I practice when I have the house to myself. This happens once, maybe twice a week. If I'm alone, I have a shot at living up to the definition stated by Rachel Brice's tattoo: "Practice becomes firmly grounded when continued for a long time, without interruption, and with reverent devotion." It's written in Sanskrit in beautiful organic shapes, like a vine full of flowers climbing the trellis of her hip bone.

Here is the reason I want to dance. (Why do I phrase it that way? I do dance. The gap between the way I dance now, compared to how I want to dance, is big enough that it's hard to define myself as a dancer--even though I dance.) I want the experience of doing something for a long time, without interruption, with reverent devotion.

What stops me?

It's hard to do anything for a long time, without interruption. Every parent knows what it's like to have your schedule, and even your ability to think, put through the shredder. I used to mix juice concentrate in a big plastic pitcher. I observed that I would dump in the juice concentrate and get interrupted, then begin filling the pitcher and get interrupted, then continue to fill the pitcher and get interrupted, then finish the pitcher of water and begin stirring the juice. Parenting of small children was time well spent, no time was wasted and it was all important to do--but it did not involve completing even the smallest task in an organized, coherent way. This was my experience of parenting, and it has been recapitulated by our culture of cell phones in private life and email alerts at work.

It's hard to do anything with reverent devotion. There's a book which may be in print called "The Practice of the Presence of God," which is about finding ways to do the simplest, humblest, least dramatic things with reverent devotion, so they can be done for God as an act of worship and have meaning. Things like the dishes. The monk who wrote the book thought of himself as the least talented and the least skilled, so he did a lot of unskilled labor. He was a humble servant of God. He made the dishes into a sacrament, by his ATTITUDE and by his CHOICE OF THOUGHTS.

I have a hard time doing that.

I'm fortunate to have married a man who shares my faith. When one of us is set on "dim", the other of us can help change the setting. Together, we're bright with faith. This has great implications for our sex life. Our sex life is practiced for a long time, without interruption, with reverent devotion. That's about the only example I can think of for having that type of experience. Even prayer is telegraphic or parcelled out.

I love sex because everyone understands that it's really important, so important you plan vacations around it. So important, no outsider would presume to interrupt it. When you want to have it, you collude to arrange a time and place where you can take the time you need and have a special room for it--conveniently it's usually a bedroom near a bathroom, but it doesn't have to be--and if you have kids and/or little babies, you spend years--YEARS!--inculcating the habit of not banging on that closed door and staging a sit-in outside it because you've been in bed for ten minutes and now you want a drink of water.

Sometimes we practice with reverent devotion and sometimes we just practice.

I imagine somebody somewhere has a special prayer room, or an understanding within the family that if mommy and daddy are praying with the door closed you have to get your own water. Probably these people are monks or nuns--they're married in a different way, and everyone understands that it's about practice.

The people I know in real life who protect time to practice for a long time, without interruption, with reverent devotion, are athletes and artists. Athletes and artists have more in common when you think, because I'm also both (although not professionally or competitively or even competently). Athletes and artists expand reality by expanding their capacity. The capacity is within their imaginations and bodies. Athletes and artists use discipline and a growing skillset to change their bodies carefully in a way that expands their abilities. To me this is a bigger different between the two groups and those who don't do either of those things, than the difference between the two groups. But artists are creative! Yes, so are athletes. An athlete has to be able to imagine new possibilities and believe in them so vividly that s/he acts upon the possibility and reveals it as real. This is exactly what artists do. But artists are expressive! So are athletes. Look at them! They express their sport or ability on all of our behalves and make it real for us all, just like artists. Michelangelo made a statue of a perfect human form and named it David, and Beckham made a similar one and it's name is Beckham. Both are on display.

The kind of athleticism I have practiced is endurance events like walking and running, with a little cardio and weight training and yoga thrown in. I race because it's more fun to practice with a goal, and I love the applause. I don't care about winning; I care a tiny bit about medals and T-shirts; mostly I care about applause and medals. The kind of art I have practiced is acting, singing, and when that was inconvenient, just plain writing. I've sold some writing but mostly I write to clarify my mind and entertain myself. I don't really write to communicate any more than I run to cross the finish line first. I have done both of these types of activities for a long time, without interruption, with reverent devotion.

I do a LOT of church. I'm from a tradition that insists on worshipers practicing alone, because even though it's great to get together, those types of public worship can't be done for a long time or without interruption even if reverent devotion is the goal. Prayers are telegraphic at my church. They aren't ritualistic but they do punctuate rather than carry the content of our worship sentence. Music lasts about fifteen minutes and then there's announcements. Sometimes sex is like that, too. :-) I have fallen asleep during both activities and so has my husband. ;-)

I was impressed by Moe Khansa's quote of (I think) Rumi when he said in his TEDx talk, "Dancers are athletes of God." This, with Rachel Brice's sanskrit tattoo, underline my main goal in taking up dance as a practice. I combine yearnings within myself as one yearning and this yearning is, to train up my body so it can move in worship in a way that is at once passionate, disciplined, and spontaneously responsive. This is what I mean by dance as a practice. The disciplined expansiveness of athleticism, the expressiveness of art, the praise of God, the joy of sex. For a long time, without interruption, with reverent devotion.