13. Yoga and writing: two: practice
1 Reluctance: the alternative self attempts
The reluctance is mysterious: we just don't know ourselves. I have never regretted a yoga practice, I usually experience agreeable sensations when practicing, I have always felt in some sense 'better' for having done a practice. But if there is a disturbance to my routine then there is reluctance. I don't do my practice. I put it off, as if it were something to dread, then only endure.
There is the self I might have been if I had not taken up yoga...and this self, as if existent in a parallel universe, insists it would have been the better choice. This alternative self might be asserting itself, keeping me from yoga, attempting a coup d'état of the overall self. This other self wants to be more indulgent and escapist, more sociable and socially active, sexually prolific and reckless, to be known for mixing a perfect martini and have a reputation for closing the bar, to have a fiery creativity that manifests in intense spurts of concentrated, rapid and blazing productivity, balanced by dangerous binges. It is not interested in yoga's control and balance, and is willing, even keen, to risk sanity. It longs for entropy, or at least trouble; for dissolution or at least some fracture.
The reluctance is mysterious. It is a necessary relief to lose oneself in writing. It is a necessary drive. I cannot regret all the time I have spent writing. It's good when you're really on. I have always felt in some sense 'better' for having done some writing. But there is reluctance. I don't do it. I put if off, as if it were something to dread, then only endure.
There is the self I might have been if I hadn't taken up – been taken up by – writing...and this self often insists it would have been the better choice. It might be asserting itself, keeping me from writing, attempting a coup d'état of the overall self. This other self wants to have a career that is understandable, be a lawyer, keep regular hours and get a regular salary, be an academic, work more for other people, do some good, think about real people more, have investments to manage, know a lot about something that matters.
2 You practice anyway
There is a bodily sensation of need. The body needs the poses; that's what you're aware of first, how you long to stretch and open and turn and balance, and then you feel the need for the effects of the poses.
If you were going to do mindless physical activity you'd go for a walk – mindless, that is, in that it frees the mind in the body's motion and deeper rhythmic breathing, refreshes the mind by physical exertion. You can do asana like this, like a calisthenics or gym class. But it's not yoga.
In writing, the need is also embodied: not so specifically physical, but you become aware of a need. You can't concentrate on anything you read, nothing attracts your attention fully, you are restless and dull, you take up and drop the TV guide and the movie guide and fashion magazines and the unsatisfactory novels... Then you realise you have been trying to ignore words, phrases, images, insistent words, words that you should listen to, words that you suddenly want to concentrate on, that attract your attention fully, that dictate to you. You find yourself making odd little notes on this file and that post-it and on cards and on blank pages and manuscript pages. And suddenly you are on, closing in on this idea that's been brewing, this world you need, this phrase that is the way to put it, this chain or web of association you are tracing through these haphazard pages. You stop going out, retreat from the world, sometimes before you've quite decided to.
Had that been distraction or all the work being done subconsciously for a while? As you begin to write you do not feel but are a channel for feeling as you become focused and stilled.
3 Missing practice
It's not only the episodes of the mysterious reluctance...that reluctance that feels like the denial of the true self. Sometimes there are reasonable reasons not to write, or not write as much, or do less yoga, or none of either today. Though there are those who claim never to miss, up at 5 a.m. absolutely daily in any conditions in any place.
No. You are in the world. There are days when the routines and usual circumstances are altered: travel, illness, guests, fun, conferences. There is a different energy around you and you want to pay attention to that, or be part of it. This is life and you are in it.
And then after a while, you can't bear to be away from your practice. You find that you just do it. In any circumstances. So don't worry if you're missing it, you won't miss it for long. So you learn to trust yourself. Or at least accept your own rocky way, the way you keep the practice dangerous by flirting with abandoning it.
4 Aging
You will die and if you grow old enough first you will first decay; you get stiffer and slower and you can't do what you used to.
Do yoga and you will prevent or postpone, temper or soothe some of age's afflictions. But don't forget the difference between the aim and the by-product. B.K.S. Iyengar says:
Even at eighty-one I can say with confidence that I am bringing out the best... The quality of keeping up the well-being of my earlier days was definitely on the physical plane, which I was using with great intensity.
Today my well-being is not from the physical level but from the mental and intellectual level. Naturally, first the body decays, matter decays and the gross body decays before the finer body decays... In order to keep the mind in fine tune, I have to tone and keep the gross physical body expressing the dynamic vibrancy latent in the cells by attending to each and every fibre of my body.
A friend writes to me:
Yoga points to a continuity beyond physical death, isn't it a preparation for transmigration, a preparation where the trauma of death does not erase the progress of this life and the awareness is able to function in and beyond this moment of death?
Some will say that through yoga you will attain the kind of spirituality that defies the belief that death is the end of you, but I can't vouch for that. Hard to believe the world would be worse if people didn't believe in some kind of post-death existence or afterlife.
I agree with novelist John Fowles:
I feel I have three main politico-social obligations. First to be an atheist. Second, not to belong to any political party. Third, not to belong to any bloc, organisation, group, clique, school whatever. The first because if even there is a God, it is safer for humankind to act on the assumption that there is not (the famous Pascalian pari in reverse). (Fowles: 9)
The second and third, says Fowles are because 'individual freedom is in danger, and as much in the West as in the East'. But it is the refusal of belief in any one God that is relevant here: as Fowles says, 'I know by reason that there cannot be a God; I [feel] it with my whole being... Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation' Like many other atheists, I find it a logical absurdity and a moral outrage to believe a God is both all-powerful and all-good in a world full of atrocity and suffering.
I find it an obscenity when a God who cannot or will not stop famine, war or child abuse is thanked for an Oscar, a gold medal or fine weather for a picnic.
Still we must pay attention to a dimension of life that we must call spiritual. In Neem Dreams, the narrative agent remarks:
Pandora was an atheist who believed in an immanent spirituality. Jade was an atheist who believed in a transcendent divinity. Andy was an atheist who admitted you couldn't explain everything.
The character Jade remarks:
If anything had something to do with what 'spiritual' means, it would be death.
The present writer can offer little more. There is a spiritual dimension to yoga, a glimpse of the ineffable and eternal. Although I do not, most yoga practitioners call this 'God' or 'the Lord within'. To glimpse this is yoga's ultimate aim, yet it is achieved by a complete attention to one's practice.
If you grow old enough and keep on writing it will be better; you must get better, how can you not, though many do not. But you don't aim for that, your only aim to keep on keeping on, you will never stop and never go away. You may be read by fewer and fewer people, i
nterest fewer people, but this is what you do, you can't change that, you think you want to sometimes but you don't really, you need readers but they can be few. You will still grow old and old writers are uninteresting to the younger. Or maybe old writers are uninteresting to the other old, I'm not sure how this works.
Some will speak of immortality. 'Your books will exist when you are gone,' they tell you, but whatever can it matter? Everything turns to dust. Entropy rules.
Then what makes daily practice worth doing?
5 Doing it yourself; teaching
You enter the pose, and parts of you begin automatically to make the adjustments, parts remember to make further adjustments, parts will need reminding.
Now it is not only parts of the pose that you bring to consciousness, it is now the whole, the configuration.
Now there's only you, there is no one there to diagnose and click you into shape, pushing or coaxing, giving you the precise instruction.
Yoga is DIY maintenance. Taking responsibility for your body.
It is a feature of Iyengar yoga that the teacher gives precise instructions to adjust in the asana and also physically corrects the pose, touches you to do so, pushes, pulls, or just lays a hand here, a finger there, to bring your attention to an aspect you now adjust.
In various writings and talks on his study of yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar talks of the experiments he made to discover the effects of poses, and tells us that to really know yoga we too must experiment.
This is how a teacher learns; they learn their own body.
When you begin to teach yoga, you need to pay attention to the asana, to understand what you are doing and devise ways to communicate this. You examine what it is that you do, you research it and reflect on it. The book might tell you tuck the sacrum in but how can you pass this on unless you have learnt to tuck the sacrum in and feel how it alters the pose, gives it stability and strength and a centre? You can't pass this on until you know your body well enough to be able to see when another body needs this instruction.
When you begin to teach writing, you examine what it is that you do, you research it and reflect on it, and you tell your students. They can find a book to tell them, for example, read your work over before you sleep but how can you tell your students this unless you read your work over before you sleep and can report on how this affects – effects, even – the writing when you wake and begin?
Sometimes you work passively, I tell the students. That's what I learn from yoga; sometimes you are active, dynamic, you do, you do the pose. And other times you surrender, you just be in the pose, just be.
When I'm deep into my work, I read it last thing at night, so that my dream time is dedicated. Negative capability.
Quoting an earlier commentator, B.K.S. Iyengar says:
Yoga is the teacher of yoga; yoga is to be understood through yoga. So live in yoga to realize yoga; comprehend yoga through yoga; he who is free from distractions enjoys yoga through yoga. (Iyengar 1996:8)
Similarly, writing is the teacher of writing; writing is to be understood through writing.
6 We do it because we can not do it
I can apparently perform asana because I've been at it for years, and it looks to a beginner as if I can 'do yoga'. But I tend to live in my head, my body wants oblivion, distraction, I find it difficult to advance in my practice, to know what my left little toe is doing as I pay attention to my neck. I do yoga because I can not do it, because the moment of awareness has barely been glimpsed, because I love this in between territory, in between doing it for the process and for the product, in between endeavor and accomplishment.
I've published a few books, write every day, teach writing. So a raw beginner might look at me and think I can 'do writing'.
But often I think I am a writer not because words come easily to me but because they do not.
Italo Calvino says, 'I am a Saturn who wishes he were a Mercury'. And I think, Me, too, Calvino, exactly.
[T]he temperament influenced by Mercury, inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity, was contrasted with the temperament influenced by Saturn, seen as melancholy, contemplative and solitary. Ever since antiquity it has been thought that the saturnine temperament is the one proper to artists, poets and thinkers... My cult of Mercury is perhaps merely an aspiration, what I would like to be. (Calvino 1996:52)
Saturn is the planet of discipline, deepening, delay. Mercury is quickness, lightness, mental facility. In my own natal chart Saturn is nearly conjunct Mercury, making (I don't mean causing, I mean synchronistic with) the effect of lightness hard-won. I rarely can write a sentence worth writing at first thought, but must sit over it, pencil in hand, re-arranging, adding and subtracting, testing the rhythm. The work of writing is in re-writing, just as the work of asana is not in striking the pose, but in the adjustments you make to it. The asana is rewritten, the sentence is refined. The work that has gone into the final effect usually remains secret; at best the clarity and precision achieved make this effect appear natural and inevitable.