Breathe here now
From thumbs to eyeballs, every motion among the 10 adults is startlingly precise. Each week, they gather, don black garb, and move and breathe together in sweaty, memorized unison -- a martial ballet in which engineer, IT consultant, and grandmother alike slice and kick the air for 30 continuous minutes without a bobble, break, or solo breath among them.
These are students of boabom , an obscure art of meditative movement that purports to have originated in the mountaintops of ancient pre-Buddhist Tibet and to have survived through a once-secret apprenticeship system. And this tiny second-floor room above a Brookline Village hardware store is the American aerie where it's come to roost. The first and only school for boabom in the nation, the Boston School of Boabom is attracting those who seek a new kind of Eastern art to relieve the stresses of modern life.
"People say, 'Why aren't you in California or New York?' " said Ben Kelley , the school's director. "But this art goes well with this city. Because there's so much education here, people tend to be more interested in learning things."
For many boabom students, such as Michael Aquino, 30, a financial analyst and accountant, that educational process began with exploring other Eastern arts. Aquino left Okinawan karate banged up and bruised, practiced the slow movements of tai chi to the point of boredom, and attended a yoga studio until he mastered every position.
In boabom, he found an art that emphasized deep breathing, encompassed both fast and slow movements, and -- though many moves are for self-defense -- shunned physical contact, competition, and hierarchies.
Boabom's most singular niche, however, may be its open-endedness. Students could spend an entire year mastering a particular cycle of movements, and then start over again on new cycles, repeating the process indefinitely.
"I could practice 30 years and still be learning," Aquino said.
Adherents say this indefiniteness makes boabom less "pre-packaged" than other Eastern arts, but it also points to the art's ambiguous origins.
Boabom's half-dozen schools worldwide teach cycles handed down from a Chilean man named Asanaro , who wrote the books on boabom. In his books (the art's only known documentation), he writes that boabom originated in ancient Tibet and was passed to him through a nomadic teacher, though he acknowledges he cannot verify his claims.
"The legend says it's thousands of years old. Can we know that? No," said Kelley, barefoot and bearded, his hair in a bun. "In the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is that it changes, it's real for me, it's deep."
Apparently, the students feel the same way. Since its founding in September 2004, the school has grown from 10 students to nearly 70, with the capacity to double in size at its present location as ads and flyers continue to draw the curious.
"I have no doubt in my mind that there are going to be more schools in the foreseeable future," wrote Mauro Nunez , the school's owner. A student of Asanaro's, he brought boabom from Chile to Boston as a Fulbright scholar studying at Suffolk University.
Because it requires no long-term commitment, lifestyle changes or dogma, boabom is particularly adaptable to the lives of busy professionals, its school an incensed Shangri-la for the chronically stressed.
"During the winter, it's really easy to work and then go home and sit. When you sit too much, you can start to ruminate about the same problems over and over again," said boabom student Laura Kampas, 27, who juggles three professors' schedules as an office assistant at MIT. "If you don't focus on the movements, you'll do them wrong. It makes you very present. You can't pat your head and rub your stomach while worrying about doing laundry."
Kampas has gained 10 pounds of muscle since practicing boabom, and others say they've experienced weight loss and increased flexibility and energy. For Michael Dunn, a 61-year-old substance - abuse counselor with diabetes, the added awareness of his feet outweighs the art's fuzzy origins.
"There's a certain mystery to it, but I don't care. I like what I feel from the other people and what I feel from myself," he said. "I'll be the grasshopper and take it as it comes."
Boston School of Boabom, 33A Harvard St. , Brookline, 617 - 480-8237 . Prices are $60 a month for one class a week, and $80 a month for two classes a week, plus discounts for students and seniors. Free intro classes are held Saturdays at noon.
