Why Yoga?

The Journey from the Center to the Page
by Jeff Davis

(Page 2 of 4)

Why yoga? Why not another form of meditation or some form of physical exercise such as running, aerobics, or lifting weights? Meditation alone certainly heightens concentration and relaxation, but focusing directly on our thoughts drives some people crazy. Their lower backs twitch, their noses itch, and their minds flutter. A writer friend I know took a six-week meditation class to help him quiet his jittery chatter. By the end of week one, he was ready to take literally the Zen saying, When you meet the Buddha, kill him. That's one reason yogis developed the practices of physical poses (¯asana) and breath awareness (pr¯an¯ay¯ama) over two thousand years ago and why yogis later developed Hatha-Yoga, the science of breathing, physical poses, and energy flow. The fifteenth-century text The Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika recommends that rather than tending directly to thoughts we instead focus upon our breath's in-and-out flow and on our body's careful movements; thoughts naturally will quiet down as breath, body, mind, harmonize.

With consistent practice, yoga can alter how you breathe, think, shift energy, and deal with emotions - all beneficial attributes, as this book will explain, to writers. And whereas physical forms of exercise such as aerobics and running do benefit the brain and body, yoga's principles and tools offer a practical philosophy that does not exhaust the mind and body; instead, it efficiently energizes and centers the "body- mind-imagination" and deepens self-understanding. Yoga is a philosophy and practice that emphasizes less how you look on the mat and more how you live in the world. To practice yoga as muse for authentic writing involves the physi- cal postures (¯asanas), breath awareness (pr¯an¯ay¯ama), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana), visualization (bhavana), and self-study (sv¯adhy¯aya). But yoga and authentic writing make use of these tools not as an end in themselves but in the context of how days take shape in our lives. Practicing yoga poses alone is no more a full yoga practice than learning a few tricks about style is an authentic writing practice. I suggest you approach these philosophies and practices not with rigidity but with a sense of play. Test things out. Read this book to trigger fresh ways of approaching your writing practice from a different space, a more abiding space, your center. The center.

The word authentic is an adjective that stems from the Greek authentes, "one who acts on his own authority." So, again, we circle around to Krishnamurti's wisdom: Use this book to test things out for yourself and write from that space of experimentation. I suggest you first read Chapter One because yoga can help you explore what truly matters to you as a writer and remember your authentic intention as you draft, revise, and publish. Then either jump to any chapter that seems to speak to your writing needs, or enjoy the book from beginning to end. Chapters Two through Four address some of the most common questions that writers ask me: "How do I find time to write?" and "How do I find the concentration and self-discipline to write consistently and effectively?" Yoga can strengthen your constitution and slow down your brain waves so you can endure intense writing projects with self-discipline, perseverance, and concentration.

Even your writing style can benefit from yoga, as Chapters Five through Thirteen explain. Most writers I know sense that words are harbored in their bodies and that something visceral among body, imagination, and language mixes in authentic writing. Through simple yoga tools you can access the layers of your embodied imagination to heighten your presence and to create what John Gardner called in The Art of Fiction the "fictional dream," the seamless web of redolent detail and sapid images a good writer often creates for readers. For many writers who begin practicing yoga, something rich happens, too, to the present moment of penning or typing word after word. With simple yoga practices, you can induce a creative frame of mind that can so open your imagination and body that the writing experience can become as satisfying as a day spent hiking through a newly discovered evergreen forest. And with yoga's tools for listening, you can regain your authentic voice, craft convincing dialogue, and write sentences whose music comes from the mix between brain and heart - literally.

Chapters Fourteen through Nineteen explain how yoga helps you as a writer face emotionally hazardous terrain. By deepening your emotional intelligence, yoga grants you resources to better handle that most primal emotion - fear - as well as its close cousin, anger. I'm not promising that yoga will make you a better person, but because yoga can help you practice compassion and truthfulness, you can learn to portray your subjects - yourself, other people, difficult fictional characters - with greater complexity and believability. And perhaps no part of the writing process so confounds writers as rewriting, but yoga can help here too. Chapters Twenty and Twenty-one offer you advice. If you already have a regular and advanced yoga practice, you might jump to and review Chapter Twenty-three. Its ideas and generalizations I offer there may inform your reading of the other chapters.

Each chapter shows you how either yoga principles or specific yoga tools can help you become a more versatile and authentic writer when addressing specific writing topics in your own practice. Most chapters include "TAKE A BREATH" exercises to guide you through embodying your writing practice. If an exercise requires a physical pose, you can use the appendix of photographs as a prompt. Several original Sanskrit terms - Sanskrit being yoga's language - may deepen your knowledge and understanding of this sacred tongue. To those ends, the book also offers a glossary of terms.

To write authentically is to write from a common source, a common center. Ancient Hatha-Yoga texts describe unique centers within certain parts of the body that guide facets of ourselves such as our emotions, physical energy, will, imagination, and vision. Some texts describe seven, some eight, some more. You'll learn in this book, though, how some of these centers help you write from one center.

When an anthropologist asked a yogi, "Where is the center of the universe?" the yogi looked across the plain where they stood, pointed at a mountain, and said, "There." Then he said, "If that's where you're standing." Then he pointed to his left at a tree and said, "There. If that's where you're standing." Then he pointed to the place beneath the anthropologist's feet and said, "There is the center of the universe for you at this moment." He paused again. "And there. It's always there," he said, pointing to the anthropologist's heart. He wasn't a relativist or a narcissist suggesting that the universe is simply a construct of a person's point of view, nor was he being clever or symbolic by pointing to the heart. The heart's location below our brain and in our torso can keep our awareness in our core, the Latin word for heart, from which we get courage. From that center, common to all of us, spirit and body and language align. When you write from the center, you write what your spirit, body, and language demand you write. It's a potentially hazardous and dangerous path because your protective ego may no longer be in as much control, and this writing can shake you out of your comfortable habits by forcing you to write the truth - regardless of genre. With persistence, though, you learn you can persevere, that you can write no other way.

Writing is a journey. When Margaret Atwood asked several novelists a few years ago what it felt like to write, they repeatedly used words evoking a journey through a dark place. Many of them felt almost blind along the way, yet they sensed that the movement forward would bring about vision. Atwood writes, "I was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior of the human body, forty years ago: 'It's dark in there.'" And perhaps this is how I've remembered to live and to write authentically: to make love to the darkness instead of trying to kick it out of bed. To make love to the darkness a writer moves toward doubts and doesn't try to repress them or let them control her. Such a writer finds ways to spelunker into the body's and the imagination's subtle caverns and find hideous yet exquisite forms and names of oneself, of humanity, of God, and of whatever it is we call reality - the basic stuff of authentic writing and the basic stuff of yoga.

This book encourages you to enter that darkness. It does not pretend to be Virgil to all of the Dantes in the writing world. Writing is difficult. This book, however, does suggest new ways for you to use yoga's tools and live its philosophies, that you may find the courage, confidence, and skill to step into the darkness and so begin a journey to the center and then back to the page.

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.