Yoga: Making A Few Preparations

The Journey from the Center to the Page
by Jeff Davis

(Page 3 of 4)

Putting on the Robe:
Exploring Your Intentions for Writing

An hour or so before dawn, the congress in my head that years ago would wake me by trumpeting the day's debates seems this morning cooperative and sedate. I creep from bed across the hall's squeaking hardwoods to my study. On one side of my study, the window above my desk looks like a blank blackboard that complements my computer screen's white sky. On the study's other side, my yoga mat waits for me to step on it like a diving board. If my mat be a diving board, then that white screen must be the sky into which I dive. (I'm not one of those gonzo writers who actually leaps from downed planes flying over, say, war-torn Liberia and live to write about it; metaphors placate my imagination just fine.) It's a precarious business, this writing life, one filled with little daily affirmation from other people that what you're spending your precious time and energy doing actually matters or is any good. No supervisor nods her head in approval. No customer survey rates your writing. No regular performance evaluation ranks you for writer of the month. Just the wide-open page and you, free-falling, twisting, teaching yourself how to shift your limbs to spin into airborne pirouettes, all with the faith that as you see some creative problem mount and the brown ground zooms toward your face, your parachute cord will work. More often than not when you write, although it feels at times as if you get caught in trees or hurt your knees, you land upright on your two feet, your soles refastened to earth. The next day you can't wait to begin again with a new page.

Why on earth, of all the ways to spend the morning, do I choose to write? While I was a temporary resident at the Zen Mountain Monastery, Vice-Abbess Bonnie Myotai Treace, Sensei, raised a question about practicing Zen that reminds me of an essential question for writers: "Why, given the endless possibilities of a morning, given dawn, put on a robe at the sound of a bell?"1 Why put on your robe, indeed, and hobble to the desk? Why write? It seems like a good question for starters. Without a genuine motivation, we're possibly hobby writing, sky doodling. We got into this business of taking creative leaps for reasons other than an adrenaline rush.

Something I've learned from my yoga practice - to revisit a variation of the question "Why write?" - has changed the way I start things - my mornings, my classes and workshops, and my own writing sessions. Before practicing yoga, I set an intention. An intention is a conscious gesture to align your mind, heart, imagination, and body with whatever act you're about to begin - whether it's a series of physical poses, breathing awareness, a day of karma yoga and good acts, or a writing session. A yoga teacher and writer I know practices yoga to manifest her highest qualities. A friend of mine says he simply practices yoga to deepen his joy. Another friend practices yoga to perpetuate peace. Most of us take that first step onto the mat for personal reasons. An injury, the first signs of cellulite, loneliness, heartbreak, grief, addiction, or a gamut of physical and emotional ailments may propel us into downward dog pose and cobra pose. In her classic book Awakening the Spine, Vanda Scaravelli lays out her poetic reflections for a natural, egoless practice: "Yoga should not be a training for body control; on the contrary, it must bring freedom to the body, all the freedom it needs."2 The highest motive to practice yoga may be liberation.

I don't know if writing will set us free, but I do know there's value in setting an intention as a writer. To begin each writing session and each workshop, I've rephrased the question "Why write?" to "What am I writing for?" A more private question than its more direct sibling, it's meant to be asked of and answered primarily to yourself and to whoever or whatever else can read your body, mind, and heart. No other yogi, writer, or professor will hear you. That fact alone may make all the difference in the answer that surfaces. You can respond with a justification, a defense, but you may be surprised by what happens. You'll feel more at ease about your writing as you start to connect your writing intention to your core identity as a writer. The phrasing "What am I writing for?" may even lead you to dedicate your writing practice to something or someone. In this way your writing may come from a source other than your ego. When successful, seasoned writers tell me "something is missing" from their writing practice, this simple gesture begins to satisfy some of their hunger.

No need to expect grand or immediate answers, though. Often only after years of writing do we have any perspective on why we've been spending the better part of our days following one word after another. This gesture of asking "What am I writing for?" to yourself, though, begins the process. Perhaps the answers that surface for you - today, tomorrow, next month - may reflect what other writers have said they write for. Jhumpa Lahiri, the youngest writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize, says she writes to confront and sort through the discrepancy between her Indian parents' worldview and her more American worldview with which she has grown up.3 Sindiwe Magona, a novelist from South Africa and now working for the United Nations, says writing is therapeutic for her and for others.4 Essayist Jean Bernstein says she must write because questions, voices, images, surface in her like "splinters," and writing essays is the best way she has found to pull out the really irritating ones.5 These motives sustain writers and propel them to the desk each day.

What are you writing for? Perhaps, like many writers, you write to make sense of the world. If lucky, you can form some order out of chaotic human experience. For now, what you write for may be nothing more than the pleasure or wonder you've experienced when wielding words. Something related to a core principle also may stir you to write. If you hunger to make sense of how the taco-chain owner who migrated from Mexico twenty years ago is filthy rich and yet pays his illegal immigrant employees thirty-five dollars for fourteen-hour shifts, then exploring justice's complexities may be what you write for. Sometimes the reasons why we write seem as fleeting as the hidden blue jay cawing among the birches, but these more remote, at times ineffable, motives help us write from our center.

When checking in with this question, watch your ego. A thirty-year-old writer, Elise, recently asked me to help her figure out a focus for her first novel. She had almost finished the first draft of the story, which follows a young woman's emotional and political entanglements as she avoids marriage to pursue her dreams of opening an animal sanctuary, but Elise felt that the story, and she as a writer, had started to lose direction. "What stirs you to write this book?" I asked. She responded almost without hesitation: "To prove to my mother I've accomplished something. I have three degrees in languages and have nothing to show for it." Oh, the mother motive. I'd heard about it, although thankfully I've never had to wrestle with this one myself. Elise's ego, I sensed, still clung too tightly to her manuscript. She didn't trust her own authority. I suggested she let the project rest for a while and instead explore a deeper motivation that leads her to write even when her mother's not approving or disapproving; otherwise, she not only may censor herself when drafting and rewriting, but she also may be sorely disappointed when the book's completed, and her mother still doesn't nod her head. Will the book, then, be a failure? Two months later she hadn't taken my advice. Her mother's judgmental air still hovered over her shoulder, and when she had worked on the book she still felt lost and often uninspired. So, I took her through a fairly simple process to slow down her thoughts, to ground her in her body, and to help her locate an authentic drive that would both sustain her writing and give it focus. Within a few minutes, she realized she was writing her novel to satisfy an insatiable hunger to figure out some of her own views on being a woman in this country, on living an ethical livelihood, as well as on the conflicting loyalties between having a family and following a personal dream. These issues mattered to Elise, but she hadn't been able to acknowledge that her caring about these puzzling topics was what had stirred her to write the novel. The next day, Elise told me, she centered herself and kept in her heart some of these intentions. The results? She finished a second rewrite of the manuscript within six weeks and submitted it to her agent.

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.