As many before me have said, the spiritual path is a spiral. The spiral is characterized by the process of various spiritual practices. In this techne, the four paths of yoga offer various paths to transformation and ultimately, truth.

 

The goal of each path isn’t to gain something (though you might gain muscle mass if your way in was asana); it is fundamentally a process of letting go of illusion. 

 

It is gradual, but these are the same illusions that we are faced with when we sit down to write: that we have nothing to say, that we are not good writers, that our audience won’t like it. Stripping these illusions away occurs through thre creation of vasanas, a habitus of writing.

 

As a young writer, when I first started going to readings of authors I admired, I began to hear about the idiosyncratic tendencies of each writer. One piece of advice has stuck with me through the years: “If you want to be a writer, you have to write.”

 

This is the universal truth of writing, lifting, and yoga alike: if you wanna be jacked, you gotta go to the gym.

 

...If you want to be a yogi, you have to practice yoga. It’s really this simple. My project emerges in this exigence; as an intervention for all the students, scholars, and people that have to write, want to write, and should write. Lifting the veils of illusion is a subtle process. It is not instant gratification in the way you might expect; discipline and persistence are necessary virtues.

 

So, this is the type of process people like Donald Murray and Peter Elbow were talking about. A process before cognitivism and the scientific study of the brain perpetuated the myth of sight; the myth that just because we can see something, we might have a whole understanding of everything at work. At best, a brain scan shows us a new way to understand how something might work; at worst, it is extended to represent a whole picture, and a grounds with which to leverage totalizing theories that do not take into account the multitude of other mediators we can hardly even begin to guess at.

 

Supplementing the introspective process with an ecological lens leads to an overwhelming sense of smallness in the midst of the incredibly complex networks we’re a part of. Where can we find solace, then? In understanding that these complex systems are all connected; we are all one system. Yoga philosophy provides an epistemological and ontological framework for this which validates what science is finding.

So—can writing be taught? The obvious answer is it’s not that simple. Can teachers work towards coaching students to remove the veils and obstacles which get in the way of the individual process and introspection required to write? Sure. If compassionate and contemplative methods are practiced.

 

At the CCCC 2015 conference in Tampa, Florida, Peter Elbow was featured as a respondent to a panel called “Practicing Mindfulness and Compassion in Teaching Composition.”

Two of his main points were as follows:

1. Back in his day, they didn’t have this fancy “mindfulness” language. They just called it liking their students writing.

2. In order to like your students’ writing, you can’t possibly read everything they have to write in order to become better writers. Don’t feel guilty about this! For some writing assignments, a simple “thank you” is okay.

 

So, the paths are many; the language to describe the paths is varied, but the truth is one.

This project is an attempt to disentangle one path from the other to create individual and practical heuristics which writers can incorporate into their writing processes. If it seems like they all bleed together (like the elements of the rhetorical situation do), it’s because they’re meant to; they do. They are all designed to lift the veils of the struggling writer and person.

 

So what do you have to lose? Take the path that appeals to you, and notice the subtleties in your level of focus. Notice the wisdom offered by your intuitive self when the illusions fade away.