Finding Spirit in Movement

Is it possible to find spirit in movement?  Just ask any athlete and they can probably tell you of their own transcendent experiences while engaged in sport.  I had the opportunity when working on my Master’s degree to explore this subject in depth while exploring the idea of nutrition and exercise facilitating midlife transformation.  Back in 1995, Michael Murphy wrote the book, In The Zone: Transcendent Experience In Sports.  He explains, as I said in the last blog, that one aspect of exercising is a sense of “acute well-being” which is an essential element in transcendent experiences.  Murphy says, “The key is to be in the moment, realizing it is moving, not static. To be is to move with the process of the universe as it unfolds in you and you in it.”  This tells me that an aspect of good health is exercise, and engaging in exercise of any kind can be a transcendent experience, which has a profound effect on all the aspects of our lives.  That transcendent experience is when everything is flowing, and our current sense of time no longer exists, there is only now.  If you haven't experienced it when engaged in exercise, you may know what I am talking about if you have ever been so absorbed in something that there was nothing else, but what you were doing that moment.  It is a feeling we can have at the time, but a feeling that is hard to hold onto.  Once we are aware of having a transcendent experience, we naturally seek, when possible, that sense of well-being.