A combination of miracle and prudence saved me recently on Highway 17 as I was driving south to Santa Cruz.

About 5 miles below the summit of that hilly, forested, curvy road, a motorcyclist spun out of control in front of me.

I managed to stop exactly at his downed bike, maybe an inch from it, although I had been traveling at freeway speed.

The cars that had been traveling behind me stopped. No one hit me.

He and some other drivers pulled his trashed bike off the highway. My car was stopped in the left lane while they dragged the bike and random debris onto the right side of the road. Many cars were at a standstill behind us on this winding, fast highway through the forest. My car seemed undamaged.

Disoriented, I got out and stood in the 90° heat in the middle of this rather scary road I've been driving for decades, since I first learned to drive on this very highway.

The motorcyclist was agitated but nice. I told him he was in shock and needed to go to the hospital, as he was running around on the highway, and also looking under my car at my request, for more missing pieces of his bike. I don't know if he was injured, but it seems likely. But not at first look.

I should have looked under my car too, but I was in some shock of my own (and had defaulted to paying more attention to the motorcyclist than to myself amid my surging adrenaline). I did check the front of my car; all looked fine.

No cops were called, as far as I knew, or arrived on the scene. After about 10 minutes, I guess, with the motorcycle and its fragments cleared away, I was glad to just get going. A few minutes later as I was driving, one of the helper-drivers pulled up on my left as we traversed one of the highway's challenging curves and asked me through my window if I was all right. (I don't know what would have happened if I had said no.)

But when I arrived at my mom's about a half hour later, I saw that my front bumper had minor damage. I hadn't thought to get any of the motorcyclist's information, because of my shock and my gratitude that all seemed well, or so I thought. The minor bumper damage must have come from just barely tapping his already downed bike. On the highway, it had looked like my car was about an inch from it.

The funny thing is that I really didn't want to make that particular trip that day. I had so much to do. I felt tired. I was mired in an overall feeling of resistance to getting in my car and going. I felt emotionally unsettled and pissed off at the idea of undertaking the journey. I even cried a little.

Yet I felt I had to visit my mother. So I dried my tears and pushed myself to get in the car and go.

But given my resistance, I made sure to use specific, yet simple, energy management tools. Once on the road, I visualized grounding my body to the earth. I also imagined grounding my car. Plus I visually placed a fluorescent blue shield around my car, at a distance of about 3 feet away from the vehicle, all around it.

I created these dynamic mental images with the intention that they were real on an energy plane. I could see them not with normal seeing but in my mind's eye.

These tactics, I think, saved me.

And they supported my taking physical actions that saved me too: leaving a number of car lengths between me and anyone ahead of me on the road, feeling calmer, and maintaining presence of mind and the ability to react as I needed to.

All this equaled effective energy work. I'm grateful!

Oh, and since a couple of people pointed out that the motorcyclist could have taken a photo of my license without my noticing and blamed the accident on me, I decided to proactively contact my car insurer. Even though I had gathered absolutely no information from this other driver.

My insurance company believed my recounting of the incident! And I ended up with a new front bumper for the cost of my low deductible.

Wow!

Energy tools work.