Creating From Your Center

Inspiration through Yoga and Creative Movement

by Lorrie Klosterman and illustrations by Jason Cring, August 24, 2007

It was a dark and stormy night when…when…the rain fell like…like cats and dogs, and the wind howled like a wolf that…that…Oh, heck, forget it. I gotta do laundry, anyway.

Getting vibrant, unique expressions onto paper can be tough. The same is true for creations in the visual arts, music, dance, or any imaginative expression. It’s no fun when the inspirational well has run dry—rather, when the universe of creative stardust has been sucked into a black hole. When that happens, it’s tempting to force progress by thinking about how stuck we are, and how we must make ourselves get unstuck. Then the analytical mind becomes another barrier—or worse, a hostile critic.

“I’m a freelance editor,” says Daia Gerson of Marbletown. “Language comes easily to me, and I’ve worked on others’ books for years and years.” But she also longed to write her own material. “When it came to doing anything from my own imagination,” she recalls, “I always got stuck right at the beginning. I was always thinking, ‘This is not worth anything.’”

Then she found Yoga as Muse, a process created by Jeff Davis. Davis is an Accord-based writing coach, workshop leader, consultant, and author of The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing. Since Daia joined Davis’s once-weekly summer workshop, she’s seen a turnaround. “This is the first time in my whole life I’ve been able to enjoy writing,” she says. “It just comes out, it just flows.” Davis’s consulting service, Center to Page, has helped many professional writers of fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, speeches, and poets birth richer, more satisfying (and acclaimed) creations. And Davis is currently running the first longterm study of yoga’s effects on students’ creative productivity, with students from the Masters of Fine Arts program at Western Connecticut State University.

“Yoga helps writers become more aware of how to elicit insight from their own imagination, their intellect, and their emotions,” Davis explains. The process takes you to “the borderlands of consciousness, where boundaries of interior and exterior, joy and sorrow, self and other, and of magic and reality all overlap.” To reach those borderlands, Davis guides people in a three-step sequence: Set an intention for a creative session; engage in yogic upaya (skillful means) to breathe life into the intention; and then express what emerges through your chosen form (such as writing, song, dance, or photography).

Using the example of enriching one’s writing, the steps of a Yoga as Muse session would go like this: First, sit in a relaxed position (adamantine pose, or vajrasana) and take several full breaths as you set your intention. The intention might answer the question, “What am I writing for?” Your response might be “I intend to describe a thunderstorm as though it were really alive” or “I intend to receive insight to improve the opening of chapter three.” Even something like “I intend to listen to my body” will birth a different outcome to one’s writing than would sitting at a piece of paper with the thought, “I have to conjure up something remarkable to describe a storm!”