Yoga as Muse:
How My Practice Has Informed My Art
Copyright © 2007. 298 words.
I have been a singer/songwriter for over twenty years. I have been a yoga practitioner for seventeen.
When I look back on my body of work, I see an unfocused songsmith, full of agendas. My music has resembled everything from show tunes that I wrote for easy money, to power-pop ballads, hoping to become a star, to straight-ahead jazz, trying desperately to be hip.
It wasn’t until yoga came into my life, and I learned to quiet my world, that my practice reshaped me as an artist and I began to connect with the art of song on a level too organic for agenda.
This wasn’t instantaneous. I persevered through the years of the yoga novice and the machinations of the ego: wanting the practice to give me an awesome body and stupefying flexibility (a leg behind the head is something we’d all like to show off, wouldn’t we?), wanting to wear the badge of New-Age-artsy-liberal-hippy-chic honor, and, perhaps the biggest trap of all, wanting instant enlightenment. I begrudgingly honored patience, and, as will beautifully happen with time and commitment, finally managed to burrow deep.
It was during this shift that I clearly saw my music going through the same stages of maturation. The writing was no longer about acceptance in my industry. It became surprisingly internal.
Today my music is as close to pure as it’s ever been. Can it traverse even further? Of course! But I believe that where it is today owes its great debt to the practice of yoga. Sometimes I even wonder if it might not be the other way around. After all, they both regard the Pursuit of Truth.
Though in the end, as life goes galloping richly by, the richer for all our efforts to be whole, does it really matter?