(2018-09-16) Crossfit Is My Church

"CrossFit is my church." A 2012 Pew study tracked the rise of a new religious group: the “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated. One-fifth of Americans — and a full third of adults under 30 — say they belong to no religion at all.

they stay for the community,” he said. “It’s really the relationships that keep them coming back.”

Whether it’s the flag [on display] in every CrossFit [gym]; the names of different workouts that are given to honor fallen servicemen and women, either in the police in the military; the way that the space is set up; or how you could follow a kind of liturgy in a SoulCycle class, especially through their use of light and sound.

SoulCycle talks about how people “come for the body but stay for the breakthrough

sense of release of stress or a new insight and clarity about what’s important to them or a renewed commitment to the goals in their life or an experience of sanctuary, amid anxiety and pressure from their job. So it’s really an emotional and spiritual experience as well as a physical one.

That need for community was something that was so strong in our research. People were longing for relationships that have meaning and the experience of belonging rather than just surface-level relationships.

What both CrossFit and especially SoulCycle do well is that you get to make your own journey (Hero's Journey). You’re receiving the physical intensity. You’re in charge of the resistance on your bike; there’s no preset settings. You have a lot of control over your experience. If you pray to Jesus, you can do that on your bike. But maybe somebody else just wants to soak up the good energy in the room, or focus on breathing. All of those things are possible

The SoulCycle recruitment process in itself is fascinating. They don’t actually recruit from trainers. They recruit from dancers, actors, Broadway people, people who know how to move an audience. People who are good at emoting

In CrossFit, there’s plenty of examples [in our study] of trainers sleeping with their students, which of course is the biggest no-no in a pastoral relationship. Because CrossFit is so libertarian, there’s no [formal] guidance against that. But it can cause real significant relational challenges.

working on something with other people

in our culture, especially among high-achieving, Type A people who are in these classes, there’s a pressure to perform, to meet a standard — what you look like, who you’re hanging out with. And by getting ugly sweaty and being pushed through those limits of physical comfort, some of those barriers are broken down and you’re left in this raw and vulnerable experience together.

In SoulCycle, it’s we’re riding as a pack. Or in CrossFit, the workout doesn’t finish until the last person is finished, and everyone will stand around and clap for you until you’ve done the right amount of reps.

the body feels like one of the last vestiges of how we can actually access spirituality

Ritual gives us a rhythm in a world where we’ve lost so many of the traditional markers of time

Ritual is so much about intention and attention and repetition

Ritual is this really helpful way of making people think of something greater. It’s a connective tissue tool. I think it also is something you can submit to in a certain way.

How do I feel truly connected to myself, to people around me, and how do I become the person that I feel called to be? Brands that can help people do those two things are going to see huge success. That might be through transformational experiences. That might be through reflection exercises. That might be through communities that offer support and commitment.

there’s a real negotiation of boundaries. Clients will text them — we have a number of examples of this — at 4 pm on a Sunday asking, “Should I divorce my husband?”

We keep saying, “Meaning-making is a growth industry,