It was a Declaration of Independence…for her body. It was heartbreaking, and hopeful. The realization that she’d adopted the words, and images, of the media, and had violated her body by holding up that standard as the measure of her worth was profound.
She was setting herself free. I looked into her big brown eyes after I finished reading it and just stared for a moment. Words seemed insufficient to reflect her wisdom and honor her writing.
It’s not every day an invitation arrives to be part of something that will crack you open. Yet over and over again yoga, on my mat, and in my life has led me to these places.
Yoga, writing, a college essay requirement. The invitation…a week guiding Philadelphia high school seniors in a yoga/college essay writing program in partnership with the Philadelphia-based Spells Writing Lab. 4 classes of 30 students each day.
I said yes. I have learned to recognize these invitations. I know I’m being called to stretch, to open, to serve and to receive.
It was an auditorium stage. Thirty yoga mats, holding silent, still students. The class has not started that way. For many of them it was their first time on a yoga mat. The nervous whispers and giggles blended in with the yoga breath for the first few minutes. Cat and cow collected their attention. Mountain pose and the flow of sun salutations offered movement and a rhythm to settle in.
This workshop is not the first time yoga and writing have been paired together. Jeff Davis, author of The Journey from the Center of the Page writes, “if we accept that mind and body influence one another, then we must accept that the body plays a seminal role in our capacity to imagine, to think, to feel–and to learn.” All of these are important tasks for writing and the creative capacity. Also for life. Does your daily life require thinking, feeling, problem solving and learning?
And where are these capacities housed? In the head? Maybe some of them. In this conversation with the students they quickly offered that many of these capacities spring from the heart. Yet most of us live safely in our heads. We get the job done. But often it falls flat. There is no energy, no feeling, no engagement. It begins to feel empty and draining.
When we introduced yoga as a preparation for the writing with the students, a pairing with the writing, something magical happened. It cleared the way. It built courage. It catalyzed the truest telling of their stories. All college essay questions are ultimately questions of what matters dressed as examples of problems solved, special talents, or an example of transformation from a child to an adult. The admissions process is seeking to learn who the students are. It takes students out of their comfort zone of providing standard answers to our education system of standardized tests. The students know these essays can make or break their college applications.
This kind of writing, this kind of an approach to life, to speak and live in a vulnerable way that reflects what really matters is a full body, all in, whole-hearted, life and breath experience. Yoga brings it all together, to make writing, and life easier, and more filled with meaning and what really matters. Yoga opens the door to the intelligence of your mind, and connects it to the depth of your heart, and sprinkles the courage needed to allow you to put the words on paper or speak them out loud.
It was a week I will not soon forget. The students reminded me of the spirit I love so much in teenagers. They have energy and dreams. Many have not had an easy road. Yet they were open to try, to say yes to the invitation to yoga, to writing, to life.
Will you?
Be well…it’s a state of mind.