To write or practice yoga, you have to tune everything else out so you can be in the moment. Writing and yoga require practice to maintain a certain level of skill – years of practice to be really good. You could argue, though, that students of writing and students of yoga never reach an ultimate state of “goodness,” they just keep working toward it.

If you stick with writing or yoga long enough, you start learning certain things about yourself. Strengths. Weaknesses. Habits. If you can identify your habits, you can decide whether it would be good to change them. As a writer, I tend to write long. Even on short pieces I go over. That’s a habit I’m committed to changing. In yoga, my hips don’t naturally align for poses like alanasana, or lunge pose. I have to consciously shift them into what feels like a weird place to get into the pose. But the longer I work on it, the less weird it feels, and the more solid the pose feels once I’m there.

Why should writers care about yoga? Practicing one can help the other. The pranayama or breath work yoga students do at the beginning of class is supposed to help the mind rid itself of thoughts in order to focus on the now. Writers can learn from that. When you’ve got a deadline and you really need focus on writing, it’s easy to let thoughts wander to other things – checking email, reading the newspaper, looking to see if anyone’s visited your blog, checking email again. I know, because if I let myself, I’m one of the worst offenders.