Yoga As Muse

Yoga As Muse

Yoga is not magic per se. It’s not snake oil. Yoga works. It changed my mental loops and stagnant patterns from the inside-out – and it has done so for thousands of other artists and writers. I’ve spent ten years studying how specific yoga tools affect my creative process as well as that of other artists and writers. We don’t have to wait for the muse to show up. We show up for the muse. That's a key premise of the book The Journey from the Center to the Page.

Here’s one simple secret to live creatively for the rest of your life: Don’t get addicted to those inspired moments when your fingers tap on the keyboard like Chopin, and don’t wait for the clouds to part and the angels to sing before you create. “The muse” may be whatever tool it takes to shift your energy, alter your mental loops, and refresh that shaky mobile home of the body that carries around your creative faculties – all so you can create what you know you need to create. Yoga, it turns out, offers literally thousands of such tools –without hangovers or drug addictions. These tools can work at every stage of writing (from conceiving ideas, to drafting, to shaping and re-visioning, to line editing) and for every type of writing (from technical writing to poetry to playwrighting). I do wish my beloved writing professors and mentors would have told me all of this back in grad school twenty years ago, but they didn’t. So, I want to share what I can with you.

Yoga doesn’t have to be complicated. If you’re new to yoga and not sure where to begin, just remember how to breathe. It may sound clichéd, but most writers know or discover that the breath’s rhythm plays with the mind’s rhythm that plays with writing’s rhythm.

Try this: Let your belly relax as you breathe in through the nose. As you slowly exhale, lightly draw the belly in. Back and forth, back and forth for just three cycles, observe your shoulders drop and your mind’s wheels quiet. Then, pause and notice how your body and mind feel.

And try this: To slow down your breathing, try constricting your throat so that you hear a little seashore-like wave sound gliding up and down between your heart space and throat (sort of a Darth Vader-like breathing). Try this tool for three cycles, and observe any differences in how you feel in your body and mind.

Test things out for yourself. That’s a main tenet of “Yoga As Muse.” With the aid of a good guide, you can learn a few fundamental tools – body postures, ways to harness the breath’s volume and rate, ways to focus the mind’s attention. If you’ve practiced yoga for a while, then try practice more reflectively. Observe how the tools affect you. This way, you assume responsibility for your practice, and you can show up for your muse regardless of you how you think you feel.

Then play with these simple yet effective “Yoga As Muse” steps:

1. Center your attention and ask yourself, “What am I writing for?” (“What am I creating for?” “What am I painting for?”)

2. For just a few minutes, engage some yoga tools of body and breath that will help your creative faculties – imagination, emotions, intuition, inspired intellect – awaken and override those other irritating voices.

3. Move to the next posture– the creative posture of writing (or whatever your métier may be). As you create, keep heeding the breath. Let your sensual imagination offer you images and specific details to ground your mind and words – and to avoid the loops of analysis and self-doubt.

You’ve heard the codger writer bark the adage, “Writing is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration.” And it’s true. The root of “inspiration” is spirare. It means “to breathe.” It’s also the root of “perspiration.” Writing is 100% breathing.

This is a starting place. To go further, contact me, read The Journey from the Center to the Page, or experiment yourself.

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