Effort and Surrender and Writing
A personal yoga lesson, writing lesson, and review
by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Yoga simply is. Like life. Like love. Like Writing. When we do it we may also connect. Eric Dinyer’s ethereal photographs in his Effort and Surrender published by Andrews McMeel, are aged like a Sienna landscape. They could easily be the route a beginner or a yoga sage might take to the next step. Or a writer takes to get creative juices started or to keep the I’m Not Good Enough Syndrome at bay.
Way back in 2004 Eric asked me to write the foreword for this little treasure.
An author-illustrator-photographer Dinyer has worked in the entertainment, music, and publishing industries with creative giants like Time-Warner Books, Columbia Records, Viking Penguin, St. Martin's Press, Doubleday, and Scholastic, as well as in publications such as Harper's, Newsweek, and the New York Times Book Review. He created cover images for Bruce Springsteen and Sting and illustrated The Breathing Field: Meditations on Yoga. And his request forced me to revisit my early experiences with yoga and I’m retelling a bit of it from the foreword for you so my writing fellows will understand why I think writers should give it a try, if they aren’t already in love with it..
I have been doing yoga since by brother directed me in a few poses. I lay on a delicate patterned Oriental carpet before a fire in my mother’s home; he pointed my limbs in the proper directions.
“Hatha Yoga” my brother said, “just poses…” He knew my atheistic tendencies.
So, I did “poses only” until I saw light and knew.
That was my only lesson.
My yoga instructor did not believe that yoga should be uncomfortable or difficult but joyful. “Ignore those who say ‘No pain, no gain,’” he said. “Stretch until it feels good. Breathe until it feels better.”
Some poses came naturally. I have long muscles with little structure. Working them is like stretching warm Play-Doh. Dinyer’s photos of poses like The Plow are difficult for some but were easy for me. At 63 I was still doing that extension with variations, knees touching the floor above my head. Some poses like The Airplane he illustrates impart balance. My ability to do them improved as I practiced, mostly without my perceiving the changes because yoga benefits deliberately, leisurely.Some, like the Crane Posture require strength. I do not expect ever to achieve them.
Having said that, it does not matter to me. Yoga is not a contest with others nor with myself. I’m like that with writing, too. If practiced, it will progress. I eventually—perhaps after ten or twelve years—read (nay digested) Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings but only when I was ready. His book materialized in the reading pile next to my bed. I still don’t know how that small volume came to be there.
I did not take expensive lessons, use special equipment, buy a Zen wardrobe or even set goals. All one needs for Yoga is willingness. I admit I ended up spending more money on things like writing classes, writers’ conferences, and reading, reading, reading on anything one needed for that like marketing. But I worked in breathing to increase the joy factor. I think it worked. I even wrote a poem about it:
Yoga is life.
We see its splendor if we look
Know its challenges when we choose to know
Its comforts when we acknowledge them
Recognize pain as a companion
From whom we can learn or turn away
It can quiet like the curve
Of an egg in a bowl.
It can be personal as a pulse
Or connect like a current.
Life. We select its ecstasies.
Such inspiration will surely move reader whether they choose Effort or Surrender or Writing—or all three. Yoga and writing is in the doing. Yoga and writing are very simply, life.
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