Yoga as Muse for Authentic Writing
This work begins with a simple yet potentially transformational premise: Yoga can deepen your writing process, enrich your writing style, and help you understand how your imagination, emotions, and intellect work with your body as you write.
We writers often live in our heads--a comfortable place to be for us with wild imaginations. But after a while, our sentences may limp across the page, and our whole practice--if we can call it a practice--may seem to be either an occupational habit or a literary tryst. These things happen. Writing is difficult.
Yoga won't ease your writing practice necessarily, but it can transform it. Make it deeper. More embodied. Yoga can heighten your senses and presence, help you develop discipline & perseverance, and can renew your wonder--with your body, your faculties, your world, and your writing. Several seasoned writers, aspiring writers, novelists, editors, journalists, people yearning for their creativity to erupt--whether they previously practiced yoga or not--have found this work invaluable.
Yoga is a way to explore how breath wedded with movement and concentration can unfold our unconscious. What we call the unconscious is our physical body and our subtle body--the body of breath, of mind, of emotion, and imagination. The physical body also directly influences the imagination's different layers. Practicing yoga, then, can be a way to explore our immediate creative reservoir--our embodied unconscious.
Try this: Take a few breaths and ask yourself, "What am I writing for?" Listen to the response. With your writing intention clarified, move through specific yoga poses, breath work, or concentration practices to manifest that intention. Sometimes fifteen minutes, sometimes ninety minutes. Then move from your mat to the page. Intention-yoga-writing become part and parcel of the same process. This process marks the beginning of the journey. The rest of the journey can take you through confronting your Inner Heckler, writing with an authentic voice, cultivating concentration, perseverance, presence, a fresh sense of surprise & wonder, active compassion, an intutive vision, and more. Yoga is no cure-all. But it is a viable way to test out for yourself what works.
I took my first
yoga class at nineteen years old and had little idea what I was doing.
Still, it felt right. It took over another ten years, though, before yoga
began to enter my life's center and to transform my writing practice. My
skeptical inquiry into ancient yoga texts and of contemporary neurobiology
have informed much of my practice as have my training in the Vanda Scaravelli
Method with Michelle Andrei, in Jivamukti-inspired vinyasa with Debi DiPeso-Anna,
and in fundamental principles of Anusara Yoga with Joe Palese. I have traveled
to Greece to study in-depth with Angela Farmer and Victor VonKooten and
to South India to study with TKV Desikachar and his teachers at the Krishnamacarya
Yoga Mandiram.
I encourage
my students to find their own practice that helps them live with imagination,
vigor, and authenticity--the trust of one's own faculties and body.
It's this authenticity
that helps us navigate the
journey to wonder. The Yoga
as Muse workshops and retreats will help you experience first-hand
with a community of
other serious writers how yoga can help you become a more versatile,
skillful, and authentic writer. The 2005
schedule will take us to the Northeast, the South, the Northwest, London,
and Greece. 2005's Yoga as Muse for Authentic Writing focus is on taking
a
journey to wonder. Join us.
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