This guy walks into a yoga studio

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Flicker to a flow to a jet. The whole series is here. Please share this email. Sign up free or, if you’ve done that, please pledge to support my work below.

Ten years ago, at the end of March, I went to a yoga class. It differed from the others I’d been to in that it became a habit. That class led to a different class, and then many others, with a host of teachers—maybe 30 people by now whose influence on my perspective I can name with specifics. I can tell you about each room where I practice, what I’ve come to know in that room. There’s the room where I discovered that my relationship with myself would be the most important of my life. The one where I learned that it was the nature of our being both to strive for and to be repelled from the infinite. The one where I realized that the purpose of building strength was to prepare for letting it go.

Early on, it was so hard. I remember going to classes sometimes in my first few years and realizing only when I got there that something wasn’t quite right with my body, and having to rest for most of the class. One of the cool things about yoga is, that’s not even an off-label use. You’re not doing anything wrong if you lie in savasana for the whole hour.

I was thinking about this: Of all the habits that have helped me through life’s challenges, yoga is the one I would hold on to if I had to let the rest go. By tradition, the physical postures are intended to prepare the mind for meditation. But—despite a committed meditation practice—I’ve found that for me the real meditation is in movement, and this becomes truer over time. I diverge from many belief traditions in my position that conscious embodiment is probably the apex of existence, not some purgatory or burden. Specifically in and because of our bodies, including their suffering, we are consciousness at something like its peak.

The poses are familiar now, but not easy. I’ve come to think of yoga mainly in terms of intelligence-gathering. Yoga provides you with insight about the state of your embodiment.

Nowadays I’m trained as a yoga teacher, and so I know a little more about the theory and history and anatomy of it than I once did. I have a greater appreciation for why the best teachers are so good. I feel less pressure to do things with my body that are not part of its design. But the practice has never changed, not fundamentally. Not the practice of de-armoring yourself, of stepping into a room where you’re not in charge, of surrendering to the natural state of your body and mind, of moving into positions in which you will always, if you are paying attention, find something new; and of heeding what you feel and see under those conditions. I had a professor once, someone with whom I agreed about little except when he said there wasn’t a better way you could spend your time than reading Proust. So, I just add: after Proust, yoga. The two of them cover everything.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.