Sweat Prayers
What will your body move into being?
Last weekend was the strangest 4th of July, an anniversary that felt like a grieving. The streets were still, no red white and blue banners rippling. The energy felt frozen even in the summer sun. What’s next? What is over? What is possible?
I had the great gift of attending a party at a little outdoor venue. The patio area was surrounded with planter boxes overflowing with mint and sage and datura - plant wisdom herbs holding space. The steps from the bar are still painted in rainbow colors from when this space was a gay bar in the 1990s. A DJ was playing joyful house with eclectic rhythms and we were dancing - queer and straight, young and old, black americans, mexican americans, white americans. Circles of dancers would open to stomp and clap for some very impressive old school voguing and smiles were huge. The hair at the nape of my neck was wet all afternoon as I danced and clapped and spread compliments around with strangers. The sweat on all of our bodies felt like a YES - yes, this is the community we want, yes all of these people are beautiful, yes we should be happy, yes we can love each other, yes we are powerful together.
And just like that I felt the possible. I felt the prayers that rise to our skin with our sweat. Unfrozen. Alive.
Movement and its companion sweat - transmute. It takes effort to build and tend and deconstruct and reconstruct. When we feel the fire of our bodies, we unfreeze. It is in living into the life we want that we create it. In the heat of effort, we witness change, sometimes subtle in the moment like a seed simply cracking open with the imagining of the bloom yet to come. The body remembers that we can affect things, choose, give ourselves to something not yet formed but alive within us.
On a summer’s sun-flooded 5 Rhythms dancefloor, in the peak of the flow, the floor is bouncing with pounding feet and I am sweating. I can feel my hair wet as it swings against my face. My legs are burning, my back asking for some caution. But this is the time to push, to stay in it, surrender to the challenge. Our teacher growls, “Keep going.” And I reach deeper, let my body do what it can do and leave my mind and its doubts behind. This is time when something in me transforms.
In the 5Rhythms dance community we embrace this phrase from creatrix Gabrielle Roth – Sweat your prayers. For me this means that whatever prayer we have, our body must take us there. This mantra inspires me to bring it all to the dancefloor and burn through it like an offering, a supplication of sweat. I imagine the heat of my body creating the sweat like smoke rising from a sacred incense on an altar. When I hug my fellow dancers at the end of the night, wet and clammy and spent, I know we shapeshifted things inside of us. We made space for something new.
When I did CrossFit in the 2000s I remember dropping to the floor after many intense workouts, making what we would jokingly call “sweat angels” on the mats. In those moments I felt like I had uncovered a part of myself I hadn’t know before, a fierce part who knows it can push and fight and recover.
In the modern world we have been taught to see sweat, and in connection effort, as a shameful thing to be hidden, to be covered over in sweet smells, immediately washed away and patted dry. When I began meeting clients outdoors for walks, I initially worried about them seeing me flushed or with patches of sweat on my back. How could they see me as professional if I am sweaty? Then I realized the awful underlying premise in this -We have been taught that work that requires physical effort, sweat, is not “professional”.
Oh sure, we may glamorize the hustle or grind culture, but only with slick soled shoes and a powdered nose and fresh manicure. We want our prayers answered in air-conditioned carpeted offices, based on an illusion of our mental willpower alone getting us there. So disconnected from the wild source of growth and manifestation that is our body.
I used to unconsciously see my own struggling as a shameful thing, to be hidden. “Never let them see you sweat” lurked somewhere in my subconscious. It took a lot of unwinding to honor my, sometimes undignified, effort-ing as an important – even sacred – aspect of life. Now my own sweat on my skin is a whisper of encouragement from a friend; you may be tired but you can do hard things.
Now I am learning to see physical - and the paired emotional - effort, even struggle, as a sacred act of caring. I see it as a manifestation of what I choose to tend to and sacrifice for. This is not equivalent to sacrificing or harming myself or my well-being; it is an extension of myself and my strength into the world. Now I see willingness to put in the sweat as commitment to an embodied integrity. This is where I find the edge of my sacred Yes.
And in consciously honoring physical work, I also honor the people who do that work for our communities. I bow to the many people out in the strawberry fields right now, bent over in the heat and dust so that we can all taste the sweetness of fresh berries. And the people who clean sinks and floors in our schools and hospitals and keep our roads safe to drive on. This is important work. Sweaty prayers for life and comfort and safety.
As much as I hate the ableist blindness of a statement like, “Just do it.”, I know there are times in life when our only real choice is to keep going, however that may look. In my 50s now, I have made it through things that I thought might break me – I thought my body, my mind, my heart would not be able to keep going. I think of the weeks after my father unexpectedly died and my mother was still in the hospital, newly unable to walk or use her arm. Packing up their home of 30 years, one that my mother would no longer be able to live in, my arms damp and covered in dust as I stumbled through each drawer and cabinet and closet, moving, sorting, carrying. This was a sweat prayer, that we might all find a new security somehow while stability seemed to have been cracked apart. The effort you make is yours. You do what you can do.
And there was a strength that was drawn out, wrapped in sweat and its sister saltwater, tears. In these moments I had to let go of certain reassurances and comforts and push toward the unmarked edge. During some of these dark passages in my life I couldn’t have articulated what I was hoping for or moving toward, I just kept going, kept dancing through the intensity until somehow, great Mystery, I came out transformed.
Fire asks us – What do you want so much you will sweat for it?
What prayers will you draw out of your flesh?
And do you know how strong you are?
Stoke your creative fires with us this Summer!
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