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.
Is the muse out there? To be inspired or to inspire one’s self?
Is the muse inside or outside? That question has gnawed at me since I coined the phrase “Yoga As Muse” years ago. And over the years the phrase has rubbed more than one writer with whom I’ve worked the wrong way. Once, a writer in Taos said to me in private something to the effect of, “I like what you’re doing, but there’s something about the word ‘muse’ that doesn’t sit right with me. Something about some entity outside of me,” and her flittering fingers made a gesture that implied fairy dust.
I nodded and said something like, “Right, right.” I cleared my throat and said, “But the idea of Yoga As Muse is that the muse is within and that any source of ‘inspiration’ is at our disposal as readily as is the harnessed breath.” She wasn’t satisfied. “Muse” still said to her Tinkerbell.
A few years ago at a workshop I offered in Woodstock, New York, the point came up again. A sweet-faced man said, “Do you sometimes feel as if another force is coming through you? When I write, I feel as if I’m simply channeling some other force.” He smiled wide as if he had found a kindred spirit.“No,” I quipped. “I take full responsibility for whatever dribble I might write.” He stopped smiling. I hope the poor man didn’t feel shunned. Probably not. He and his force are probably happy as dancing clams co-writing book after book while I wrestle like Job with mine.
But I understand what that man meant, in part. More than once, I’ve re-read something I’ve written, been privately pleased, and wondered, “How did I write that? Where was I when I wrote that?” And the truth may be “I” got out of the way. Or, rather, a part of my mind that’s attached to my little personality being projected to the world stepped aside for the moment so that a deeper imagination, felt mind, and sensual tongue could come out to play.
Still, the idea of a “muse out there” is dangerous to some aspiring writers. Recently, I offered a one-hour tele-seminar with up2Yoga about Yoga As Muse. A young writer said that for years she’s only written spontaneously when she felt “inspired” but does not feel as if she has any control over when those feelings arise. She’d like to write more consistently. That’s the problem. Some young writers grow up thinking that to be a “real writer” you must work yourself up into an intoxicated frenzy or get dizzy on the Himalayan peaks and write unfettered and free-form a la myths of Jack Kerouac. Whether booze or Headstand, the muse is supposed to propel them into ecstasy-driven verses and memoirs. But what about the other 364 days of the year when you’re doing the laundry, raising kids, and driving to work? The muse is not out there, I tell these aspiring writers. You don’t have to wait for the muse to show up, I say. It’s here. You show up for it. (And leave the bottled spirits to the tortured literary ghosts of the past.)
Then, Elizabeth Gilbert comes along and shakes it all up. I watched her deliver a smart talk at TED in which she persuasively suggests we at least imagine again the Greco-Roman idea of the “personal genius” as a creative person’s muse. The Greco-Roman idea of “genius” – from which the word “genie” derives – is that we each have a genius, not that any one is a genius. It’s sort of like having your own personal assistant, only this assistant teems with novel ideas and insights, fresh associations, riveting characters and voices, a panoply of material. At least, that is, if you’re assigned a good genius or if your genius is having a good day.
Imagining such an idea – what’s the harm of imagining? – gives writers a necessary distance on their process. Gilbert says writers then don’t have to feel mortified if they’ve produced a wretched novel: Their genius didn’t work especially hard. And they also cannot gloat if their book takes the globe by surprise like, say, Eat, Pray, Love: It was mostly the personal genius’s work. Such an idea of the personal genius could, Gilbert suggests, hold the writer’s ego in check.
It’s a seductive idea. I want to imagine my personal genius. Right now, she’s probably an over-worked task-master. But when I listen to her, take walks with her, and just sit quietly with her by a creek or by a window, she invariably fills me with a manic stream of metaphors or sound clusters that help me wade again in a pool of language. For better or worse. Yes, sometimes she carries me away on a metaphor ferry. She’s edgy and earthy, has dried moss for hair in the shape of dreadlocks, and tells me bawdy jokes about insects and plants that I don’t really get. She laughs anyway. And she also does something to my skin. Sort of strokes it as I write so I can feel the words on the page like entities themselves instead of just letting words shoot out like widgets from a machine. She puts the spell in spelling.
But I know, too, something about Homer and Virgil and Ovid and all those marvelous bards who called upon the muses. When they called upon the muses to breathe into them, they weren’t speaking figuratively. The Greek word pneuman and the Latin word spiritus both mean “breath” but also mean “wind” and “breeze” and “soul” and “spirit.” It is the life force that moves through them and allows them to do what earth’s elements do so effortlessly – create. The root of the wordinspiration is spirare, this way of breathing the life force that is wind and soul.
What the Romans called spiritus the yogis call prana. And pranayama is the art of harnessing this creative force within the body. A person learns this art first by learning breathing exercises. But those exercises are only the beginning of the art. Over time, a yogi, or Yoga As Muser for that matter, learns several ways to shift fatigue, self-doubt, and a crowded mind to a creative frame of mind. They may not be “inspired” with trumpets blaring as the red sun rises, but they do muster the equanimity to put one word in front of the other and walk with a bit more ease on the page.
Maybe the practice primes the mind to receive the personal genius. I can hear my little genius laughing in my study. She’s lounging on the chaise lounge that looks onto the wide-mouthed pond out back.
“What are you laughing at?” I ask.
“You. You have to be so practical, so rational all the time. That prana stuff is not all science, you know?” She winds a tender finger in her dreadlock moss and whispers, “Let a little magic and mystery in.”
I get up and move to the living room. At this moment, a wood fire blazes in the cast-iron stove. A fourteen-year-old cat licks its matted fur and then gazes at the flames. A woman fries eggs in a skillet. And a six-month-old girl squirms on the hardwood floor, fascinated with a stripe of sunlight.
In a 2006 issue of TIFERET, I came across an association with massage to writing that resonated. In an interview with writer Brenda Miller, Miller (also a massseuse) says that in massage a masseuse must be intuitive and listen intently to what is going on. Writing, she says, is similar: You have to get into that intuitive state.
She’s spot on. I’ve been writing about this very thing lately. A few weeks ago, I was refining some material for an e-mail Yoga and Writing course I’m teaching this month on Yoga, Writing, and Writing Into the True Self, and I thought this group might appreciate some of it:
A character’s body, its infinite parts and endless history, grounds my writer’s “processor mind.” My processor mind is the mind that strives to explain away, to over-think and analyze, to complete the story or poem long before my imagination and hands have even reached the tenth sentence or line. It is all sky and meaning and figuring out; it is little earth.
If I can imagine how a character’s hands finesse a hammer and even what the fingers look like – sausages or drum sticks or budding hickory branches in summer – then my processor mind gives way to the felt mind. The felt mind strokes textures, senses what only Doris’s skin on her spotted forearms feels like on this one icy blue January morning. The felt mind hears the sounds of syllables and lets words wash over the inner ear and insides of my own fingers even as I write. If the processor mind is made of air and steel, then the felt mind is made of silk and sinew, of felt and grit. It is mostly earth.
I access the felt mind at key moments when writing, moments that are difficult, I admit, to distinguish. When I hear language lag or clunk, when I feel it grow cumbersome and stale like some scholar’s stack of moldy books, then I pause and listen for the words behind the words, the textures beneath the phrases. When I hear the writing voice strain to explain to the reader some point – Do you get it? Are you following me? – then I close my eyes and let the sound of breath lead my imagination to an image. A bulbous nose the shape of a large garlic clove appears on the face of Doris’s date. A pang arises in an uncle’s generous belly. The image brings my language back to earth, so to speak, and gives my imagination – and that of my readers – something to hold on to.
To arouse my felt mind, I regularly bring a character’s body to the mat. The mat has helped me sense, paradoxically, what it must have felt like to be that 26-year-old lonely workaholic who shares my name with no notion of his body below his neck. The mat has helped me explore the body of Doris, an imagined 58-year-old woman who, I think for now at least, is a not-too-bitter widow and who, while trying to revive her dating life, grieves her southward-bound breasts. My existing emotional body – with its own creaky crevices and layers of sensations – is my grounding point. The emotional body mixed with embodied imagination and intuition lure me into these character’s body-scapes that I might do justice to their experience.
Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Robert Olen Butler actually uses the word “trance” to describe to his undergrads in Florida what they need to get into in order to write. “Do whatever you need to,” he says in essence, “to get into that waking dream state.”
This subtle yoga and meditation practice entrances me and gives me entrance to the felt mind. Studies on Yoga Nidra and other yogic practices have shown that even beginning practitioners demonstrate increased emotional intelligence - and their brain stimulation corroborates that the brain’s limbic system (what we might call the brain’s emotional zone) communicates with the brain’s somatosensory region (where stimulation for touch and body orientation arise).
Thanks for your comments on previous posts, by the way. I’d love to hear more about your experiences with yoga & writing.
- Jeffrey
CENTER TO PAGE
MOVING WRITERS FROM
THE CENTER TO THE PAGE C E N T E R T O P A G E . C O M The Journey from the Center to the Page (Monkfish 2008; Penguin 2004)
It’s a precarious way of life, this writing from some place where “will” steps aside and something else altogether takes over. I don’t mean to imply that divine agency is afoot or that little daimons in my brain relay signals from my imagination to my hands, mere five-limbed workers that peck out the right combinations of keyboard keys while “I” just sit back and contemplate my grocery list. I won’t blame “inspiration” or my hands for any dribble I write. Still, on the page, who’s in charge?
I don’t know, and in that not-knowing I derive endless pleasure from the writing process’s mystery. The mind writes its own song, and I hum the tunes and shape the melodies. A stranger in a waiting room speaks on her cell phone about her latest dating exploits, and three months later that voice becomes a character for a short story. A moment by a woodstove fire rattles something in the mind until the loose bits coalesce that night into a poem. But how do I or any writer shape those melodies or reveries or stories or poems? Like most writers I know and respect, I have had to find ways to get out of my own way. When I come to the page, I must let these hands orchestrate imagination’s symphony without merely taking “dictation.”
And for me, those out-of-the-way ways have been through yoga.
Yoga, as I practice it, is not an exercise – although it profoundly has improved my breathing, temperament, and immunity. It also is not a religion – although it enriches my spiritual life. For over ten years, yoga has afforded this overly analytical, overly serious, overly sedentary writer opportunities to renew his writing process.
And so this blog: On this blog, I’ll share some of my current experiences in engaging yoga as muse. I’m not the only one onto this path. I work with and stay in touch with thousands of writers throughout North America and around the world who likewise have discovered in yoga a timeless way to embody the creative impulse and spirit. I’ll connect you with some of them, and this blog will keep you posted the latest news and trends regarding yoga & creativity. Finally, because I work as an editor, mentor, and coach, I also will include posts related to those topics as well.
We’re not so different. Whether I am teaching in Greece, Nova Scotia, Taos, or the tiny farming hamlet in upstate New York where I live, I am struck by what we writers and artists hold in common. We yearn to write from that deep source regularly and not erratically – say, when some unreliable “muse,” like a bad boyfriend or girlfriend, just shows up out of the blue on your front door and asks to be let in. We yearn to feel vital as we write and that the words we wield have a verve and breath of their own. And we yearn to get out of the way of our own writing. When we get out of the way, we get into the way of flow.
For this posting, I want to answer some frequently asked questions related to Yoga As Muse.
WHAT IS YOGA?
I answer this question as a writer who came to yoga later but also as a writer who has completed two Yoga Teacher Trainings, traveled to South India to study with his primary teacher, who continues to study seminal yogic texts, and who has taught yoga in different venues. Yoga is a way to live more fully in this body, in this physical world; it is not an escape from nor abnegation of this world. This way includes a series of tools that when executed regularly and appropriately alter the patterns of mind, speech, and action. It hones concentration, awakens compassion, ignites imagination, builds discipline and discernment, and expands awareness. It is a practice of small liberations in this lifetime.
WHAT IS YOGA NOT?
It is not exercise although your body – especially if it’s aging like mine – will benefit. It is not a religion – although Hindus have appropriated some of its teachings and it can awaken that which you might call spiritual. It is not an excuse to feel pious or self-righteous or somehow better than people who do not practice yoga. Many of yoga’s tools, after all, aim to help us experience the break down of dualistic consciousness.
I am infinitely flawed and contradictory. I cuss at lunatic SUV drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike; I eat too much dark chocolate until my body crashes; and I have a gift not only for putting my foot behind my head but also squarely in my mouth. So, yoga is not about achieving moral or physical perfection.
WHAT IS YOGA AS MUSE?
Yoga as Muse is a term I use to describe the way I integrate yoga’s tools directly into my creative process. At the foundational level, I set writing intentions, engage the appropriate yogic tools for a writing intention, and write with a receptive, easeful state of mind and body.
I have learned what tools lasso my concentration, crack open my heart toward my characters, break my mind out of hard-edged conceptions, and lure images like fish to the surface. But the process is not mechanical.
I have taught literature and creative writing courses at high schools and colleges for years, but I was frustrated by a key problem in how creative writing is – and often must be – taught in academia: A teacher or professor can teach craft, can point students toward model texts, can critique students’ writings, and in essence try to describe what works inthe student and what does not work. But few writing teachers or professors have academic permission to teach students the how. When it comes to process, most writing pedagogy gets no further than the “pre-write, draft, re-vision, edit” stage or a few “creative exercises” that might include playing music or putting on goofy hats and writing as a caterpillar.
Yoga, when approached in the way I’m describing, helps writers become more aware of how their imaginations, intellects, and emotions work for or against their writing. From that faculty awareness follows craft awareness.
WHAT ARE YOGA AS MUSE TOOLS?
Yoga as Muse tools are the same as yoga’s tools. Physical postures both shift physical energy as well as alter the mind’s point of awareness and degree of awareness. Yoga offers numerous breathing tools that can elevate alertness and energy, calm the nervous system, and stimulate the imagination and unconscious. Meditation tools increase writers’ awareness of their mind’s margins and percolating unconscious. Chanting tools can awaken writers’ inner ear for musicality, rhythm, and voice. Philosophy tools and daily practice tools help writers live the writing life – from drafting to publishing – without losing their center.
DOESN’T THIS HYBRIDIZATION CHEAPEN YOGA’S SACREDNESS & PURITY?
No. Here are three reasons why not.
#1: Yoga is adaptive and dynamic, not static. A quick study of yoga’s history of Yoga betrays that “Yoga” refers to numerous practices all aimed either toward liberation or peace. There is meditation yoga (raja yoga), the yoga of selfless service (karma yoga), the yoga of chanting (bhakti yoga), and the yoga of physical transformation and transmutation (hatha yoga) to name a few. Within hatha yoga alone, literally hundreds of traditions have sprouted, and the teachers for centuries have learned from one another and adapted their teachings accordingly. The teaching of yoga has always been adapted to and changed according to students’ time, place, and needs. Thousands of creative people in the 21st century need a clear way to embody their creative process.
#2: Yogis have drawn from their practices to write and to create for centuries. Numerous yogic texts are said to have been “revealed” to their authors. Without recourse to the reductive terms of Western psychology, how else would you describe that luminous state of awareness that yoga and meditation can bring a writer to? Bhakti yoginis such as Mirabai found direct inspiration for their poetry in their devotional practices. More contemporary yogis such as Sri Aurobindo felt that creativity was our evolutionary gift. In this sense, Yoga As Muse is as ancient as the first chant.
#3: “Tools” are a seminal aspect of almost all yogic and Buddhist traditions. Yoga and Buddhism attract contemporary Westerners in part because of the endless teaching tools these traditions’ teachers have at their disposal. These tools are called upaya in Sanskrit, which translates loosely to “skillful means.” Yoga As Muse draws upon many of these same tools with the aim of creative liberation (not perfection).
WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE TWO HOURS OR $15 A DAY FOR A YOGA CLASS?
My teacher Sri TKV Desikachar liberated me from feeling obligated to practice yoga 90 minutes to two hours a day. “20 to 30 minutes a day,” he would say, “is much better than two hours once a week.” The same is true for writing. The body and mind need daily tending; so, too, does the imagination’s and unconscious’s bidding. Ideally, you can visit your yoga teacher once or more a week for guidance and deepening, but Yoga As Muse can be practiced at your own home and woven into your daily life’s fabric. I know numerous writers who have written books 20 minutes at a time.
That’s enough to pique your curiosity, I hope. Send me questions to jeffdavis@centertopage.com, or visit www.centertopage.com to learn more.
In upcoming entries, I’ll share with you how Yoga As Muse helped me write a short story, yoga session after yoga session; how yoga helps me and others write into the truth; and much, much more.
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.”
