Spiritual Form

The spiritual life is concerned with form. Pleasure and pain are concerns of the body. The body when guided not by spiritual form, but by pleasure or pain, is the secular. The secular is a place of demonry and deceit. A false place where spirit dies.

To pray unceasingly is the call of the Orthodox. To at all moments be in prayer. To at every moment be spirited. There is no secular. There is only the spiritual form of life. The pleasure and pain of the body is subservient to the form. The form must not break down. Ignore the pleasure or pain. They arrive as challenges to the form. Perhaps they arrive as enemies. But when properly approached they increase the spirit, they grow the spirit by antagonizing the form. Each day invite these enemies of form, for when encountered properly they will strengthen the form and expand it.

The pushup form must not waiver. Neither the pullup. To neglect the form is to encourage injury. Should pain cause one’s form to waiver one must stop the exercise to rest. One has reached his limit. To push past is to push for numbers and not for form. To push past with bad form is an act of the ego. To claim numbers of reps and records. But it is the form, in its complete range of motion, its strictness always, not the number of sets and repetitions, that is the goal. Perfect form. Each rep. The pushup and pullup have become ascetical exercises.

So goes each day for the man of spirit. In all things the spiritual form repeated unceasingly. Discovering the spirit in new ways, extending and growing it. Never allowing discomfort, whether it be soreness or sickness or fatigue, to affect the form. Never allowing pleasure to distract from the form. Never thinking about tomorrow.