Vinyasa Writing

Back home again, in Indiana.

For two months, no one looked at me at 6pm and asked, what's for dinner? We survived on an odd mixture of pie, frozen pizza, bagels and salads. Or my personal favorite, a bowl of fresh cherries, pits disposed into the grass, or in 13's case, at the person sitting across from her. Once I made stir-fry, another time pasta, which we ate for several nights in a row.

The kids and I took turns washing dishes. Each person was responsible for their own laundry. I had more free time than I have had since childhood.

 

And yet, I did not write. Not one blog post. Not a letter home. Not a draft of a single word for the new story collection, even though I had set the lofty goal of finishing a first draft, just a shitty first draft (thank you, Anne Lamott) by the end of the summer.

What was I thinking?

My completed collection took five years to finish, and who knows, made need another revision before it gets published. It has been a long time since I wrote a first draft. I forgot how much time is spent in the percolation stage. That's what a composer/musician friend calls the period of time when an artist feels or looks to other people like she is doing nothing, when in reality, lots of good stuff is brewing inside. Twyla Tharp calls this scratching. This summer I did lots and lots of scratching. I plan to share some of those things with you in the coming weeks.

In addition to scratching, I also did the hardest work of my life.

I learned to sit still.

Easy, you say?

Well, hold on. I don't mean sitting still on the couch, stretched out, binge watching The Food Network, or even reading a good literary novel.

I mean sitting upright, muscles tightened around my spine, my pelvis and the bones of my thighs; shoulders relaxed away from my ears; my head and neck aligned with my spine; an imaginary thread lifting from the top of my skull into the sky so that I feel tall and straight. I mean feet planted firmly on the ground as if I am standing in mountain pose. I mean working so hard to sit straight and tall, strong and yet not tensed, that sweat rolls down my back and along my temples, a line of it across my upper lip.

That kind of sitting takes more strength than I ever imagined.

I was able to do this work with the help of the yoga teacher I found in Michigan. I did some research about area yoga instructors, finally settling with Jess on instinct after I read her bio. It was a huge splurge, but the best money I ever spent. We began with private yoga sessions. 90 minutes focused only how I am moving my body. I was pretty closed up at the beginning, and those first stretches left me feeling exhausted and tender. When we finished our first session, I stood up and walked straight to the tiny bathroom at the back of her studio and threw up.

We continued to work together, transitioning to classes with her or other instructors in the area. By the time I left Michigan to return home, I was going to yoga class three times a week. This might not seem like much, but that practice extended far beyond the mat. I was paying attention as I rode my bike, walked, bent over to pick up the newspaper, swam in the lake or lay down at night to sleep.

Even though I did not start my own new writing project, I did continue copying Anna Karenina. I found that when I sat with my feet planted and stayed aware of the placement of my spine and shoulders, kept my jaw relaxed, focused on my breathing, I could sit still and copy much longer. If I caught my mind wondering how many pages until I would finish a chapter or thinking about what I needed to do when I finished or, the worst, how much longer it would take to finish copying the whole novel, I brought my attention back to my breath, I moved my hand word by word, until I reached the end.

When I told Jess about this, about how I felt like I was truly developing a "practice" for the first time, after years of attending yoga classes, she said this:

"The physical practice of yoga was designed 1) as a way to make the body strong enough to endure long periods of stillness and 2) a way to understand what we are capable of with discipline, practice, mindfulness.

All this time I thought writers did yoga so they could let go and be creative. Turns out, yoga was giving them the strength to sit in a chair for long periods of time, to hold that pose, even when the character was about to make a huge mistake, or when we wanted to walk away because writing that story hurt too much. I have never felt more acutely how important my physical body is to telling a story.

 

 

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