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Private Practice: Toward a Philosophy of Just Sitting
Private Practice: Toward a Philosophy of Just Sitting
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Literary HubPublisher
Literary HubPlace of publication
New York, N.Y.Language
engResearch statement
This essay continues on ongoing inquiry staged via commissioned long creative nonfiction essays which sits alongside and extends my traditional research on the questions of practising, time, yoga, creativity, change and ethics. It follows on from and extends knowledge articulated in scholarly articles and chapters such as: Pont A. ‘That tender discipline: spacing, structured nothingness & kumbhaka’, in Breathing with Luce Irigaray. Editor(s): Skof, L., Holmes, E.. 83-97. Bloomsbury Academic, London, England 2013, and Pont A. ‘Precarious decencies: negotiating creative (im)mortalities, in life, together’, Axon: creative explorations n.p. Mar 2016, and many others, including a forthcoming monograph with EUP, A Philosophy of Practising with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. This essay was composed in order to articulate the intersection of practising and creativity paradigms with the strange experiential aspects forced into focus globally by the corona virus pandemic, which was in its earlier stages at the time of initial drafting and which continues. (The essay is published out of New York). Its background involved 17th century Spinozan and 20th century work by Deleuze on bodies defined as speed and not form, and placed this into conversation with 13th century and contemporary articulations of the Soto Zen practice of shikantaza. It disambiguates for a popular audience meditation from the intransitive ‘just sitting’ of shikantaza and the politics and enablements that are implied by this minimal difference. In a moment when people have been restricted in their movements, the essay—using theory, personal anecdote and slow argumentation—interrogates our relation to movement and stillness, our obsession with the former and struggle with the latter under neoliberalism. It provides new ways of saying the kinds of change we can look for and struggle to live out and within. (The essay received 20,000 readers within its first six days of publication.)Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkScale
NTRO MinorUsage metrics
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