writing is like yoga
Several years ago, a lecturer told my class that writing was like yoga. I appreciated what I think he meant, and what I took from it at the time—that writing is a constant practice, a means unto itself rather than to an outcome. It’s not a linear journey either. Some days you can do a pose with great ease. Other days it’s just not happening. So you just have to keep showing up, and putting your faith in the process.
But lately I have also been thinking about another tenet of yoga, which is that whatever happens on the mat stays on the mat, and at the end of the practice, you let go. Whether practice went well, whether you were able to focus, whether your body felt stiff or limber, strong or weak, you accept it all, and let it go. In savasana, the final resting pose, we let the body absorb the benefits of our practice. We trust the body to take what it needs and leave the rest behind. We don’t need to keep thinking about practice off the mat, wondering how we could have done this or that pose better.
When much of your writing journey so far has been very focused on output—needing to meet deadlines in school, needing to submit something before a submission period closes, needing to polish work for publication—it can be a difficult mindset shift to think of writing as a practice you don’t need to take off the mat. I realise I have been used to thinking about it all the time, as if it were my full-time unpaid job, and then feeling bad if I find myself not thinking about it, or not wanting to think about it; if I loved it that much, why wasn’t it bringing me joy to think about all the time? Of course, there are bigger questions here about my love for writing itself vs all the things writing has become conflated with, like publications and readership and awards, and this is just a part of the knot I have been gently untangling when it comes to my relationship with writing. Everything is connected.
In any case, I’ve been practising my writing in this way for the past couple of weeks. Setting a timer to just sit and write without thinking about the outcome, and then when I’m done for the day, I’m done. I leave it to percolate in the back of my mind as it will, but I don’t try to force anything.
It’s been really nice writing like this. I feel lighter, more liberated. I’ve been handwriting without worrying about getting this story finished or published or anything, just focusing on how the practice makes me feel in the moment, then stepping away when I’m done. And the thing is, I’ve noticed that when I’m not trying to think about it, I feel the benefits of my creative practice sinking in the same way I feel the benefits of asana on my mat: I am more observant of things around me that might spark ideas, I am more patient with vague threads that feel like they might be something but need work to tease out, and I am more attuned to the emotional nuances of everyday life that I’m trying to pour into my writing. It reminds me of why I write in the first place. I love it, but it’s hard work. But I do it because I am a better person when I write. When I’m not writing, I feel like a clogged drainpipe, for want of a nicer-sounding analogy.
I’ve been doing yoga for twelve years now. That’s long enough to know I’m never going to be some kind of master, and there are still some basic poses I have a hard time with, depending on how my body feels that day. But I still show up because mastery is not the point. The practice is the point. Not that mastery of your craft is a bad thing, but I think I’ll go crazy if I have to feel like everything I do isn’t worth doing unless I can get better at it, whatever better means anyway.
So for now, I think I’ll keep practising.