Listen to the inner voice

This is one of the stories in our Story-Gems project, a collection of our experiences with our Guru, Sri Chinmoy. Project homepage »

It was a beautiful sunny Games Day at our annual August Celebrations in New York. The teams were North America against Europe, playing soccer, a game Guru used to play at the Ashram and encouraged his disciples to play to foster dynamism, oneness and good old discipline.

On another occasion, Sri Chinmoy plays soccer with his students.

It was an intense game and I was playing defence. One of our players pierced the defence of the European team but the goalie made a beautiful save and the European team made a couple of very fine passes. Suddenly one European player broke away and was coming towards our goalie. I was running after him as I had gone forward to help on the last play and was caught off guard. I ran with all the speed I could gather up and caught up with him. As he was about to kick the ball, I also swung my right foot to block and we both hit our own foot and collapsed on the ground. The game was stopped momentarily. My brother-disciple seems to have gotten the better of it as he was OK, but my foot had inflated in size. I had pulled something, probably a tendon.

Video
Vidura relates this same story some years later

I had to limp off the field and exit from the game and I think the European disciples won that game by a goal. Guru was informed of the situation and I was immediately grateful for that. For some reason, I felt I should walk on my foot, but everyone was giving me advice as to what to do and what not to do, which was not to walk on my foot. I inwardly felt all the time that I should be walking on my foot and it was a very powerful feeling. I felt uncomfortable all afternoon for not listening to that inner voice.

Later that evening I went up for prasad and Guru saw me walking with one foot off the ground and the other taking the whole weight. Guru motioned to me come and see him. I went up to Guru and he told me that he had put a very strong force on me and asked me why was I not walking. I apologized to Guru and went back to my seat walking quite comfortably on both feet. The pain and whatever the problem was had disappeared, and voila – a truly incredible instant miracle cure had occurred.

From that day on I learned a very precious lesson, and that is to listen to one’s inner voice, especially with the calibre of Guru we have.