Why the Temple

14 Jun Why the Temple

The work we do in our movement space has a purpose. It has a meaning. 

We call it “dance class”, which is a sort of paper thin shield over a profound gathering of truth seekers engaging in meaning making that defies easy categorization.

I struggle to define it, and this resistance is both protective and justified. For what we do, and what I teach, is not for everyone. It is not meant to be seen by everyone, and it contradicts the very framework of the system we all exist within. 

Without exactly trying to, I have created a Mystery School, something ancient, meaningful and timeless. I did not do it alone, and it has no meaning with only me. It is a true act of sympoesis because it exists only with the other women who breath and dance it in to life with their presence and belief.

I may stand in the center as it’s teacher and caretaker, but it is the other women who make it be so.

It doesn’t exist to make money. It doesn’t exist to create fame. It does not exist to replicate itself. It exists simply  because it is meant to exist. This sometimes confuses people.

That is ok with me.

The Mystery School teaches me. I cannot see what is coming. 

It works best when you are committed to it. It is a spiral path. You just keep going in. Like a sacred temple space, there are ever more rooms to enter, but you cannot see them until you are inside of one. One room cannot be revealed until you have thoroughly explored the room before it. And so away we go, exploring and exploring. The spiral path never ends.

The most is revealed to those who commit themselves simply to showing up. Attention, commitment and focus is required for the true work – and those things are prized commodities in our society. I’ll return to this later.

If I could call out what inspires me most it is aliveness.

Aliveness is both very simple and very complex.

All mystery school teachings work this way. They are simple, complex and chaotic all at once. 

Aliveness is like this. Aliveness is simple. We are all alive. 

And we all have a body, one body with which to experience the miracle of aliveness. This body is the only technology you get to experience the blessing and the pain of being alive.

Further, you belong in this body. We all struggle with belonging. We all feel like we don’t belong here, or we want to belong there. Or we should belong more here or there. But there is one place you always belong, and that is inside your one, perfect body.

And that is both incredibly simple, and incredibly profound. 

You can fight this mystery, and you can accept this, and you can go around and around with it for your whole life.

In our temple, we find thousands of ways to experience more aliveness. Because it is one of those things that is both so obvious and so unacknowledged.

Second, you get to be alive right now, in the only vessel that you have to experience this aliveness, your body. You only have this moment to become aware of your aliveness.

There is only right now, no matter what attachments you have to the past, and what preoccupations you have with the future. The now is the only thing you can have any impact upon, and the only thing you can engage with.

This too is very complex and very straightforward at the same time.

And I think every Mystery School that’s ever existed on this planet is about these two things.

You only have this one body and you only have this one moment and you can think of a million ways to escape from that and land in that and go around that and argue with that, but it will still be the one and only truth.

So, we dance with that, engage with that, laugh and cry with that, in community, over and over again.

Our Second (or Third?) Large Tennet is Desire is the Activation of Your Aliveness.

Every living thing on this planet from plants to bees to your dog, to yourself has desires. Your aliveness moves through your desires. We all have desires, all living organisms do, and this is what will is, this is what lifeforce is, and this is the movement of life.

We’ve done much work on this and I could go on and on, but  to keep it simple… You are a conscious being. You can struggle with what your desires are. You can feel like they’re wrong. You can like them, you can disagree with them. But desire is how you move from the here to there. It is how you express your will. It can seem like a struggle. You can feel like your desires were misplaced, or like your parents fucked you up.

You may not like your desires, or they may be confusing to you, but you have them. You have desires that can be as simple as eating and sleeping, to sex, to money, and on and on.

And they’re socially conditioned and they’re evolutionarily controlled, and well, it’s complicated.

Desire is the lifeforce of all beings. 

This brings us to attention.

Attention, and I owe this definition to D. Graham Barrett,  attention is the nonconscious rearranging of desire. This is where I think what we do here becomes extremely important and life changing.

Let’s break that down a little bit. Why are we talking about attention? 

So whether or not you like it or not, we live, and almost the whole world now lives in a capitalist society where attention is a commodity and where we are best kept  in this prolonged state of non-specific wanting. 

It is best for the engines of capitalism, and marketing, if you are in a space of free-floating, spaced-out desire. You aren’t quite latched on to what you want exactly, but open to experiences, needs, and wants and ready to be manipulated as a set of eyeballs, time chunks, and money blocks that can be sold off and capitalized upon. You are a chunk of

“ROI” that can be sold as “views”, “clicks”, “likes”, and “datapoints” and ideally converted into dollars and cents. 

Frankly, it really works, as most of us voluntarily give our time to scrolling, shopping and social media-ing in an attempt to feel something. We aren’t sure what we want but are in a non-specific void state seeking to be grabbed into an experience that would make us want to consume a “high”. We freely give up our attention in exchange for emotive, sensory slush.

So back to the definition, attention is attention is the nonconscious rearranging of desire

Why the word “nonconscious” there? Well, nonconscious here, I believe, applies to the fact that we are generally unaware of how we distribute our attention. We aren’t hyper aware of where we place our attention. And we are even less aware of the ways placing our attention rearranges what we then desire. It could be said that attention is the semi-conscious rearrangement of desire, I think. We place our attention on something and therefore, we become somewhat aware of how that changes what we want.

In the capitalist landscape in which we live, if we are mostly allowing others to rearrange our desire landscape, in order for them to use our time and eyeballs as a return on their  investments, how can we ever have a good sense of what we truly desire?

How can we “break out of the matrix” of soft-padded mall-scape and stop being a click, a view and an eyeball?

I think the capitalist system seeps into everything. It isn’t just about stuff. It starts to flood your way of living and make you feel like you need new everything – new relationships, houses, body parts… it creates a generalized state of ever-wanting.

The capitalist system is not about human flourishing. Sure, capitalism has lifted millions our of poverty but the end game of late state capitalism is not about your soul.

So how can we overcome this state?

Maybe not all the time, but just enough to actually actively participate in human flourishment?

It’s by finding a sanctuary. It’s by anchoring our intention in community and having a place to renew our attention.

I can say for myself that when I am teaching in our temple, when I am moving with my community, when I am dancing full out… I feel myself flourishing – and it feels like something. It does not feel like the temporary high I get from buying something on Etsy… it feels like flourishing.

However, this flourishing, this humanity, it required commitment. It required me building this community over the last 6 years. It required time, space, attention and focus. 

If attention is the nonconscious rearranging of desire, for me, it requires having a sanctuary where I can ground my intention and renew my attention. And I need a community to be accountable and find joy in that process.

And I think what myself and my students get to do here, even if it’s just for a couple hours a week, is have a community and have a sanctuary where we can have intention to renew our attention. There aren’t phones, or photos, or scrolling, or social media-ing. We won’t ever be on Zoom. We just dance, and love, and eat, and cry and scream and love.

Mostly, wordlessly. You don’t need any skill. You just need a desire to flourish. 

You don’t get to the interior of a Mystery School, or the inside of a sanctuary, by having a roving sense of non-committed desire, by scrolling, or by hoping from this to that.

In our temple, we commit to a sanctuary.  We commit to each other. We commit our attention and intention to the non-conscious rearrangement of our desire to simply showing up, moving, and being together. We commit to the activation of our aliveness. We commit to feeling things. We commit to joy. We commit to the spiral path.

It’s about the commitment to a flourishment of our humanity. Just because being alive and being human means something.