The gifts from an ancient discipline to expand our ability on “writing” our minds.
It’s true. Yoga has a lot to do with exercise and body. We can’t deny the number of benefits it brings to the well-being of our physical state overall. But Yoga is also mind, and the magical effects it has on it. At least that’s what a group of students from Dharma Yoga studio learned in 2013.
Three years ago, the Lip Service Institute, teaching arm of famous Miami-based storytelling annual gathering Lip Service, teamed up with Dharma Yoga Studio for the first one-day yoga/writing retreat.
The session started with two questions: Who are you and why are you here?
Lip Service founder and storyteller Andrea Askowitz remembered how the ten participants were leery at first. “I know for sure that my wife, Victoria, was scared. She loves yoga, but writing intimidates her. She was very, very afraid”. Andrea then asked the group to read what they had written. For Askowitz’s wife, who thought Yoga would come first, this task was accomplished with a very angry “this is hard” read out loud.
Yoga came minutes later, taught by the best instructor in town, Vanessa Michel. A butt-kicking hour of Asanas to the beat of Ice-ice baby and Hallelujah was followed by five-minute writing exercise, and then the magic started to happen.
“I followed a boy, found a man”, wrote one of the students. “I’m a planetary rain man” and “Breasts fascinate me, mostly because I don’t understand the fascination. Fun bags. Sacks of fat.”, were some of the exercises Askowitz shared through the art blog of the Knight Foundation.
As for Victoria, she was able to let out some of the anger that had her boiling: “I can’t stand bad cooking. Last week my wife cooked shrimp without deveining it first. Everyone was eating shrimp poo”, she wrote. Although some of the temper was still there at the end, she told Askowitz she wanted to do it again.
This article was originally written by Andrea Askowitz and published on The Knight Foundation’s Art Blog.