How do yoga and poetry connect?
The creative process is unique to every person. As a poet, I am startled by lines. I collect them, like mantras, and dwell in their rhythm, their depth of meaning, their beauty or experience. And from those lines grow poems. I hear them as I do my own breath and can recognize them because they feel natural, because they inspire. After all, inspiration means to breathe in. To take in air. In yoga, inspiration ignites the body into moving through it’s intricate and enlivening dance of unification. Yoga, or in Sanskrit “Yuj”, means “to unite or integrate”. It is the practice of connecting body and mind, breath and movement, individual awareness and universal consciousness, human and divine. In poetry, a single line can be the catalyst for that union–it can make sense of a tragic or profound event, it can tie together seemingly disparate themes, emotions or experiences–like a thread.
In her book, Teaching Yoga, Donna Farhi says, “As yoga teachers we attempt, though whatever understanding we have gained from our own experience, to act as ushers for the student’s fiery process of transmutation…using skillful means to ignite and sustain the fires of transformation…” (14). My own life has been ignited, and as an Instructor using the tools of poetry and yoga, I strive to act as an usher for my students’ own transformations.