This week I’m stationed in beautiful, though at the moment sodden, Bellingen learning to be a better writer. Enrolled in a course called Life Stories with 15 other pupils, we’re part of the overall turn-out of 1,000 students of the 2011 Camp Creative.
I haven’t felt so moved and excited in a learning situation for a long time. I go into the course room, fully awake and alive to discovering some unexamined part of my life for me to dust off and bring back from the past into the now. The human brain is so amazing to be able to retrieve an old experience and revitalise it with details of colour, sound, fragrance, and feelings, invest it with meaning and present it as a gift to an audience.
I wasn’t very good at this when I was younger. I needed to learn the distinctions author, narrator and audience. Yoga training has you develop the Witness, the ability to observe what and how you are being or doing, which is like an author being detached enough to create a narrator and choose a point of view or points of view.
Another thing that writing and yoga share is that they are disciplines and systems with rules. Long-term yoga practice has had pay-offs for me in terms of health and well-being on all levels. For nearly 5 years, I’ve had the privilege to be a blogger and a fairly regular contributor at it. Almost daily writing has had a huge pay-off for me in letting me know what I think and feel. And along the way has improved my writing ability.
Hopefully this week’s stint will create a leap in that ability.
0 Comments