What does it mean to practice?
I have held this word close for about a decade now. I share here a little more about how I have come to understand and relate to the word and the idea of “practice.” This piece is about how we practice what we long for in the world.
How can we practice the liberatory community we dream of?
When I was a pastor in Memphis I had a colleague and friend with whom I met weekly over our favorite buttery pastry. One of the conversations we had over and over again was about belief and practice.
He had been in the parish longer than me by almost a decade and had spent years nurturing his congregation away from harmful theology. One day he said to me, “I used to think if we could just get them to believe [meaning to trust] something different, everything would be OK.” And he did. He unwound atonement theology over a decade and the people affirmed: “this is trash.”
And then in meetings and conversations about decisions at church, they found themselves leaning on the same old structures of the idea that Jesus died to save us from our sins, and therefore that is how we should also show up in the world. He was weary.
I sat across from him and said, “That’s why I want to invite people to practice together, I don’t care what they believe!” It felt far less important to toil over ideas than to focus on how we show up in the world in real time. Because how we show up is how we have impact. We can feel connection or severance based on how we show up in community. We have capacity to offer deep care and we have capacity to harm one another. Both how we show up ourselves, and the impact we experience from how others show up, really shape our sense of dignity, belonging, and safety.
So I said to him, and then to my congregation: “I want people to really practice together! Let’s practice the community we want to be! And the values we say we have!” What if people could be a part of a community regardless of what they believed (what they say they trust) and instead could find belonging because they were willing to be in practice together?
I knew at the time this had to incorporate the body, but I hadn’t yet come into relationship with the formalized practice of somatics yet. Instead, I noticed embodied inconsistencies in myself and started to practice curiosity.
Here are a couple examples from my writing at the time:
I come home from work, toss my backpack on the chair by the door, the keys in the bowl, and make my way into the kitchen. As I kick off my shoes, I scoop up my daughter who toddles toward me splashing glee on the floor and walls as she comes. Immediately my heart opens and I feel the aches of the day soften, the unfinished to-do list vaporizes and I come back to the present moment. But my ability to stay there leaves just as quickly as it comes, and I turn to my partner and say with bitterness and irritation, “I thought you were going to have dinner started by now.
And another…
My friend is hurting. I can tell.
I’m not sure exactly what is going on in his life, but I know him well enough now to know that he is unsettled. We went to lunch to get some planning done for the festival next month, but he couldn’t get comfortable in his chair.
I watched my friend, the one who teaches me gentleness, snap at the server because the ketchup bottle was empty. “Aren’t you supposed to check all these before you open the restaurant?” I consider asking him why his heart is hurting, but I decide siding with him will help him feel better. I say: “Yea, this place has really gone down hill.” I start to worry we won’t be ready in time, “we’ve got to get to work, man.” The moment passes, and so does that opportunity for deep connection, and the distance between us grows greater. Now my heart hurts too.
Since then, my somatic teachers have taught me that: “We are always practicing something.” Our bodies are always practicing something: our timidness, our anxiety, our courage, our curiosity.
If that bears truth – then I have practiced a lot of things in my life I wish I hadn’t. In the vignettes described above I practiced: joyful presence and empathy, but also impatience, biting criticism and separation & disconnection. These last few lead me away from the kind of life and community I long to live. They are antithetical to the values I hold and strive to embody.
We can know things and want things and still fail to do them, no? We can intend things, or say we care about something, and *do* something entirely different. So often the behavior creeps in so subtly we don’t even recognize what has happened until we are past it. Even when we think we have set our mind right, we find our bodies carry us elsewhere.
If you’re into Christian scripture references, you can read the next section. If not, skip ahead to the next section…
I can’t help but remember the line from the Bible that says:
“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
These words seem to recognize a division between the spirit and the flesh. The wisdom in this text is the human account of describing the reality that we can experience division of our Spirit and body.
I can want a thing, intend a thing, desire a thing, value a thing…
…and then do, behave, act in a totally different way.
Whether or not Paul (the author of this text) intended to teach that the body and spirit are somehow fundamentally or should remain separate is a debate among those who study his writings. I don’t care much about what he intended, the impact of that interpretation in Christian practice over the years has been to strictly divide the two (even in spite of the doctrine of Incarnation: that Jesus was divine and fleshy). And so now we are reckoning with what it means to reconcile the two. To bring them back into relationship.
The question becomes: how? How do we bring our body and our actions into alignment with what we care about? How do we show up in the world in the way that we want? How do we move toward our dreams for a liberated future in real time?
We practice.
We try on, learn, adjust, and try again.
We move toward the vision or the feeling or the desire that keeps calling our attention back to it.
This is not a practice of forcing anything, it’s about cultivating our ability to access the thing we want, the way we want to be.
I have come to learn that the body is one of the most trustworthy domains for me to be in practice.
And so I started practicing listening to my body.
Paying attention to the cues, recognizing that my jaw, my gut, the tissue that cups my right thoracic spine, my psoas muscle, my eyebrows all have wisdom for me. They reveal a deeper knowing about how I am feeling or reacting to a moment.
And when I am in the practice of noticing – I can be more curious about what possible “moves” are available to me. I can be in more purposeful choice about how I want to show up. Practice helps us bridge the gap between between the thing we wish to do and the thing we actually do.
We practice regularly and a lot, because it’s especially hard to do this when there is a lot of pressure. When we practice when things aren’t intense, new pathways are actually being laid for us in our brains to be able to return and use them again when we really need them.
When I purposefully practice feeling for other people, and feeling for myself, I am able to really access that skill when conflict begins to build or when shame starts to rise.
In other words: we practice when the stakes aren’t so high, so that when the stakes rise, we have more access to what we need.
I remember when I first started learning about how all of this lives in the body and the nervous system, it felt so ethereal or theoretical. So let me offer a story as an example of one time I have really felt the impact of practice in my life.
I sat at the kitchen table with two white women who were about my mom’s age. They are members at a church that had taken up a commitment in the last year to focus on ecological issues. We were organizing a group around this commitment and were meeting to talk about the year ahead. It had become clear along the way that I differed from one of these elders in our analysis about how power moves in the world, specifically as it relates to corporations and fossil fuel companies.
At one point in the conversation this elder circled back to a word I had used that indicated fossil fuel companies were not our friends or allies. She began to sharply retort how she felt differently. She began to distance herself from me. I felt my throat start to catch and my breath become more shallow and swift. I held my belly muscles tight bracing for the tension that was increasing inside of this difference, this distance. I felt myself preparing to fight.
Embodiment practice was what cultivated an awareness in me that I could notice these things happening in real time. And in that moment I was able to recognize, and remember, this is what tears our social movements apart.
I grounded into my chair, felt my breath move deeper, and practiced maintaining eye contact. I took in what she was saying and felt for her commitment to what she cares about. And, I felt for the vision of the world that I long for. Then I found my words.
I spoke transparently about the differences we have in our understanding of what is needed. I spoke with grounded conviction about how I see things without sacrificing my own knowing or experience. And then I shared that I wanted to remain on the same team, and that my hope was that the container we were building inside of this congregation could be big enough to hold both of us.
I watched her jaw melt, and her eyes shift back toward something more honest; she too had been preparing to enter a fight. We softened toward each other, and for the moment that was all that was needed to keep moving forward together.
The capacity to feel my fighting self come online, and then move with the growing tension in a way that had more purpose and alignment with my values had grown in me because of my somatic practice. I was able to connect with my ally who had suddenly turned opponent. I could receive the incoming pressure, the “opponent” energy, and then move with it toward what I care about without diminishing either of us. Something new became available to me under pressure. It was one of the first times I experienced the power of what it means to practice “taking on a new shape” through embodied skill-building.
As I left that day, there was a new countenance between us, and somehow, as we stood in the driveway preparing to leave, the conversation ended by talking about breaking bread together.
Let me close by saying: I don’t hold illusions about one way of practice being the singular key to a peaceful and just world.
But - what I have come to trust is that the only way through the hard places is to practice together. To practice what we want to become.
We will fail and hurt each other along the way.
And hopefully, we will learn and adapt.
And then return to practice again.
I am deeply grateful for Black Feminist thought and abolitionist leaders like Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis and many many others who have deepened this knowing and practice for me.
I want to practice trusting interdependence more.
I want to practice collective care in ways that dignify everyone.
I want to practice laying on the earth more.
What do you want to be practicing?
Note: When I say “we” in reference to reckoning with the division between body and spirit, I mean Christians and people of Christian lineage. AND I also intend this “we” to be quite broad because of the way all of us across the globe live inside of Christian hegemony. Many people have access to spiritual traditions and cultures that have integrated Spirit and body. At the same time, we are all shaped by the division of the two that Christianity has put into the world, and the impact that has had on how the workplace is shaped, our education systems, health care and more.