So… I was running with the dog in the dark. It was 5:00am. And mid-stride, my toe caught the lip of the sidewalk – smack – face-plant! Well almost. I put my hands out instinctively and landed with full force on my hands, fortunately missing my face. But the force was intense. The dog came right over – this was not the typical scene – to see me horizontal. I rolled to one side and got up – praying. I grew up with the phrase, “there are no accidents in God’s kingdom” and declared that out loud as I rose.

The challenge as I ran home, was to not replay the incident over and over in my head. I challenged myself to focus on my spiritual nature (qualities of strength and freedom, balance and poise, innocence and purity) – not my physical body – (pain and shredded skin). I wanted to affirm in my thought that my good qualities had never been hurt – had never stopped being expressed – that nothing that happened in the physical realm could touch my spiritual nature. When I got home, I did pretty well not showcasing injuries to get the pity. But when I went to the sink to wash out the stones in my palms, my husband did notice and asked what happened. I tried to down-play the situation and keep my focus on spiritual qualities that had never been touched by the concrete.

I went to work, confident that all was well. But as the day progressed, so did the stiffening and the pain. Finally I had to leave work because most of my job is spent on the computer and my right hand and arm weren’t working very well.

I got home, driving with my left arm. And when I got there, all I could do was lie down and pray. Prayer for me is the action of turning thought to God and who I am as His likeness. I reasoned that as an idea in Mind, I couldn’t be separated from Mind. (If I think about something, I can’t separate myself from what I’m thinking – so the same would be true for God.) Since I’m God’s idea expressed, I can never be separated from God, Good, All.

I reasoned that I didn’t want to fill my thought with the Adam man – the thoughts of myself that said I was made from dust and returned to dust – thoughts that said I was made up of broken material bits that needed to heal over a long period of time. I actively pushed those thoughts out of my consciousness, and filled my thought with who I really was – a spiritual idea in Mind, expressing only good.

Then it dawned on me – the harder I pushed away the Adam-man view of myself (man, made of the dust of the ground), the better I felt. So actually, the fact that I’d pushed away the ground with as much force as possible, was a good thing, and I not only couldn’t be hurt by it, I was benefited by it. Pushing away the Adam-man view of myself left room in my thought for what is true about me. Since I am a spiritual idea, and it was a good thing that the activity of my thought was pushing away a dust-laden concept of me, I could find a way to be grateful for that expression, that pushing away – and all of a sudden I could see that my pushing away with force was a blessing – a cause of progress and inspiration – not a cause of pain and injury.

With that insight lifting thought, I slept for about ten minutes and then woke free of pain. My right arm and hand worked normally and I honestly can’t tell you how quickly the hands healed, since I really stopped noticing them after that. I was free from the idea that I’d fallen and therefore free from the result of a fall.