This morning, I yelled at an apple. I fed the dog, did yoga for half an hour, and then I yelled at an apple.
More specifically, I yelled at the sticker attached to the apple, but I can’t imagine the apple’s feelings weren’t hurt. It was right there.
I can’t say why I got so upset that the sticker wouldn’t come off, but it’s even more pathetic since I had so recently finished putting my body through a calming mindfulness practice. That's a life lived as a human for you, I guess.
If nothing else, my little outburst reminded me that any religious/mindfulness practice is just that—practice. It’s an effort to ground yourself in the present, to reconnect the mind and body. They need reconnecting because your normal state (if you’re like me) is apple abuser. The effort is one to be made again and again, the centering attempted in the face of one soul-destroying piece of fruit after another.
I’ve written about ritual and mindful awareness here before, but failing at the practice is a different part of the process. Failing is the reason the practice exists. No one needs connection if they never become disconnected. Maybe there’s more than fifteen minutes between the connecting and failing, but sometimes there just isn’t. Resting in the failure, then, can become its own ritual, its own physical interplay between the grumpy children we are and the slightly-less-grumpy children we want to be. That’s hard, though, and there's a wide gap between failing like you normally do and working through the failure via ritual. It’s the difference between "namaste" and "namaste, dammit."
Let’s Get Physical
Rowan Williams contributed a great section to a recent article on ritual practice in daily life.[^1] He describes his time of sitting prayer, preceded by a walking meditation, as “a vehicle to detach you slowly from distracted, wandering images and thoughts.” Unfortunately, it’s a messier reality given that the vehicle doesn’t always take you where you want to go and doesn’t always move when you want to go there. Williams gets this, too:
"So the day begins with a physically concrete and specific reminder that your own individual existence is breathed through by a life that isn’t your possession; and at moments of tension or anxiety during the day, deliberately breathing in and out a few times with the words of the prayer in mind connects you with this life that isn’t yours, immersing the anxiety and dispersing the tension – even if it doesn’t simply take away pain or doubt, solve problems or create some kind of spiritual bliss. The point is just to be connected again."
What we're left with, then, are broken brains and bodies that listen to our broken brains. But as Williams points out, this isn't cause for despair; rather, it's a chance to reorient and try again. When the focus shifts from actively seeking to improve ourselves to noticing what needs improvement in a kind and mindful way, something fundamentally different happens. The practice becomes more than the original effort to have some kind of awakening or breakthrough. The practice becomes attempting the practice.
Getting the body involved in where we want the mind to be gives us an out when our minds start to dump on the present. The bodily practice brings it back. This is the failure ritual, and doing it enough helps eliminate the failure distinction altogether. Getting out of sync and realigning becomes the wider ritual at play. The morning yoga isn’t the practice or the ritual; the morning yoga followed by emotionally damaging some produce followed by a breathing prayer is.
[^1]: The rest of the article is great, too. Read it after you read this one.