embodied worship:
between naivety and scepticism
More and more people are asking questions about Gxd - the nameless, the ultimate, the transcendent, Jesus, God, Shiva, Allah, Kālī, Bhairava, the silence with many names, and more - and about how to pray.
After postmodernism destabilised the major religions and their concepts of God (by showing that they are culturally constructed, linguistically mediated, and never self-evident) many people liberated themselves from these often oppressive structures. Yet the individualist freedom this engendered (democratic equality, moral autonomy, and more) had a dark side: a self-centredness that made life poorer in meaning, less concerned with others and society, and turned everything into an instrument of personal comfort and enjoyment.
Despite the liberties, a hunger for meaning, belonging, and transcendence remained.
Some of us get lost in trying to think their way out of this conundrum. But the rational-analytical mind is ill-equipped for the task: it’s strength is to separate and generate propositional truth (i.e., a statement that can be true or false; McGillchrist), not to create connection and belonging.
How can we create meaning, belonging and self-transcendence in a world without truth?
At House of the beloved we tackle this meta-modern challenge through the body and in connection. With a mind deconstructed until conceptual “hopelessness” (Trungpa), the body is set free for a (phenomenologically) unmediated agency and a non-conceptual experience of how it is like to be alive. In this immediacy lies meaning, connection, belonging, and self-transcendence.
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” - Joseph Campbell
How does prayer and worship look when you neither want to regress into naivety nor dry up in scepticism?
The answer lies in practices that bring us back to the pre-conceptual - an experience of reality and Gxd not mediated by language or concept - without losing the sharpness of a critical mind. House of the beloved offers an ecology of ideas and practices to support you in this search.