Getting Outside
How it changes our practice and what literature has to say about it
Welcome to Yoga Culture’s Yoga & Writing! Here, we look at the intersection of yoga and writing practices and explore new ideas together. Anyone is welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Going outside doesn’t have to look like a hiking trail or a beach. I mean, these places in nature have loads of benefit and joy, but even the city streets or your courtyard offer benefits to a yogi-writer way of life.
As most of you are experiencing summer right now, you’re probably spending more time outside. This makes it a good time to think about how it’s affecting us.
Outdoors requires letting go of control over our environment. We might feel the elements, be (more frequently) interrupted, and see unexpected sights. The bombardment of senses we are not used to and cannot fully plan for give us freshness. We can open ourselves to full observation and allow ourselves to melt into the rhythm of our surroundings.
Doing vs. experiencing
Many of us have or regularly do yoga or writing outside. Sometimes this is practically impossible! However, parks, terraces, balconies, rooftops…these are all great places to experience the outdoors as a yogi or writer.
But how can we experience the fullness of the outdoors either during an ‘activity’ or whilst doing something else (or doing nothing at all)? All we have to do is let go into the spaces and places we enter and encounter. We allow all our senses to be activated by what’s out there. We consider that new things may come our way. We seek peace in the rhythm of the natural day. We allow the heat or snow to change the way our bodies feel.
How are the outdoors a part of your writing? Your yoga practice? Does it make you feel more balanced or stressed? Does it inspire you or distract you? Or are the distractions the inspiration?
Literary wisdom
A bit later on, I’ll be exploring the Transcendentalist connection to yoga. Did you know that Henry David Thoreau read the Yoga Sutras? It just feels right…it goes with the whole nature and open-minded, peaceful vibe he was sending out to the world through his writing. He does not always write about nature; rather nature helps him gain wisdom about society, religion, and other human ideas.
Below is something I wrote last year that briefly talks about the Transcendentalists as I was on a trip ‘home’, which is about fifteen minutes from the famous Walden:
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.
“Economy,” Walden, Henry David Thoreau
**Philip Connors’ Fire Season is the account of his job to spend half of each year looking out for fires from a tower in the remote American wilderness. He has many encounters with different types of nature but also with himself.
The questions—unanswered and unanswerable. I stare at the endless dark north and west, the big wild, more than a thousand square miles unlit by a man-made light, and I let the questions go and think instead of a line from the poet Richard Hugo: If I could find the place I could find the poem. I have found the place. This is my poem.
**Ambreen Tariq’s Fatima’s Great Outdoors is a children’s book with a great narrative, but as the author tells NPR, it’s also about immigrants exploring the American wilderness and the way cultures experience the outdoors.
**André Aciman’s Essays on Elsewhere take us to many places he’s dwelled in through philosophical accounts. I like this quote from “The Sea of Remembrance”:
Water cities have a way of seducing us, though it’s always difficult to know why, and explanations vary with each city. Perhaps it’s the fact that when afternoons grow too hot and the air too thick, you can always turn your back on your day-to-day life, utter an exasperated “Enough with this,” pull out a bathing suit stashed somewhere in your desk, and dash off to the nearest beach.
This is what living in Hong Kong is like, although one could also say, “Enough of this,” and wander up a hiking trail. On the other hand, I could also find a lot of inspiration in the city itself!
**Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard has too many great quotes to choose from, but I’ll just choose something for the purpose of enticing you if you haven’t read her work. This passage comes from “The Present”:
Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. In fact, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens all. Even a certain amount of interior verbalization is helpful to enforce the memory of whatever it is that is taking place. …
Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays the tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities—looking over my own shoulder, as it were—the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown.
I see all these passages as also representative of yoga’s wisdom. I don’t want to say too much and just let you enjoy these author’s great ideas.
The benefits!
As they came to me one recent morning on my balcony…
[I did not have a balcony or outdoor space part of my home for fifteen years, so I really really appreciate it!]
Why do you go outside and what do you enjoy doing there? What gets in your way? Are you going outside today? Let us know in the comments!
P.S. At the request of a reader who saw this previewed on YouTube.com, here’s a photo of my view!
I love laying in my yoga swing, between the trees. I love feeling the breeze while I write. It makes me feel more creative. 🙏
Thank you for sharing!
I need to get outside everyday or I go nuts! And wow! I had no idea Thoreau was into yoga!