Welcome to Yoga & Writing! We are a new community with a podcast, courses, and retreats coming soon. Stay tuned for ideas, tips, and conversations.
These first few weeks, I’m sharing the origins of this project and orienting you in my approach. Soon, I’ll be sharing ideas, also in podcast form, from a variety of angles: practical, philosophical, cultural, historical, or literary. Additionally, I’ll alternate these articles with community discussion threads. Another part of the newsletter and podcast will bring you fun and meaningful ways to deepen your practice to start each week.
A lot of the direction depends on the community, so please reply to this email to let me know more about you!
If you want to check out some of my other writing, please visit The Matterhorn: intersections of literature & art (also a podcast) or my author website.
An introduction to Yoga & Writing
You might be wondering why I want to put yoga and writing together. Besides enjoying both practices and doing them regularly I find that each enhances the other and that I find new discoveries about myself and the world from their convergence.
There’s something new that can be found when we put two things together — in literature, we call this the intertext. More than just this and that, it’s something that emerges from the juxtapositions and engagements. Some call it synergy.
Yoga and writing are both practices that can be a part of your daily life, both because you can set time aside to do each of them daily and because they can enrich other parts of your life. But that doesn’t mean to engage with this community that you need to commit to working on them everyday. Even just dipping into these practices and ideas once a week or every other week can have a great effect on your mind and body.
Yoga is much more than a physical practice, which I’ll introduce briefly in The 8 Limbs of Yoga for those unfamiliar. The mind-body connection is already developed within the practice of yoga and something I’ll also go into in another introductory podcast here. Writing allows us to assert what we learn through yoga, whether in journalistic reflections, poetry concerning our emotions, articles about important discoveries, or even enhancing the fiction characters in a novel we’re working on. Additionally, yoga’s teachings can give us the confidence to share our voice through writing and help us to access deeper elements of our creativity, imagination, vulnerability, powers of observation, and more. Essentially, we are seeking our own authenticity and the courage to celebrate that.
Likewise, writing enhances our yoga practice by opening ourselves to the world. Through observing, sharing our perspective, and working through challenging ideas or emotions in our writing, we can move deeper in our yoga practice.
In addition to these philosophical underpinnings as well as the development of our mind-body connection, there are perhaps more practical ways yoga and writing can come together. Here, one might think of focus, setting intentions, space, mental and physical health, posture, time management, and professional elements (for example, if you are a yoga teacher or professional writer).
As we begin, I don’t want to limit us with expectations. Instead, I hope that this community can grow through a sharing of ideas and seeking individual challenges along the way.
Here’s something a little cheesy to introduce myself!
Thanks for checking out Yoga & Writing, a new community with a podcast, courses, and retreats coming soon. These next introductory posts will help you to get the most out of the community and understand my approach. I would be grateful if you share this post with anybody who might connect with our ethos or be curious about something new!
Definitely agree that yoga and writing can sit hand in hand. I have only just started practicing yoga so a complete novice but enjoying it so much. I have been writing on and off for a number of years. I wouldn't consider myself good but the pleasure it gives me to switch off and waffle about all sorts of rubbish is priceless. Allows me to detach completely
This sounds really good. I haven't done yoga in a long time but I used to enjoy it and it is the best form of exercise I have ever tried. From your explanation I can see exactly how both disciplines would enhance and inform each other. Great idea. I also like the artwork for the website.