4. Balance and creativity
With the increase of the popularity of yoga in the West many more writers are doing yoga. Usually the practice of yoga is taken up as a 'balance' to the work of writing which, physical and tiring as it is, is largely mental work done with little motion. Yoga is taken up for physical discipline, an alternative to or adjunct to going to the gym or going for walks. (You can go to a 'yoga' class in a gym, but if you were serious about yoga you probably wouldn't.) Writers famously like to go for walks too; a good walk is essential to the practice of writing in ways similar to yoga; a writer is someone who goes for walks. This affinity of writing and long walks is exemplified in the prodigious English hikes of Romantic poets like Wordsworth. Most writers I know like to walk.
The mind roams free on a walk; on the other hand in yoga the mind is concentrated in the pose. And it becomes clear that yoga is not only physical exercise, it is also mental discipline, though it might indeed be a 'balance' to the practice of writing.
In every Australian city – as in the cities of many other countries – yoga schools are mushrooming. Even the smallest towns are likely to have a yoga class in a local hall. 'I do yoga,' is becoming a very common declaration in private and in public. 'It's so relaxing,' people say. 'I feel so much better. It helps.'
Yoga asana is a bodily practice that has its effects on the whole being. A writer friend says to me, 'After I do yoga I can't write, I'm too balanced and peaceful, I can't just go straight into writing'. In this view, art – any kind of creativity – requires a kind of derangement that yoga works against. Or at least it requires to have a head that is not empty but vibrant with (creative) tensions.
People in creative work worry that if they were to loose their hold on craving, that if they were to still the agitated, desiring feeling-states that seem to produce work, that seem essential origins of work, that if all this were gone then they would become numb and catatonic. Or so serene and accepting that the creative urge would be evaporated.
But this is not what happens. In a book called The Embodied Mind, the authors point out that the practice of mindfulness/awareness (which is the point of yoga asana) shows that:
In fact, exactly the reverse is the case. It is the mindless, the unaware state of mind that is numb – swathed in a thick cocoon of wandering thoughts, prejudgments, and solipsistic ruminations. As mindfulness/awareness grows, appreciation for the components of experience grows. The point of mindfulness/awareness is not to disengage the mind from the phenomenal world; it is to enable the mind to be fully present in the world. The goal is not to avoid action but to be fully present in one's actions, so that one's behavior becomes progressively more responsive and aware. (Varela et al: 122)
Yoga is not a negation of creativity, not a stifling of creativity, but both an awakening of and a kind of creativity in itself.
In his book Creativity, poet and writing teacher Kevin Brophy discusses creativity as a changing value or knowledge in dispute between discourses. Psychoanalysis tells us that creativity is a kind of neurosis; Surrealism that it is a kind of revolution; the current mania for creative writing courses that it is a kind of therapy. In other recent theory, creativity is an effect of humans doing the work for memes, the culture's equivalent of genes, or viruses of the mind. We might say that 'doing yoga' has become a meme, in the way that wearing low-cut jeans or calling everything that pleases you 'cool' is. (Or was.)
The very term 'creative writing' gives equal emphasis to what is done and the quality of its doing. Creative writing in universities, a rapidly growing discipline, increasingly promotes the study of 'creativity' as much as the doing of writing: we do not only seek self-expression and artistry but to add to the knowledge of the processes and conditions that produce it. What is 'creativity'? Can yoga tell us any more about this vexing, necessary term?
In yoga, the experienced sadhaka is instructed to 'create' within each pose. Creativity in asana requires constant attention to and action on each element of the pose, and the endless refinement of understanding of what these elements are.
B.K.S. Iyengar discusses yoga as 'art' in his The Art of Yoga and says:
Yoga brought a new meaning to my life...and led me to search for the hidden truth and artistic essence in each asana. ...I found joy in bettering my best, finding new movements, meanings and aesthetic nuances in each asana, in learning, unlearning and learning again. ...Gradually, I became indifferent to the responses of the audience as my practice became artistic in itself... There was no fixed format for the asanas when I started. I therefore had to face the hardships of working in the unknown and experimenting with my body. Often this was painful...I laboured hard...I analysed every movement and adjusted every fibre and muscle of my body... (Iyengar 1985: 4-5)
Pain, joy, unlearning, experiment, analysis: the writer works on the text as the yogi works on the asana.
B.K.S. Iyengar's translation of and commentary on the sutras of Patanjali is suffused with his own experimental – creative – mindset, yet it leaves the original text for another reader more, and not less, readable and writable. The engagement of critical writing with a novel does the same. That is, the best critical writing extends, rather than limits, the possible readings of a text. This applies to formal critical essays or a piece in a journal or a letter from a friend urging you to read a certain book.
The writer is concerned with the mind, the life of the mind, the mind's passions and inventions. And inquiry into how fiction is written is illuminated by asana, the yoga of physical posture, the yoga in which the body is most clearly involved, most essential.
Yoga brings the attention of the mind to the body, stilling all other thought. The first sutra of Patanjali says:
Yoga is the cessation of movements in the consciousness. (Iyengar 1996:46)
The sutra has given rise to many translations and commentaries; the Sanskrit words it uses are capable of extensive exegesis, especially over the word 'citta', here translated as 'consciousness'.
It is interesting that yoga texts like these have many words in the ancient Sanskrit for aspects of mind and consciousness: 'buddhi': the individual discriminating intelligence; 'mahat': its cosmic counterpart; 'citta': consciousness; 'antahkarana': the thinking principle, 'ahamkara': the ego. Recent studies in consciousness show that Freud's theory of the unconscious was far from the last word on the workings of the mind. The creative mind, the creative self, the creative act – these phenomena are circled and approached in discourses of mind and self, and retain an essential quality of mystery. It is impossible to know all the factors involved. And there is that essential paradox: the creative mind is studying itself, a paradox pointed to by yoga. For, when all citta is stilled, when the endless babble of thoughts is silenced and you observe your own still, silent mind, where, then, is the mind; what is the true self? The observer or the observed? The reader of the self or the self that is read? Is the self the mind, or something else? What does it mean to say that body and mind can't be separated?