Ah, resistance to change. I admit I like my routines and cringe at change, but I’m not the dig-your-heels-in-the-ground sort. I don’t invite the dramatic change, but even when my first wife said adios and even when lightning said hello! to my farmhouse rooftop, I cried and yelled and stomped my feet, and then I found a way to move on. Okay, both of those events took a long time to move through, but I didn’t resist either because they were both inevitable.
I have a similar attitude about rewriting of the big kind – re-visioning. Several years ago when my editor at Penguin sent me back the first submitted draft of The Journey from the Center to the Page, I opened the package and found an eleven-page, single-spaced typed letter that began something like, “You have some good material here, but we’ve got a long way to go before this is publishable.” Most of the next eleven pages listed all of the problems and a few possible solutions. The manuscript itself had page after page with my editor’s pen marks Xed on them.
My response? I went to bed for two days. After two days, I went to my yoga mat, centered my mind, and said, “Okay. I know how to do this. Let’s get to work.” And I did. I salvaged maybe 15% of the original manuscript, but the new version was mostly unrecognizable from what I originally submitted. And even when it came out, I wasn’t satisfied with it. Four years later, Monkfish published a revised and updated edition. I do the same with short stories, and my current book project has gone through at least eight major structural overhauls. Since my college days, I don’t recall being much different. I get shocked. I cringe. And then I get to work.
As a coach and editor, I am often on the other side of this deal. After I have suggested to certain clients that they shift a story’s point of view or try to embody a different character or drop an entire sub-plot, they say to themselves or to their friends, “He doesn’t get my artistic intentions! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” I know because they’ve later told me so. The happiest and most productive clients/writers with whom I have worked and known are ones who learn to stomp their feet and then find a way to get back to work.
Novelist Benjamin Percy is such a writer. In the current issue of Poets & Writers, he compares revisioning a novel to renovating a house. It turns out that just as he and his wife had bought a house in desperate need of renovation, Greywolf Press had bought his novel. According to his new editor, the novel also needed major renovation. So Percy got to work – on both the house and the novel.
Why do we resist?
Here’s what Percy writes: “So much of revision, I’ve discovered, is about coming to terms with that word: gone. Letting things go. When revising, the beginning writer spends hours consulting the thesaurus, replacing a period with a semicolon, cutting adjectives, adding a few descriptive sentences – whereas the professional writer mercilessly lops off limbs, rips out innards like party streamers, drains away gallons of blood, and then calls down the lightning to bring the body back to life.”
Percy also observes why some amateur writers resist revision. If you’re writing only when the mood strikes you, he says, then you have less pages of productivity – and so you want to hold onto those few pages. “But if you’re producing reams of pages you’ll be less resistant to revision,” he writes, “because you know it won’t be long before another load of timber comes down the road.” So write and write and write everyday – and the task of rewriting won’t seem so daunting.
And yoga is all about letting go. With practice, yoga helps us see the mental patterns that hold us back as writers. We can start to see how our minds react to constructive criticism, how our mental loops can keep us locked in inertia and resistance, and how our bodies will avoid the desk at all costs when we know we need to rewrite.
Yet, sometimes more spiritually inclined writers have resisted my suggestions for rewriting for another reason. They feel they are channeling or otherwise receiving messages from a spirit or spirits and that to tinker too much with the original inspiration might offend the spirits. I sympathize, but I can’t convince these writers that spirits probably are not as attached to words as we are or that earth constantly revises herself. Everything changes. And yet we sometimes protect our sentences as if they were pyramids or stone temples built to outlast the next 2000 winters.
As a coach, I suppose I am a sort of wind god who unexpectedly may throw you off course, but I don’t do so at whim. My hope is that the wind ultimately blows your boat in the right direction and helps you learn to get yourself precisely where you need even it was not where you thought you were going or wanted to go.
Writing is temporary. All of it is. Stomp your feet. Hurl an epithet at your coach – that force of creative chaos and change. Then move on. There’s work to do while you’re still here.
For more on this topic, see Chapter 22, “Letting Go of Delusion and Control: Revise!” in The Journey from the Center to the Page.(I had to revise that chapter significantly!)
The following words I delivered March 19, 2010 at the close of the 5th Annual Yoga As Muse for Authentic Writing & Creativity Retreat held at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, NM. Our focus for six days had been on writing into “layers of truth” – the layer of intimate detail, the layer of points of view, the tragic layer, the comedic layer, and the mythic layer. I have modified it to fit this blog.
Freedom is Not Just Another Word
I would like to say a few closing words.
Writing toward truth requires more than saying, “Well, I am living and speaking my truth!” To write, live, and speak the truth, seems to me, requires that I frequently check in with the foundation of my writing, speaking, and living: the mind. The embodied mind, more precisely. And even more precisely, I check in with what I know to be the truth and what I think I know to be the truth – both of which are jnana. Knowledge. Knowledge can bind us; knowledge can liberate us. Being in a physical body can bind us; and it can liberate us. Our actions can bind us; the actor behind the actions can liberate us. The sounds of language can bind us; the sounds of language can liberate us.
It turns out that liberation for most of us is neither immediate nor permanent in this lifetime. To live with consciousness of consciousness in a non-dual world involves dancing between freedom and bondage. The promise and the reality are that as you practice, the ratio can shift. You can dance in freedom for more frequent and longer periods, and even when you’re in bondage you can recognize it more readily, know that it’s temporary, and be versatile enough to find the tools that will unlock the shackles or unravel the ropes.
The light on your reactivity meter will still be active at certain surprising times. You will still have inexplicable emotional bursts, judgmental thoughts will still raise their heads like prairie dogs, but less so perhaps and the energy those undesirable thought patterns once held on the mind may gradually have less and less and less sustaining charge.
Mind spreads out wide like the New Mexico sky. It wants to be given shape with purpose and focus the way earth’s horizon defines sky, but the sky-mind does not want to stay locked up in old adolescent patterns.
Would you want to stay in seventh grade all your life? Neither does the mind.
As writers, we are more than our characters even though we cannot control them. We are more than our poem’s speakers and our stories’ narrators even though we must step out of the way that they may speak with freedom and truth beyond what our processor minds could say. When we let True Self reside deeply and at home in Animate Body, and when we write from that space, that center, then, yes, we can write into the unknown labyrinth and perhaps hear the voice behind the voices that helps us find our way home.
Writing, it might turn out, is self-exploration and self-expansion – an expanded awareness of what is the self, an awareness that allows the self to inhabit multiple points of view, an awareness that allows the self to delve into complex layers and mythic layers.
Practice
But we must practice. Yoga. Every. Day. Do so for fifteen days from March 22-April 5. See what happens. The commentary in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika makes claims such as, “Try this tool for 15 days, and you will be free.” When I first read that, I’d say to myself, “Well, there’s an early New Age self-help claim.” But, it’s true. You try a yogic tool deliberately for 15 days, and you observe the mind and body, and you will observe a shift, and that observation of the shift is a movement toward freedom from old habits. Practice Yoga As Muse at least three times a week. Write for only 45 minutes at first.
You can spend a lifetime analyzing why you act the way you do, why you don’t do what you know you want to do. And maybe, maybe after twenty years of psychoanalysis, you might or might not get to “the bottom” of things only to find out that you still act the way you do; only now, you have an excuse for those habits. I suggest you stop analyzing why.
Act differently. When you act differently, the mind’s habits will follow.
A practice asks us to cultivate tapas – a series of voluntary self-challenges. A series of voluntary self-challenges – that is the heart of being a writer. It demands you not talk away your project, that you only talk about what you have written, not what you are going to write. That you grow accustomed to rejection. Cultivate the ability to be disappointed. And move on.
Above all, you keep writing. Better fifteen minutes a day no matter what than 90 minutes a week or every two weeks. All of which let’s you move toward the difficult and lets you hang up on the Inner Heckler.
The Return and the Ultimate Responsibility
When you return home, you will still need allies. Find one to three others with whom to share your Yoga As Muse wisdom. Start them with the Concentration Sequence, rotate facilitating one another. This journey is beautiful, and it’s also rife with obstacles and challenges. Don’t surrender to the obstacles. Greet them. Welcome them. And stay in touch with one another for encouragement and for generosity, for compassion and for truthfulness.
You will return home, most of you, a different person. When Odysseus returned from his 20-year journey, he returned disguised as a beggar. That is, no one recognized him. And some of your loved ones may not recognize you as you start to act and speak and write differently. Don’t judge them for not having changed the way you have. Have compassion and patience for their own growth. When Odysseus returned home, Penelope reminded the hero he was also a husband. He was both: a hero and a husband. In that sense, he was transfigured. He could live in both worlds simultaneously. When you practice Yoga As Muse, you can live in the world of ideas and creativity and spirit and in the world of chores and a job. They are not at odds.
But be responsible. And know to what you ultimately must be responsible. The Self has a dharma. Something calls the Self to act well in the world. Your ultimate responsibility is not your small obligations to others – although you cannot abnegate those obligations. Be responsible to that part of the Self that you cannot even call your own. I remember every day what Krishna said to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita:
“It is better to perform your own duty imperfectly than someone else’s perfectly.”
Here’s to responsible imperfection.
And this, too:
A retreat is to the soul what winter is to the earth. It is a time to withdraw, to let seeds sink deep into soil, to be in darkness where seeds sprout.
Remember Sunday evening when with seeds at your heart you asked, What am I here for? You might have fulfilled your intention. You might have gotten more than you asked for.
Now, spring is just around the bend. Make a commitment for the next fifteen days—from March 22 to April 6—to meet with your muse at least 6 times.
Let a place find you here before you leave and plant half your seeds. Then go home, find a place, a small pot, a patch of yard, and plant them.
The Gift of Writing the Truth
When I traveled through the Himalayas, an affable retired engineer who had a lovely house and orchard and two children had invited me into his home and told me a story about Vac. Vac is a feminine force of sacred speech described in the Vedas, but this story is not in there. He said that Vac deeply desired to grant the gift of sacred speech to human beings. The other deities who dwelled on a high mountain thought that idea inane. “They’ll abuse the gift!” one of them said. “They don’t know how to use sacred speech,” another protested. But Vac insisted. Well, they wanted to persecute Vac for her insubordination, so she fled among the banyan trees. When the gods demanded the trees extradite her for punishment, the trees held out on behalf of Vac and said, “We will let her go, but only if you grant her wish.”
The gods gave in. And Vac gave us the gift of scared speech. And so musicians who played wooden instruments and writers who use paper remember the role that the trees played in granting us this gift of sacred speech and of writing and singing toward the truth in all of its layers.
To speak and write the truth assumes great risks. People bristle at the truth. They’re offended. Your mother will cringe. Writers risk be alienated from families and whole communities. Such exile is the risk some of us must take not to do battle with the world but to continue loving the world with the wish that all creatures will remember that they are or can be happy and they can be free from their own suffering.
You’ll feel when you write from the truth. It vibrates differently than when you’re merely spinning your ego’s wheels. An authentic intention lines up with the words, and from that centered alignment Vac brings the words to the page. It’s a gift. Use it responsibly. And be responsible to use it.
I wish you grace and peace on your travels home. Om Gum Ganapataye Namaha.
I’ve had problems with concentration for years. Not a good thing for a writer. So as a former ADD candidate, I’ve explored ways that yoga aids my and other writers’ concentration. Only recently have I experienced concentration in a deeper way. Call it “newborn concentration.”
I’m fascinated that neuroscientists have been able to measure the brain wave of concentration for over thirty years (although yogis have experienced it for thousands of years). So, for instance, when most of us are chatting on a Blackberry while checking our daily planner and eating a panini sandwich, the brain waves in our frontal lobes would probably look like sharp jags on an EEG, bouncing at a rapid 13-36 oscillations a second. These busy brain waves are called beta brain waves.
What happens when yogis harness their breath and meditate? Brain waves in the frontal lobes of many of them slow down by half or more to a cool 6-13 oscillations a second. Alpha brain waves they’re called, and they mirror a brain on concentration.
Woe to us who live in the world of Twitter and Blackberries, right?
Consider another study whose results have long held my envy. In this study, scientists dipped a subject’s fingers into a glass of cold water or made loud clacking noises to monitor any shifts in the frontal lobes’ brain wave patterns. They didn’t shift. Or if they did, not by much.
In other words, these yogis can concentrate even when the phone rings or the dish clings.
That capacity has eluded me. For years, I tried to shut out all external distractions. I moved to quieter regions of Woodstock, NY, and then further away from Woodstock where I thought the only sounds I might hear would be a pileated woodpecker kissing a willow. So when I prepared to practice, I would ask my wife not to make any noise. Closed my door and proceeded with my Yoga As Muse practice to focus on a piece of writing.
The problem? The slightest sound – a dish clanging in the sink, a neighbor’s leaf blower – threw off my concentration, and I’d become an agitated nutjob. I remember my first wife saying, “I just wonder what kind of spiritual practice you have that makes you so irritable.” I’m sure any alphas I mustered quickly jagged to betas.
But for several years, I have worked with a more inclusive form of meditation. Whereas Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras encourage practitioners to withdraw from their senses and to shut out external stimuli in order to concentrate, the Tantric Kashmir Shaivism – and the text the Siva-Sutras – encourage practitioners to include random external stimuli as part and parcel of their meditation. The leaf blower becomes part of my focus – or it becomes the background to whatever my imagination centers on that morning for my writing. It’s not unlike my practice with zazen, or Zen meditation.
Dahlia, my five-month-old daughter, has become my glass of cold water. On most mornings, I now get her up early and let her mother sleep in. I hold her in my arms while I make a cup of tea and then bring her into my study and place her in her favorite “giraffe chair.” She watches as I light incense and situate myself on the mat. I then glide through a sequence I designed years ago – my writer’s concentration sequence. She gazes or crunches up her plastic baby “book” or gurgles or groans. I may be in a forward bend, my inner witness honing in on refining an idea for an essay or story, the contour of a character’s face just coming into the light of my imagination, and – then – Dahlia’s groans start amping up a notch or two.
I don’t ignore the babe or try to tune her out (woe to me if I did). I pop up, check on her, smile at her, say a few words of assurance, hand her a toy, and, once she seems satisfied, return to my forward bend – all without agitation. Who knows? The texture of her gurgle or the morning light across her pink cheek might find its way into a piece of writing some day.
Without agitation. That’s a key to this layer of creative concentration. I receive the sudden clack instead of blocking it. It’s an addition instead of an interruption.
I know that as Dahlia reaches the toddler stage, I’ll have a baby downward dog running barking beneath me on the mat, but Yoga As Muse for me is about discovering how to play with the world’s surprises and weave them right into my creative process.
As an old writer and a new papa, I’m trying to ride this (alpha) wave of concentration in a fresh way. Call it “newborn concentration.”
Ah, resistance to change. I admit I like my routines and cringe at change, but I’m not the dig-your-heels-in-the-ground sort. I don’t invite the dramatic change, but even when my first wife said adios and even when lightning said hello! to my farmhouse rooftop, I cried and yelled and stomped my feet, and then I found a way to move on. Okay, both of those events took a long time to move through, but I didn’t resist either because they were both inevitable.