IN A PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, Annie Dillard writes,
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the
altitudes
and latitudes so dazzling spare
and clean that the spirit can discover
itself for the first time like a
once-blind man unbound.
In body-mind practices, one crosses
a threshold from the everyday into a different order. There is a combination of an asceticism of a discipline as
well as affection for the practice that can transport the participant out of
the ordinary. The world is
the same one, but the view is
deeper, inseparable.
In
studios, dojos and dojangs, in kivas and temples, and in small rooms and wild,
unbuilt spaces, there is the possibility for something transcendent and
enduring and timeless.
Body-mind practices have likely
endured because they can offer an accessible “gap” in the world, so that the
gap doesn’t have to be far off. We
tend to make “far off” and “special,” and tend to miss the richness that is
present without taking one step.
Stepping through the doorway, it can be as if one has slipped inside a
gap in the everyday. The space can
be sacral rather than mundane.
There might be a deeper sense of
one’s authenticity—inclusive, even inseparable, and a letting
go—dis-identification, and observation more than control, where ego might be
set aside and inside/outside soften. Sameness and difference fade. Thought and action aspire to coming
into harmony or balance.
There is calmness inherent not only
in moments of physically slowing and stilling but also in a return to the
reliability of repetitive actions.
By returns, actions might be followed, perhaps becoming graced even if
not athletically graceful, and implicitly meaningful without needing to offer
explicit meaning.
*****
AT THE SAME time, this quality that Annie Dillard writes of
may be largely absent in body-mind practices. Across time, body-mind practices vacillate between the
practical and the spiritual, and reformation efforts arise to take them by
varying degrees one way or the other.
Contemporary practices termed “yoga” are resplendent with a broad
continuum of approaches.
We tend to become our words. The
core language of approaches may be quite different. Effort might be directed toward strengthening ego rather
than softening ego—“knowing oneself” by pushing physical limits and overcoming
weakness to go “deeper inside.”
There may be no sense of gap in the everyday to be found. Rather than stepping out fo the
everyday, the real task might be identified as intensifying the everyday to
extract the very best from it.
Everyday “work” might carry forward into a “workout.”
