Upaya: Yoga's Philosophical Principles

The Journey from the Center to the Page
by Jeff Davis

The first book to show how yoga can help create better writing, with invigorating postures, breathing techniques, and wisdom for wordsmiths of any level.

Combining the enlightened perspective of Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones with the gentle practical advice of Anne Lamott's classic Bird by Bird, nationally known yoga and writing instructor Jeff Davis shows how yoga principles and myriad tools can help writers deepen their writing process, become more versatile, and enrich their writing style. Demonstrating the link between the "mind/body/imagination," The Journey from the Center to the Page is ideal for writers seeking to:

• Overcome writer's block as well as develop more concentration, focus, and a grounded sense of self-discipline

• Convert negative emotions - such as anger, fear, and hatred - into powerful storytelling energy

• Increase awareness of the copious imagery presented in daily life and help turn it into powerful metaphors and descriptions

• Cultivate compassion to create complex characters

• Practice truthfulness in writing by finding an authentic, clear voice and creating authentic characters and dialogue

The Journey from the Center to the Page is for a wide audience: novelists, memoirists, poets, screenwriters, journalists, copywriters, English teachers, technical writers, or anyone who simply enjoys the power of the written word. Ultimately, it is a book for all those who hunger for renewed inspiration and a fresh focus in each of life's chapters.

Remember Your Body

This book takes as its premise something simple yet potentially transformational: Yoga's philosophical principles and myriad skillful tools (upaya) can help you as a creative writer deepen your writing practice, become more versatile in your writing process, and enrich your writing style. My journey as a writer, as well as my ongoing work with thousands of writers and students, have led me to discover that a wellspring for our creative writing is as close as our nose. Our breath and body - these in part can be the muses that help us learn to navigate our fluttering minds, our tricky imagination, and our unpredictable hearts as we write (and rewrite).

For the nonyogis reading this book, keep reading. If the focus on yoga intimidates as much as intrigues you, maybe it's because you imagine svelte yogis sweating and twisting their bodies into impossible shapes. You need not worry, though, if your day's most physical act has been to walk to the corner shop for coffee and a bagel. Don't sweat. Really. Although sweating does loosen ligaments and prepare muscles for physically intense yoga sessions, your torso need not drop buckets of water to derive yoga's benefits for authentic writing. As this book will show you, being able to twist your imagination with a flexible spirit is more important for authentic writing than being able to secure your foot behind your head.

"Don't accept anything the speaker is saying. Test it out for yourself," the twentieth-century Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti frequently said. This skeptical inquiry and this thrust of testing out things define the essential mindset for practicing yoga. Part of what distinguishes yoga from forms of exercise as well as from many other spiritual disciplines is its all-encompassing tools to understand through the body's experience how body, mind, and other faculties relate. For had someone approached me fifteen years ago and told me that yoga would profoundly alter my understanding of how my body, mind, and imagination cooperate with my writing process and style, I would have raised my eyebrow. So be ready to test things out. I had to.

As a writer, I've had a precarious relationship with my body. The summer after my freshman year in college, when I heaved stones under the hot Texas sun for my then brother-in-law's landscaping business, I wrote in a notebook one evening, my slight muscles throbbing, "I will be a writer." Anything to avoid that heat and that backbreaking labor. More than pain avoidance, of course, led me to make that peculiar and private declaration of independence, for a far more reasonable aspiration than to become a writer might've brought more reliable sources of pleasure. After two years spent under the tutelage of writing professors such as David Wevill and Thomas Whitbread, I also realized that I genuinely wanted to be an extraordinary writing teacher as much as a writer. Those two pursuits I followed with fervor during my twenties, a fervor that exacted a cost on my body.

During my twenties and early thirties, I had become wedded to my writing and to teaching writing. At different times, I taught creative writing courses and poetry seminars at three colleges and at three high schools, including one public high school ranked by Newsweek as among the nation's top twenty. As a consultant for the College Board and as part of a textbook company's mentor team, I often traveled throughout the Southwest to teach hundreds of writing teachers the art of teaching writing. I also cofounded and acted as first president on the board of Dallas's first literary nonprofit organization, WordSpace.

I was a working head. Smug with my vegetarianism and imbalanced asceticism, I had not made love in years, fell ill from stress at least three times a year, and by age twenty-eight had stress-induced bronchitis, chest pains, and a pinched nerve in my right trapezius muscle that often left me half-paralyzed flat on my back. With muscles aching chronically and a right arm shaking from too much writing and responding to students' writings, I'm surprised I didn't scribble in a notebook at the time, "I will become a stoneworker," which was starting to sound like more attractive work.

Not particularly athletic, I had intuited even at nineteen that I needed to be more aware of my body. As an undergraduate, I had sneaked off early one morning away from my roommates to take my first yoga class. That was in 1985 in Texas, where yoga among my friends was still relegated to one of the weird things people who wear funny beads and smoke funny weeds do. I knew it felt good. Unfortunately, for my body and my writing, for the next ten years I didn't stick with it consistently. No one in graduate school or in the writing workshops and conferences I attended suggested I tap into the body or breath to alter my writing or to help me understand why sometimes, when I wrote, images and ideas flowed effortlessly and yet other times I sat and doodle-wrote for hours, sure that I was a fraud and hack. Would that someone had.

By the time I returned to yoga regularly twelve or so years later, I was so wound up, balled up, and stressed that I had the tightest shoulders in my yoga class. I had leapt into a high-pressure job as English department chair of a high-profile school, where I developed a budding creative writing program and helped lead the nineteen eclectic English instructors - whom I also supervised, counseled, and evaluated - through the implementation of a new writing philosophy. Around the same time, I also had abandoned a stagnating relationship to leave myself alone again with writing and teaching. My consistent, dogged, maniacal writing had dwindled into an Anaïs Nin-style cataloging of all-night excursions, and even when I could write a publishable creative essay or poem beyond my own foggy perspective, something in my writing process and style felt untrue, labored, dried-up. And as much as I understood elements of writing craft and process and style, I had no clue how the physical vehicle and subtle faculties that allowed me to write - in short, my body, mind, and imagination - functioned. I wrote from chin up, my shoulders clinched around my ears as if to keep any awareness from seeping down to my torso.

Once I returned to a steady yoga practice, my imagination awakened to my body. In the middle of a yoga class, I'd see my body as an ancient home with vast corridors, as a cottage in the Austrian mountains; aqueducts and rivulets with paper cups floating in them pulsed somewhere in my legs; a stranger's face, an old woman with braids and a scratchy scarf, rummaged around in my chest. A yoga class felt like an LSD trip. It also felt like those few and increasingly rare moments I'd have at the desk that you might call "writer's flow" when your imagination cooperates with your intellect and lets words unfold with few sputters. Those visual experiences, the pleasurable pulsing in my brain, and the relief of the pinched nerve in my right shoulder were enough to keep me coming back to yoga three times a week.

But on my journey I would come to understand far more deeply what happens when I write and how to help other writers understand their process. When practicing the physical part of yoga, I intuited subtle shifts in my views of myself, my ability to harness my energy and faculties for my writing, and a gradual ability to let go of or to work with the major obstacles - interior and exterior - that obstructed me from writing the kind of prose and poetry I intuited I needed to write. Those experiences initiated a series of questions: How could the body be a limitless yet immediate muse for writ- ing? How does the practice of yoga conduce to an authentic writing life? Those questions have led me through a deeper study of yoga philosophy, through two yoga teacher-training and certification programs, and to Greece and India to study with such generous, authentic yogis as Angela Farmer, Victor Van Kooten, and Sri T.K.V. Desikachar, whose father, T. S. Krishnamacharya, virtually birthed yoga in the West during the twentieth century. These studies and my own experience confirm that yoga is a philosophy and science for transformation. It's also a readily accessible practice that can address with openness our yearnings and needs as creative writers.

Now I teach yoga as much as I teach writing. I teach yoga classes in Woodstock, New York, and I also teach Yoga as Muse workshops to writers across the country in writing centers, universities, retreat centers, and yoga centers. In both venues - the yoga class and the Yoga as Muse workshop - I encourage students to be receptive to the subtle changes in perception, constitution, and energy that yoga most assuredly will promote. Each day yoga and writing wed with one another at my desk, on the mat, and on the street. My mat in fact resides beside my desk. This journey has led me back to my body and to the faculties I embody - intuition, the unconscious imagination, intellect, emotion - a descent that has altered profoundly how I view, experience, and understand my writing practice and my writing life. This book shares with you my findings and provides you the guidance, the yoga philosophies, and the yoga practices to help you try things out for yourself.

Copyright © 2005 Jeff Davis

About the Author

A poet, freelance writer, and editor, Jeff Davis founded the Yoga as Muse for Authentic Writing Workshops and has taught writing for sixteen years, assisting students of all ages and from all walks of life. His work has taken him to numerous locales, including Omega at The Crossings; New York City's Om Yoga Center; and Bliss Yoga Center in Woodstock, New York, where he writes and teaches.