Brian Shircliff

what is VITALITY?

I’ve been amazed by the grass this week.

How full it has come up.  Green, lush, alive.

Same for the weeds along the highway.  Life.

There is a life in Spring that I long for in my own life, in my own bones and flesh.

And re-discovering it, I’ve found, doesn’t take much.

When we first founded VITALITY in 2010 and I decided to leave a career teaching and coaching two very successful high school sports teams, people thought I had lost my mind.  Some people still think that.

Truthfully, high school students in the Meditation elective I was teaching were finding such power in their lives by doing the simplest things — resting and breathing and reflecting and moving gently and with ease.  Surely, if high school boys could find such power in it, couldn’t everybody — especially people who might not ordinarily know such opportunities exist?  Especially in communities torn by violence, poverty, despair?

So a few of us set out to make holistic self-care education affordable and accessible . . . opportunities that involve moving gently, breathing, resting, planting and harvesting fresh food, reflecting, talking with friends about life.

No real mystery here, for sure.  Not rocket science.  Not even woo-woo.

And yet many friends urged me not to do it.

A few friends even told me that I would lose my soul — they privately urged me not to “throw your life away on those evil Eastern practices.”

The funny thing is, though I had studied esoteric things of the East — even in college at Xavier University — I often found the very same holistic-minded things happening in the very Judeo-Christian tradition that I was paid to teach by the local and world authorities of the Catholic Church.

Jesus goes to the desert, to the lonely mountaintops of his Middle Eastern world.  Repeatedly.  Often alone.  What on earth was he doing there?  Call it whatever you want — meditation or reflection or prayer or relaxing or communing with nature both inside himself and within this dry, desert uncomfortable world — it was what we were doing in meditation class at St. Xavier High School and what we do at VITALITY.

So many of Jesus’ stories involve planting and harvesting — the key to survival in his world and ours, both to eat and to feed the soul.

Jesus reminds us that we are the light of the world.  We.  As in us.  As in each one of us.  No matter how “bad” we think we are.  No matter how many times we try to dodge our light-ness and try to throw the spotlight on him and other greats.

Jesus sends his followers out to heal people, to trust that God would flow through them through something as simple as touch, as friendship, as compassion, as eating with one another.  “Take nothing with you for the journey!” Jesus would say — that the only thing you need for healing is yourself, your presence, God alive within you and within the other person and between you both.

Elijah and Elisha — prophets from the Bible — do the same everyday, incredible things nearly nine hundred years before Jesus.  And they apparently set up guilds of prophets to do the same and cultivate an appreciation of what is truly possible in life.  Imagine that — a guild of people studying together all that is possible by breathing and moving and resting!

The ancient prophets about a hundred years before them were said — yep, in the Bible — to go on top of mountaintops, remove their clothes, and rest and breathe and move with the ecstasy of feeling God so close as their skin — even within themselves.  No separation between God and them.  The blood-thirsty King Saul was so moved by it that when he chased David to the prophets with the intention of killing David in his jealous rage that he fell in among the prophets and forgot about killing David — at least for a time.  He found some peace, even in his blood-thirsty rage, even in his pained jealousy.  King Saul, like David, like these mountain-top prophets, removed clothes and felt the air on their skin and knew God as only God could be known by human beings, in the flesh.  It wasn’t some strange sexual thing they were doing.  It seems to be simply about knowing God being so close, without separation.  Nakedness is so often feared in our modern culture that we haven’t begun such things at VITALITY, though we wonder about just what these prophets knew.

There are countless examples of the power of breathing and moving and resting and healing in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  And yet our culture all too often shies away from it.  Sometimes even fears it.  Again and again and again.

I’ve dedicated my life to it, and yet it is so easy for me to miss a day of being good to myself in this way — by taking even ten minutes to breathe and move gently and rest on the ground or in a chair or even to take a walk and notice the abundant beauty of life, of the seasons changing in this infinite world.

And that’s why we’ve begun our coming-together that is VITALITY.  We seek to remind one another of the importance of taking some time for ourselves.  Every day.  To feel the life within us.  To know all that is possible when we move gently, when we breathe with ease, when we rest, when we grow and eat the abundance of the earth together.

At VITALITY, we don’t try to make it all mysterious and speak in different languages — be they the ancient languages of the Bible (Hebrew and Greek) or the ancient language of yoga (Sanskrit).  We strive to speak in English, in a way that is simple, in a way that communicates.

We have found ourselves — ordinary everyday people — and our communities coming alive through such simple, gentle practices.  Bodies that were once full of pain mow move with ease.  Minds that were jumbled with all kinds of thoughts now rest easier.  People who used to not like one another now find love and light in one another.  Blighted areas of neighborhoods where murder and violence was almost everyday have become parks for night-meditation and community gardens for growing food -- where neighbors gather to re-knit together the social fabric of their community.

We hope this new blog is a way for us all to share stories about what we have discovered together through self-care . . . through breathing and moving and resting.  Call the practices whatever you want:  yoga or Healing Touch or meditation or journaling or Movement Intelligence or Bones for Life or Feldenkrais Method or tai chi or whatever.

In studying all of these “modalities” for 20+ years, I can say with confidence that they are all the same.  They all involve breathing and moving and resting and reflecting and noticing.  Sure, each modality or brand or practice might have some different ideas that are helpful that another modality might forget or leave out.

But each “modality” gets at that deeper sense that is not that deep at all and yet is the most profound mystery we will ever encounter.  That we are alive.  Right here.  Right now.  On this earth.  That life — though very difficult at times — is full of beauty.  That love is possible to be felt — even with and among strangers.  That it is all somehow deeper than we ever can contain and know.

May we all be so bold as to know such life as the ancient prophet-guilds and Elijah and Elisha and Jesus all knew.  What a world we might know together through breathing and moving gently and resting, especially in this incredible season of Spring that reminds us that what was once dormant — grass!  highway weeds! — can spring to life again in such fulness and such beauty, as can we.  As can we.

by Brian Shircliff