Writing, standing on your head
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 4: Making Perfect Bodies
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Inez Baranay
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Inez Baranay's biography and other articles by this writer
The writer needs a body to perform writing. The body is a text written by thought, experience, genetics, culture, performance, fashion, personality. The body is the self, the self is an illusion, and personality is one of its illusions. The writer creates a body of work, writings written by a person whose idea of a cohesive self is demonstrably illusory, whose conscious mind plays only a small part in what she does.
You're writing even when not performing the physical action of placing words on screen or paper. You're writing, or working on your writing, when you're thinking about your characters and themes, your research and influences, your sentences and words.
Sometimes I find myself thinking of such things while doing yoga. Well, strictly speaking, yoga requires the total absorption of mind in the pose, so I should say I think of all this while attempting to do yoga.
The writer's body becomes cramped, stiff, sacrificed to the life of the mind. Increasing numbers of writers in the West are doing yoga, usually as a "balance" to the work of writing, which, physical and tiring as it is, is largely mental work. But yoga's aim of inner stillness makes some writers anxious that it produces an empty head, from which writing cannot emerge, or a head full of anti-intellectual New Age-ism.
FOR A LONG TIME I HAD THOUGHT OF YOGA and writing as two entirely different practices, which expressed different, even opposing aspects of my self. The writer self wants to lose or dissolve the self and one way is via the body. The yoga self wants to remake the self and one way is via the body. To write or do yoga, to live the life of a writer or of a yoga practitioner: this once seemed an essential conflict. But both practices seem to be going for a kind of transcendence of the mundane.
It's escapism, if you like, the immersion in writing, partly anyway; escape from your own personality and individuality, a paradoxical loss of self in self-expression. Yoga, too, relieves you from the self experienced as the endless voice in your head ‑ from your own responses to the large and small matters of the world ‑ for every aspect of the self is required to be focused and absorbed in the Asana, the physical posture.
Once people know you are a writer they often make assumptions: they might assume you can't resist alcohol and adultery. That you must have "inspiration" to work. That you base your writing on your life, your narrator on yourself, your characters on your friends. That you live in a garret and suffer for your art; that you must have another job, a "real" job. That you earn a fortune, frequent television talk-shows and meet celebrities. Or hunger for that.
Once people know you have practiced Iyengar yoga since 1981, taught yoga since 1993, they often make assumptions. That you're especially fond of crystals, dolphins, natural fibres. That you're vegan, that you go on fasts. That you'd say no to a beer or an "eccie", and like a story to have a moral. That you read self-help books, and read them for self help. That you believe you create your own reality and that this means everyone chooses the conditions of their lives. That you think Western medicine, science and technology are wrong-headed disasters. That you believe in re-incarnation, and might have an idea who you used to be. That you think a display of a figurine of the Buddha, of Tara, of a Shiva Nataraj is an indication of something spiritual. That the word "spiritual" refers to a real and good quality that some people, some places, some objects and some practices have, and the rest do not. That chanting is spiritual. That tribal people are especially spiritual. That Eastern religions are especially spiritual. That you go to India because it is spiritual. That you really need to use the word "spiritual".
I find I can mostly leave these conflicting expectations alone, and get on with what I do. I'd like to avoid or refuse the idea of the "spiritual" too. But it turns up, over and over.
If there is any use for that word, "spiritual", it is one that expresses the sublime moments in each practice. B.K.S. Iyengar, the most influential teacher of Asana, the yoga of physical posture in our time, says: "To live spiritually is to live in the present moment. When you are practising, as long as no other thoughts come to you, for that much time you are spiritual."
Writing, too, can be seen as a spiritual practice, a kind of yoga. In writing, those times of thorough absorption, sublime immersion, when no other thoughts come but those belonging to the piece you're writing, those times come with a forgetting of the body, with little thought to it; even when eventually you have to pee or make more coffee or shake out your cramped hand for a moment, you attend to these needs barely noticing what you're doing.
I guess that's spiritual.
In yoga, on the other hand, this sublime moment comes with a sense of your own ultimate control and awareness of what the body is doing and what that's doing to you.
FROM TIME TO TIME SINCE I BEGAN STUDYING Iyengar yoga, I've come across the criticism that it is "not spiritual enough". "I want to do a more spiritual form of yoga," I've been told. It is interesting, and not exactly clear, what people mean when they say this. Most likely the sentiment arises from the puritanical idea, common in both the West and India, that the body is an impediment to spiritual awareness and growth. Too much attention to the body puts you in jeopardy. Mortification, or neglect of the flesh, is meant to enhance a spiritual progress. It's an attitude difficult to reconcile with the idea of "union" that is so basic to yoga.
Those who say they seek a yoga that immediately takes them into a "spiritual" practice, a "less physical" one, are, for instance, sometimes attracted to forms of yoga that ask them to pay close attention to the breath from the very start of their practice.
Sometimes what people mean by a "more spiritual" yoga is that they'd rather do chanting, or rather do yoga where the poses are not challenging, or rather be allowed to drift off into dreams of white light, or rather not do yoga at all.
For some, the path to the spiritual is, perhaps, Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, for which Asana is not essential and may even be a distraction. Nor is Asana seen as essential for devout yogis involved in Jnana yoga, the yoga path of knowledge, or in Karma yoga, the path of action.
The practice of Asana can be carried out simply for the sake of its physical benefits. Arguably, even this kind of practice, after enough time and done with sufficient integrity, will be experienced as something not "only physical". A better ability to relax, endure and concentrate is hard to quantify as "merely physical"; self-knowledge becomes involved and next thing you're calling this spiritual.
A serious student does not only perform Asana, but studies its meaning and effects, reads yoga texts and works on an increase in awareness and understanding. Thus the practice of Asana must go on the paths of knowledge, devotion and action; your writing practice can also be seen that way.