacher, Swami Kriyananda. It was a clear intuition that said, “Take it seriously.”
I remember another encounter with Swamiji. It was in 2012. (He left his body in April 2013.) He gave a talk at Ananda Sangha in Palo Alto, California. He had recently published a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, based on Yogananda”s interpretations. I was profoundly inspired by the book, and as I knelt before him after the talk, I told him so.
Even as I praised the book, I felt sheepish. Many times over the years, he had suggested that I write about Ananda. And while it’s true that I had written scores of articles, I had yet to publish a book.
Swamiji looked at me penetratingly and said, “It was when I was with Master (Yogananda) as a young monk that he told me to write that book. And it was FIFTY YEARS AGO.”
I must have looked at him vacantly, because he repeated twice more, “It was FIFTY YEARS AGO! — FIFTY YEARS!”
Later, I reflected that it had been nearly fifty years since he first suggested I write about Ananda. Soon I was hard at work on Joyful Athlete, followed by the other books I’ve mentioned. While writing them I realized that it was perfectly fitting and in the natural order of things that it had taken me five decades to get started.
It was particularly true of Joyful Athlete. It took that long to refine my understanding of how I could align my running with the principles that would give me the greatest progress and joy.
Ultimately, of course, I discovered that the method was simple — that each of us has an inner coach in our heart that is unfailingly wise and that is always trying to tell us how to find greater happiness. That’s the science of it. The art is simply learning to listen to what the calm, intuitive feelings of the heart are telling us, and then taking its suggestions seriously and disciplining ourselves to do what it says. And, again, while the method is simple, it isn’t easy.
My purpose in sharing my story, I reckon, is to say that I’m feeling happy and fulfilled by the accomplishments of the last 10 years and before. At age 83, my heart is full of inspiration and my life is richly filled with purpose and meaning. And in no small part I have my long, inglorious career as a runner to thank for it, in the course of which I learned so many lessons about opening the heart.