It usually starts about twenty minutes in, when the body has settled into that steady rhythm and the room disappears a little, and the hum of the treadmill becomes less like a machine and more like a metronome keeping time for something you can’t quite name. My heart rate is climbing through zone three toward zone four, which my fitness coach fusses at me about because I’m supposed to be in zone two, but that’s just who I am, I don’t do anything partway, and somewhere in that push the light shows up again, small at first, just a dot at that spot above the horizon line in my mind, the place I’ve been working with since I was a teenager reading an article in Psychology Today that I probably wasn’t ready to understand.
You know the difference between thinking about something and being inside it. This is the second one. And so I stay there, breathing, walking, letting the miles stack up without really counting them, and the light gets larger, not brighter exactly but more available, like a doorway that isn’t trying to impress you, it’s just there if you’re willing to keep your attention steady long enough to notice. I’ve been practicing this for over forty-five years, since that magazine article planted the seed, and it’s evolved from a curiosity into a daily practice that I rely on more than almost anything else in my life.
The treadmill sessions run ninety minutes to two hours. That sounds extreme to most people, and I understand that, but the first twenty minutes are just getting the body moving, the next twenty are finding the state, and everything after that is where the actual work happens. The sweat becomes part of the ritual. I envision it as past hurts and poor decisions leaving my body, dripping off my back and my arms and my face, and I know how that sounds, I know it sounds like something from a wellness retreat brochure, but the experience of it is nothing like that. It’s hard. It’s confrontational. It’s looking at every version of yourself without the luxury of editing.
And it’s always the same cast of characters that show up. The kid who did dumb things because he didn’t know better and sometimes because he did. The teenager who thought he understood the world and didn’t understand anything. The man who built something bigger than he could hold and watched it fall apart. They all show up, and for a long time I tried to keep the better versions in the frame and crop out the ones that didn’t photograph well, but this space doesn’t cooperate with that kind of editing. It just shows you what’s there.
So I do the work. I find each one of them, and I say it the same way every time. It happened. I acknowledge what I did. I learned from what I did. I truly am sorry. But I love you anyway. And I keep doing it, not because it was effective once but because life keeps adding chapters, and each one brings its own set of moments you’re going to have to look at later. This isn’t a one-time forgiveness. It’s an ongoing relationship with every version of yourself, maintained through repetition and sweat and the kind of honesty that only shows up when your body is working hard enough that your mind finally stops performing.
After these sessions, and this is the part that still surprises me even after months of it, I come out with insights I didn’t have going in. Energy I didn’t bring with me. Solutions to problems I wasn’t consciously working on. Something about the combination of physical exertion and deep internal focus creates a state where the mind does things it can’t do at a desk or in a conversation or lying in bed at three in the morning. It’s not meditation in the way most people think of meditation. It’s harder than that. It’s hotter than that. And it works in ways I can’t fully explain but have learned to trust completely.
I’m not suggesting everyone go walk on a treadmill for two hours and try to enter a trance state, because that’s my version of this and your version will look different. But I am suggesting that the mind has capacities we don’t normally access, and finding your version of the doorway, whatever that looks like for you, might be the most important thing you ever figure out how to do.
