Why Do You Write?

One day as I was going through an old journal, I read:
Sit, listen, hear the song of your soul. Always there. Always singing. Always waiting. Patient. Until the end of time. You. You. Only one you. Reach in now, through the channel of your art….”
 This was my journal. Clearly I had written these words, but I had no memory of them, and my first thought was “Who wrote this?” Its wisdom filled my heart and its gentle guidance calmed me. I knew the words were a glimpse into the true offerings of the Muse and the gift of my writing. I thought, yes, it’s true, I have reached into myself and found myself in unexpected ways through my writing, found truths about myself and my life that would have remained hidden otherwise. Through my stories and my characters I have heard the song of my soul.
 But how to keep the channel open? How not to forget, as I have done time and again, that my writing is a pathway to my truest self, often so different from the busy self that runs my day to day life?
 It’s not easy and, I realized, it’s exquisitely easy at the same time. A maddening, mystifying paradox, whose truth brings me to the core of why I write, whose revelations I don’t always understand or, more importantly don’t always want to understand. And yet if I did, if I embraced the song of my soul that I hear through my writing, might my writing and my life flow from a calmer, richer place?

Writing and Yoga: the Perfect Blend

Yoga, like creativity, shifts our awareness from the outer to the inner world through discipline of the body and breath. This discipline is not rigid. Rather yoga opens up the flow between the inner and outer worlds. There is a continuous interchange wherein the body and mind communicate at a subtle and harmonious level that releases dependence on the outer world.

Writing is a visceral experience born of deep longing for authenticity that carry us inward to a self we often do not consciously know. As creative women, we hunger for this self that dances to a song the outer world cannot hear much less understand. Images, memories, stories, characters rise up out of our unconscious but are stored in different parts of our bodies. They race along with our blood, are held taut by the muscles, flow on the breath and remain hidden, sometimes stuck in our sinews. Yoga brings physical awareness to the creative process and thus becomes another avenue to retrieve these images, emotions and stories held in the body. The release may come from accessing a particular muscle, concentrating on the breath or opening to the stillness that arises from the continual flow of the inner, outer, inner worlds.

Join Emily Hanlon and Iyengar yoga instructor Cathy Eising at the Blacktail Ranch for an unforgettable week of creativity, writing and yoga, August 7-14, 2004. The ranch, at the base of the Continental Divide, is an ideal setting for a gathering of women passionate about their creativity and anxious to connect with others of like mind and heart. With every need attended to, we open doorways to new stories, characters, techniques and friendships with each other as well as ourselves.