Any good writer knows that writing isn’t about staying in your comfort zone. In order to create something truly exemplary, you need to “be courageous and try to write in a way that scares you a little,” suggests author, Holly Gerth. Stretching your mind to produce something amazing can be difficult.
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Surprisingly, however, stretching your body through yoga could make penning prose decidedly easier. To truly reach your writing potential you need to connect both with your true inner self and the world around you. If you’re ready to take this leap for your art, consider using yoga as a tool.
Connect With Yourself
Regardless of the genre of focus, writing is about understanding – understanding the world, understanding who we are and understanding how we fit together into a society. It’s difficult to shed light on these complex relationships if you don’t really have a handle on them yourself.
When you practice yoga, you truly connect with yourself on an inner level. When you’re in this meditative and focused state, you will likely find yourself experiencing an enhanced understanding of the world. This newly fostered connection may translate into more meaningful writing.
Learn Discipline
Even for the most driven and focused writers, producing a polished finish takes effort and dedication. The thing that transfers would-be writers into authors is something called butt-in-seat, which involves putting your butt in a seat and writing for a long, long time.
Like writing, practicing yoga with regularity requires discipline and continued dedication. Help develop your dedication by incorporating yoga into your daily routine.
Practice Letting Go
Many lovers of the written word become consumed with perfection. If you find yourself hesitant to share your finished product because you’re sure it’s not quite ready or you spend most of your time scouring the thesaurus for that perfect word, you might benefit from a lesson in letting go.
Yoga provides this lesson. To perform yoga you must let go of thoughts and worries. The more you practice relinquishing control through yoga, the more likely you will be able to let it all go when it’s time to finally show that draft to your writers’ group.
Develop Self-Validation
While some writers hit it big, many writers who are wonderful in their own right never quite reach that level – and that’s okay. If you’re a truly dedicated writer, you don’t write because you’re focused on making it big. You write because you have no other choice but to write.
Through continued yoga practice, you learn to connect with yourself and let go of the outside world. This helps you learn that it’s not outside validation that determines your level of success, but how you feel you are progressing on your journey as an artist.
Strengthen Your Mental Health
Artists, writers included, are generally well in-tune with their emotions. While this is a wonderful thing for their art, it can be a dangerous thing for them as people. All too often, artists become overwhelmed by emotions and struggle with depression or substance abuse.
While practicing yoga doesn’t eliminate the risk of suffering from one of these issues, it does provide another avenue by which you can connect with your inner self and de-clutter your mind, making it a bit easier for you to process emotions that could otherwise build up and prove problematic.
Slow Yourself Down
If ideas fill your mind in a flood, creating an overwhelming tsunami that you can’t possibly contain, yoga could prove a lifesaver. When you practice yoga, you slow everything down.
By connecting to your inner self and forcing your body to shift into neutral you can potentially slow the rush of ideas and give yourself a better chance of grabbing on to the best ones.
Bust Through Writer’s Block
Writer’s block is an extremely common – and exceptionally frustrating – challenge for writers. While there isn’t a proven cure for this largely unexplained mental block, there are things you can do 
to get un-stuck faster.
When you practice yoga you stretch, both physically and mentally, and you let go of your problems. For many writers, just the process of letting go of their upset over their writer’s block is sufficient to shorten the duration of their suffering.
Instead of spending an interminable amount of time staring at the blinking cursor on your empty word processing document, slip into some yoga pants, lay out your mat and dedicate your mind to yoga to reboot and reconnect with your inner writer.
