How Writing and Yoga Work Together to Unlock Creativity

For the writer, the aspirant, the one with novels and the one wanting to memoir to maybe just journal more, threading writing and yoga is a way to tap in. After all, to write is to move, to move is to practice yoga, and to practice yoga is to continue the story, to break out of writer's block and flow into possibility. The yoga of writing is a vinyasa of words, a series of asanas that pulse the vertebrae and sacrum, legs and arms, the arterial pump between the head and the pen. Writing and yoga is a tapping into Hemingway—a farewell to arms, a pondering of Hamlet’s existential conundrum, “to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them”, a Sylvia Plath of exploring the asylum of the mind; it is an embrace of the breath of the breath as the Sufi poet Kabir tells us.

The Writing of Yoga

Writing and Yoga is a culmination of years of my deep devotion to the two, sometimes seemingly disparate paths. The seemingly sedentary with the seemingly hyper-mobile. It has been a seamless marriage of hours typing away on the fifth revision of a novel, hitting a wall, and moving through sun salutations to break on through to the other side of the looking glass.

I’ve often imagined that one of the hundreds of coffeeshops I’ve been to over the years, traversing North America and other continents, would have a space dedicated for movement, for yoga. I’ve often craved a chaiwallah/barista in the room adjacent to a yoga studio that served up seasonal lattes and had chairs and tables set up for writers to continue the flow that was catalyzed in the yoga class I just took. I longed for a place where writers could congregate, reimagine our world, and just as sanctimoniously tread into a sequence of poses.

A Room for Writers to Gather

I imagined a yoga chai house that could be a haven for the multiplicity of being, a runaway from a world whose heart has been kidnapped, a place for you to explore the inner dimensions of the stories you carry, sometimes through poem, through fiction, through an essay, through a journal entry. A place where we write and become more than the small we feel, and instead become the small we may feel when looking out into a cloudless evening sky—a vinyasa of stars, a galaxy of story, yours being one.

And in this liminal space of staring out into the Milky Way, you see yourself in the big and the small—the small of being dust in the wind—the big of surrender, of coalescing your voice into a greater orchestra, being part of something that is so huge you can no longer be so small. The paradox. Walking into this paradox, and when pen and paper, when words become yoga, a yoga of and for the writer by a writer.

During these gatherings, we are a chai house of writers, a dead poets society, reading inspiration, writing into the liminal, philosophizing the subliminal, yoga-ing into the hum.