on finding holiness in my tits

I couldn’t help but wonder: could lifting be a spiritual practice?

I flop myself down the hill by Alamo Square Park on my way home from the gym — chest that day — and I’m suddenly aware of my tits. My pectorals (if you can even call them that: they’re thin as a tarp stretched tight across the rafters of my ribcage) bounce around on my chest. It’s like I’m wearing tote bags full of groceries as necklaces, their weight beating against my chest with each step. Suddenly I almost understand the plight of all those busty blondes in the mid-2000s action movies and rom-coms I grew up on. Honestly, the weight they carried. 

That day the soreness sets in immediately. Soreness, like pain, pulls your awareness back into your body. I suppose I’ve had flesh and muscles pulling across my chest my entire life, but I just never had any awareness of the sensations involved in their existence. They had been invisible. I wonder how many other sets of fibers and feelings in my body remain unseeable to me, unacknowledged. I pass a Victorian painted a bright baby blue that I’d never noticed before, even though I walk this street nearly every day. I’m disturbed by how unappreciative and unreceptive to the world I can be. The house is painted an incredible shade of blue.

Walking down Steiner Street after the gym, I couldn’t help but wonder: could lifting be a spiritual practice? The absurdity of the thought makes me giggle. We think of the body, the mind, and the spirit as three mutually exclusive spheres. They’re all separate places, just like the gym, the university, the church. Their interests seem entirely separated, and it seems absurd to mix them and suggest that someone might find something like holiness at the gym.

Well, maybe not that absurd: the Sunday morning services at Barry’s Bootcamp get fully booked the furthest in advance.

So maybe the body, the spirit, and the mind are not so distinct. Lifting, for example, strengthens the connections between your neurons before it strengthens your muscles. Lifting fastens the wiring of consciousness more and more tightly to the body. Which seems like a good thing, at least to me. My mind mostly likes to be blown about in the winds of its invented problems. My body, however, mostly likes to breathe, explore, feel the electricity of brushing up against the world. Hands picking things up, hands putting things down. Legs rippling through green blades of grass. Fingertips running across smooth tan shoulderblades. For the simple good fun of it. And brushing up against the universe can feel deliciously, completely, mind-ejectingly good.

Being able to feel that present goodness, though, requires awareness. Lifting requires you to be more aware of your muscles, your body. You worry about form, the angles your body creates, the directions in which your muscles contract. This awareness asks you to rest your attention in new places in the body and examine more intimately what it feels like to be alive, in this body, in these muscles.

What have I found in all those hours at the gym, in all that time spent coordinating my body? When I look beneath thoughts, I find them supported by some flanks of muscle. And beneath the sensations in these muscles, the burning and pulling and contracting, are just phosphate bonds breaking, calcium ions coursing through millions of channels, energy being released. And beneath this energy and these molecules is just some soot from the stars, out and about, floating through the universe for a bit. And what a lovely day for it. The sun lights the air hazy and warm in Alamo Square Park. One particular collection of soot wanders through the park and thinks: my tits and their soreness aren’t even really mine. They belong to the universe, are made up of the universe. 

I crest the hill by the park. The Monterey cypresses are doing what trees do; my muscles are doing what muscles do; the sun and the other stars are doing what stars do. All these things, I realize upon reflecting, very cosmically, upon my tits, are basically the same process. Sometimes consciousness just doesn’t rest long enough on any of these things to pull itself apart and put the universe back together in its place.