If CrossFit is Not For Everyone, Why Bother Here?

Even if CrossFit isn’t for everyone, these words flow forth because CrossFit is for more of us than you might think. 

We face a tremendous number of seemingly insurmountable challenges today, regardless of how you politically affiliate or whatever your body has had to navigate in the course of your life. Even if you might be suspicious of the “we” in that sentence. Chronic diseases run rampant and are increasing rapidly. The capitalistic or late-capitalistic forces we’ve co-created mean that our bodies face the incessant drive of more, better, faster. Many of us have to work innumerable hours to insure basic needs of our families are met. Our food sources are run by this pace and efficiency: fast-food, processed foods for convenience, marketed “health” on labels of foods that actually drive cravings, hunger for more, with less and less nutrition for what our bodies need to survive. The Surgeon General has pointed to our “loneliness epidemic,” how we increasingly live in isolation (of our own making and not), with fewer and fewer remembering the gifts of community that come alongside the work of community. Algorithms of our lives built around anger and fear drive many of us into less awareness and detachment, simply to feel normal.

Amidst all this, life beckons in all its mystery, wonder, gratitude, love and delight. If you don’t become intentional about finding beauty and reverence every day, it’s easy to miss out on the larger purposes and possibilities that could become collaborations amongst us, in the things we call mundane, like wellness. As a spirituality scholar, the language I use for this beckoning of life, this greater purpose that could goad us forward, is called a horizon of ultimate value. What drives your life, when you’re at your best? What heart-yearnings are you afraid to name but that do live within you? Those will give you clues to what drives you, what your own horizon of ultimate value actually is. Not what you feel it should be, undergirded with religious language and often a sense of shame/guilt...but what it actually is...what you were born desiring and yearning to be. (Sometimes in contradiction of socialized norms...)

Early on in my own sacred work, after years of steeping in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, some language dropped into me for what I wanted my life–and my contributions to communities in which I live–to be about: an expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of self and others. In religious environments, I sometimes narrow it to an expressive theological delight, but it need not be associated with any religious or secular stance in the world.

Human beings thrive when they can express freely and experience an overwhelming and visceral joy, what I here call delight. To give voice to your own experience in a community that yearns to see you, hear you, know you creates a web of belonging and connection able to hold more pain, sorrow, or challenge than you can possibly imagine. Togetherness is an incredible force of life, when healthy and for the common Good. Most of us have never experienced that freedom to express, however, nor togetherness as a liberating force. For a variety of reasons, internalized and external.

But once you’ve experienced it, you yearn for everyone you know to know it too. This leads to greater capacities to companion others in the pains and unavoidable sorrows of being human. Once you see someone else's pain or grief as something you could imagine, maybe even viscerally feel in your own body, you increase your capacity to be-with-others. Life is suffering quip the Buddhists. No one escapes it, though we try with drugs and avoidance. Demonstrably true to my experience.

No less true, human beings–conscious to it or numbed to it by now–are evolutionarily and/or divinely created for loving and being loved. Without social connection, we wither. Even die (or kill). We yearn for the positive-easy of this force of Love, but suffering is unavoidable, even deepens our capacity, when we're willing to do the Work. Inextricably intertwined, then, love and suffering, being able to withstand and grow through suffering in Love–for oneself, in oneself, surrounded by other human selves–is part of this horizon of ultimate value. I love watching human beings flourish, expressive in delights, companioned in sorrows. Because while we hope for the first and try to avoid the second, each is part of the one coin of human life. Sorrows deepen our delights, when held in belonging and connection; delights expand and flourish because of the suffering we’ve known. [I don’t know why it’s like this, of course. In my moments of hubris, I imagine co-creating a world in which suffering could not exist, but that is not what human beings do with one another.]

All of which brings me to an elemental question that has driven all of my sacred work in the world: How do I live in the body I have, becoming as conscious and intentional as I can toward an expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of myself and those around me? How does my body invite me to visceral delight, even as that means overwhelming sadness and grief too? What would I need to grow toward this horizon of ultimate value?

Well, I would need a disciplined way of being in my body toward its own good that would often be fun, invite laughter as much as lament. I would need a community of practice and learning in which I could face my own insecurities, fears, and the sadnesses my body carries, even if I never spoke about any of them aloud. I would need companions who know more than I do, particularly about healthy movement and good fueling for all this fun. And I would need a deepening level of practice in which I never mastered it all, could never master it all. All this would provide me with deepening wisdom in my own body, opportunities to express my own passions and fears with curiosity and courage, and a community in which I could continue to learn from those with more knowledge-experience and a devotion to excellence that has us always learning more. Hopefully, even a community in which I can be regularly seen and heard, feeling a sense of belonging and yearning to contribute back for all I receive within its wisdom(s).

Not everyone needs CrossFit to live toward an expressive delight, able to companion the suffering of self and others. But in a decades-long clawing my way back into my own woman’s body, it has provided me an integrative, gifted and challenging, always changing pathway toward such a horizon.

I hope to CrossFit until I’m eighty (and beyond) because it helps me live into my deepest values of being human, as the spirituality scholar that I am.