I was mining my brains the other day for an example of a creative activity that I do regularly – besides writing. I was prompted to explore this route while flipping through an old copy of Wallpaper*, that pretentious design magazine that still charms my socks off. It happened to be the 'handmade' issue. As I blithely examined the many objects of desire and their makers embalmed in matte high definition, the question of whether I could ever join the artisanal trade surfaced. Did I have it in me to produce something tangible and of value that spoke of some creative identity? Obnoxiously (although not entirely surprisingly) the immediate thought that stole into the theatre of my mind was a resolute non! As if that wasn't enough, the self-reproach brought with it my old (but valid) conviction that my hands have and will always lack the dexterity demanded to make things that people actually want to buy. It's an ability gap that explains my genuine bewilderment each time I see contestants on the Great British Bake-Off pipe macaroons into perfect little mounds. To my enemies: if you ever want to undermine me in the quickest, most effective way, ask me to untie a knot or thread a needle. I will go into a frightful tizz.
To understand where this post is going, the magazine flipping was my way of further decompressing after finishing my sixth yoga session for the week (it was a uniquely productive week I must say). After doing so much yoga, my mind was on higher plains where splendid insights happen. Including this one: Wait a minute... Yoga is art... isn't it?
If someone had put this statement to me just a few months before, I would have deemed it a highly risible sentiment, an affected current of hot air in the same realm as £60 leggings from Sweaty Betty http://www.sweatybetty.com/. But now, with said lightheaded mind shift, the thought made a certain kind of sense to me. Even my core was resonating with it and not because the class I'd just finished focussed solely on sucking up the elusive mula bandha.
Like the chemistry between lovebirds, this realisation happily defied words. Yet I felt the compulsion to capture it in the best way I know how. In words in other words. Typically, my scriber's kit consisted only of the notepad on my phone. So clumsily I tapped the following:
Yoga is an art form. Not just in the sense of sculpting the body but as a visceral, creative process by which I mean space is created for the mind-body to explore and express itself; pushing boundaries, seeking the line between comfort and discomfort – emotionally as well as physically. Getting to know oneself at its core, and what's common to all humanity. Unlike dance, the outward expression of yoga is driven by an internal inquiry into the nature of the mind's interplay with the body, and the feeling and implications of the body's commitment to the postures (asanas) – many of them unconventional rather than unnatural. Who is to say which poses are natural?
I know right? I was surprised too! Now onto the difficult but fun bit: parsing this subterranean muttering.
Yoga is a creative process
Take Paschimottanasana, that hamstring-lengthening forward folding pose that's about as simple to do as its name is to pronounce. Know it? Your legs are straight out in front of you as you fold your torso forward with the aim of touching your chest to your knees (or shins if you have an extra special something) while keeping your spine as straight as possible. This is one of those poses in which it really helps to have a sense of humour. Only when you are able to laugh at yourself are you likely to be kind to your body in a pose that can potentially do a lot of damage. Being aggressive with the pose is otherwise about as effective as losing it big time towards a rebellious teenager. Your body senses your aggression and so naturally puts up its defenses, making you feel even stiffer and more frustrated than you wish to be.
To get the most out of the pose, then, you need to disarm your body with compassion and humour. In so doing, your body relaxes and becomes more receptive to being 'duped' out of its comfort zone. A relaxed body will naturally open up. It's analogous to enjoying that eureka moment of creative insight while soaking in the bath.
The language of opening up is the breath. I find that by drawing in deep breaths to generate some 'prana' (energy-giving life force or qi as the Chinese call it), I gradually massage away the bits in my body that feel constricted and uncooperative. Breathing animates the dark spaces in my body, infusing vitality into every cell. At the same time my body sends live feedback to my mind, signalling whether I should deepen further into the pose or simply be content with the stage I'm at. It's all very intelligent and unpremeditated.
As long as I'm in the pose, my mind is constantly dialoguing with my body, creating the space that might have been elusive yesterday and might very well be elusive again tomorrow. Meanwhile, my mind gains firsthand knowledge of the state and mood of my body, and its current perimeters. The attentiveness and dialoguing is the mind-body* 'internal inquiry' that you might recall from my stream of consciousness set out above. (*It is in fact my conviction that the mind and body are inseparable. Not only do they constantly talk to each other, what affects one affects the other. But in this post, I will save myself the tedium and simply refer to the mind-body with the abbreviated 'body'.)
How is this like art you ask? I imagine the yogi here as a potter getting acquainted with a chunk of clay of a certain quality then applying her knowledge and craftsmanship to shape it in the best way she can. In yoga (or indeed any movement activity), your body is the material you've got to play with.
Getting acquainted with your body means tuning into its condition in the present moment. Just as you get different qualities of clay, which can depend as much on its temperature as its intrinsic nature, your body is never the same from one day or moment to the next. Getting the most out of poses like Paschimottanasana – and to avoid injury – requires you to be attentive and responsive to your body's momentary urges. This means outcomes necessarily vary. But just as being blocked as an artist can be soul destroying, the body's volatility can be similarly frustrating for the yogi who is trained to think only in terms of linear progression. Why, she asks, could she comfortably touch her toes yesterday and barely do so today?
The upside of the body's mercurial nature, however, is that it keeps things interesting. There is no such thing as a dull routine in yoga when practised mindfully. Like the creative process, yoga is a journey, and the yogi's raw material – the mind-body – is an organic, living, changeable thing.
Looked at this way, Paschimottanasana can be much more than just a way of stretching a notoriously tight muscle group. It functions as a vehicle for exploring who you are as a mind-body. And because many people struggle with the pose, you may be inclined to spare a thought for the rest of humanity while in the pose! Wouldn't that be nice?
Not only that, as a process of self discovery, yoga shines a light on how bloody amazing our anatomy really is. For instance, raising both arms to align vertically by the ears (without scrunching up the neck) depends on a complex mechanism that belies the apparent simplicity of the action. To do it in the most unobstructive way, your mind needs to tell your body to rotate your upper arms away from your body – i.e. externally rotate the arms, as a yoga teacher would say – as you raise them to vertical. All the while, your shoulder blades need to simultaneously rotate upwards and outwards away from your spine. Did you even know that you can consciously control the various muscles on your back to realise this movement? I didn't until I started doing yoga.
Yoga tests boundaries
Yoga is challenging. Yes. It. Is. Anyone who has ever tried to break their desk-bound habit by doing Adho Mukha Svanasana or 'downward facing dog' knows yoga can be a total mind-body bruiser.
To quote one of my favourite yoga teachers, Mimi Kuo-Deemer, yoga gives you the chance to 'play your edge'. That is, to explore the limits of what is physically and mentally possible for you at a given moment.
One of the best tests of one's limitations is when defying gravity. One of my favourite poses is Bakasana or 'crow pose', which literally asks you to hang in the balance. You begin by assuming a squat position, your legs about the width of your yoga mat. You then place both hands flat down on the ground in front of you. To prepare to take flight, you tuck your knees up into your armpits and carefully gauge how much you should tip your entire body forward onto your triceps so that your feet can float away from the ground while your are in balance!
The forces of physics may remain constant, but in my experience, my own harmony with these forces is not. Like many creative activities, the process of getting into an arm balance is a playful exploration of the body's capabilities and the mind's willingness to let it assume an unconventional shape. At the same time, the pose requires a certain amount of bloodymindedness (e.g. success in the pose requires the momentary suspension of fear) not to mention intense concentration lest one falls painfully out of it. Luckily, just as the mind has a memory, so does the body. It therefore does get easier.
Yoga uncovers the soul
As in all forms of expressive art, yoga encourages practitioners to strip away their guard and expose their vulnerable selves. True expression comes at the expense of the ego and all its undermining chatter. The exemplary pose that comes to my mind is Anjaneyasana or 'crescent moon'. It's an asana of sheer surrender short of outright prostration. You're in a lunge, on one knee, your hip flexors on the extended leg are stretched good as you tilt your pelvis forwards. You raise your arms towards your ears, lifting your ribcage and tightening your abdomen so as not to compress your lower back. If all goes well, these actions serve to open your chest up to the sky, exposing your heart to all and sundry. In facilitate the process, you hang your ego out to dry so that your inhibitions can slide away to the beat of each breath. Personal experience has taught me that tightness or discomfort while in the pose usually correlates with how much pent up emotion or stress I bring to my practice. The pose therefore challenges the yogi to really let go and perhaps make way for strokes of genius à la Jackson Pollock or Charlie Parker!
Yoga returns to a place of innocence
Although there are better and worse ways to align the body while in a posture, yoga offers you a lot of freedom to assume bodily shapes not typically sanctioned by modern society. It is the very strictures of being chair-bound and screened off from our spiritual and corporeal natures that cause so many of us to become dumb in our bodies. While there's a lot of talk in the media and pop culture about the dumbing down of our minds by Google and reality television etc. comparatively little noise has been made about the concurrent dumbing down of our bodies by modern living. Yet this process begins from the moment we enter into that self-conscious phase known as adolescence. It is during this hormonal chapter that we are socially conditioned to whittle down the immense vocabulary of our bodies that our childhood selves once freely enjoyed exploring. Unless you're a gymnast, who at 16 would voluntarily walk on their hands, scamper around on all fours or climb monkey bars?
With school curriculums around the world singularly focussed on shaping minds for a life of employment, kids everywhere are being taught to drive a wedge between their minds and bodies. Then once they hit adulthood, their minds and bodies no longer work together in a meaningful way beyond getting from point A to point B in a prescribed manner.
Also, what kind of an adult would freely wish to gallivant around the city in bare feet? Probably not somebody who is 'right in the mind'. In fact, who actually consciously notes that they have feet in the absence of painful aberrations like bunions and ingrown nails?
The twin evils of a drastically pared down bodily vocabulary and detachment from the ground we stand on undercuts our body's natural intelligence, from balance to coordination to agility.
So being barefooted in yoga and taking poses like 'child's pose' as an adult effectively amounts to thrusting a big middle finger at the caged existence of modern life. In yoga, you are encouraged to assume postures that look silly to any self-respecting adult but would be eagerly imitated by a child. An example resonant with the times is learning how to 'twerk' the proper way! Your legs are astride and pigeon toed as you fold forward at the hip joint while keeping your spine super straight. But in order to keep your spine straight, you need to tilt your sit bones straight up towards the sky so that your bum sticks right out. I'd like to see Miley Cyrus twerk this way and then come into a tripod headstand. Only then may she gain my respect!
Yoga is poetry in motion
In the kind of yoga I do, you don't just assume postures in isolation. In vinyasa flow yoga, you move in a sequence and, importantly, you synchronise each movement in the sequence with a breath. One way of interpreting the term 'vinyasa' is the linking of the breath with movement. As your practice matures, you begin working toward a state in which your body, guided by prana via the breath as opposed to the will or ego, moves seamlessly into and out of postures in sequence while striking the right balance between tension and relaxation in each pose. Despite the varying intensities of the poses, the mind will ideal rise above the effort in an almost trance-like tranquil state. I can only imagine how an adept yogi is able to let their intuition (rather than an outside teacher) guide them through a sequence of postures that is effortlessly tuned to what their body needs. In this state, the body is free to transmogrify like water filling different shaped vessels, as Bruce Lee once said. The ultimate happy state is one of 'flow', which is what the eminent psychologist Csikszentmihalyi defined as the complete absorption in an activity where both ego and time fall away.
To summarise: the art of yoga can be in the form of the internal inquiry you make while in a pose as well as the egoless flow of movement from pose to pose. It's poetry in motion! And yet, even at this level of adeptness, one's yoga practice continues to change. The body – being alive – naturally continues to evolve (or devolve, as the case may be). Over time, the body will strengthen, and yield, and age, inevitably drudging up new challenges for the mind-body.
But the artist in the yogi thrives on that which her conscious self cannot control as it is a genuine source of creativity. It's like improvisational jazz. You are given a few elemental building blocks that beget multiple permutations and possibilities.
One important difference between art, including music, and yoga is that there is never a finished 'product' in yoga. An individual's yoga practice (as opposed to yoga as a sport or trademarked method) can never be commoditised.
One of the first lessons I learned from my yoga teacher Mimi is that, beyond the body's own daily evolution, a yoga practice can be livened up simply by entering into poses with a beginner's mind. As creatures of habit, we tend to do sequences like the sun salutations in the same mindless way after we've got the basics down pat. This is the dark side of unconscious competence. So, says Mimi, why not challenge your experience by tricking your mind into thinking outside of a locked pattern of movement?
I have to admit I don't always do this. Sometimes I'm just in the mood to get the sun salutes over and done with when my teacher is inclined to power us up with chattarangas (the yoga push-up) ad infinitum. But on the occasions when I do go tabula rasa, I find my experience is invigorated with sensations, space and harmony that are pleasantly unfamiliar.
I guess the upshot here is that on the days I feel creatively stunted, doing a bit of yoga is the medicine I need to get those creative juices flowing again!
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