Fitness "Versus" Spirituality

What makes our teaching different than "fitness" with perhaps a slight disdain in their voice…

Well, if spirituality is simply breath, and we are ultimately all one, let me flip it:

What am I doing in my fitness classes that ISN'T spiritual?

And here's where I know I just am what I am: an iconoclastic shake-up of a white woman with rural roots raised really without the forced dogma of any one religion.

I grew up taught to:

• Treats others as you'd like to be treated.

• Do onto others as you'd have them do to you.

• Treat everyone you meet with respect.

• People are people.

• Actions speak louder than words.

• It's not what you say but HOW you say it.

I found this helped me to be quite friendly and kind to all I encountered, and consequently, I received that same love and acceptance back from the masses.

As an only child, it was important for me to have allies, to not be in the Universe alone.

So anyway, I look at MOST traditional and organized institutions of religion with great intrigue and inquiry, as I was not raised that I MUST believe them and therefore did not take them as truth, but occasionally helpful allegory to soothe people's souls on some level.

It gave them comfort to know God was there to rest upon. But the pain. The pain and the suffering and the speaking of saints and sins… why all the pain? The agony? The rigid belief systems clung onto out of sheer desperation?

So anyway, in my world nothing was spiritual, or more accurately: EVERYTHING was spiritual. Spirit is breath. Life is spirit. Spirit is what whooshes out of your body when you are dead, a left behind cicada shell onto another manifestation.

So what makes my cycling classes less spiritual? No AUM at the end? But this music came from Vishnu himself with the symbol of AUM tattooed in black ink on his black back: we are all alive, is this very LIFE not spiritual?!

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