Musings from the Desert

Okay, as the first real post to this blog, I might as well mention a class I’m currently taking at Yoga Pura, a yoga studio here in Phoenix. The class is called Write It Down Dog, (a pun on the well-known yoga pose called downward facing dog), which combines kundalini yoga and creative free-writing. Free-writing is the act of writing in a stream-of-consciousness, free-association style, just putting down whatever words come to mind.

In class we use the techniques of kundalini yoga to help unblock our creative nature — to help that creativeness flow. The course is designed around the eight chakras of kundalini yoga, and we work with one chakra per class, for a total of eight sessions.

In the Write It Down Dog class, writing — or more specifically, free-writing –becomes just another pose, another state of being. When doing ordinary poses in a typical yoga class, you are usually told to hold a position as long as the instructor tells you to. The same applies for the “write it down dog pose”: The instructor gives us a subject to start with, and we’re supposed to write in our notebook until she tells us to stop. We’re supposed to keep that pen moving no matter what. I’m not sure the time period our instructor uses for each “write it down dog” pose — it may be as little as five minutes, but it feels more like ten or twenty minutes. It’s challenging!

I briefly studied kundalini yoga many years ago — wow, it was twenty-four years ago! — and for reasons I’ve now forgotten, I drifted away from it. But it’s interesting re-experiencing the poses and chants unique to kundalini yoga. For me, it’s like going back in time.

The time period I go back to is of no small consequence, either. I took up kundalini yoga not long after the events described in my new memoir, The Doves of Synchronicity, and those chants and poses bring back the thoughts and feelings of that tragic time.

It’s too bad I didn’t take this class before finishing my novel — perhaps it would have been useful. And it’s interesting how things keep coming back, time and again, being recycled, reprocessed, relearned, in newer and more wonderous ways.

Is taking this class at this point in time, right after publishing my novel, a synchronicity of sorts? I suppose so. And it’s worth noting that one of the synchronicities featured in my novel has to do with writing lyrics to a song that came to me by free-association — lyrics that would come to haunt me months later, in what can only be described as a premonition.

Though the Write It Down Dog class is a bit strange, I’m sure having fun with it. But I must confess, I’ve been terrible so far at free-writing in class. Often, I find I have absolutely nothing to say when being forced to write.

Hmm … how can a free-write be something you are mandated to do? A bit of irony to mention to the instructor … heh-heh!