I’m guessing that at least some of the people reading this might consider themselves to be creative. Even if you don’t think you can carry a tune in a bucket – even if you’ve never picked up a paintbrush – yoga can be a way to express yourself creatively. Yoga can be a creative process. In fact, I think creativity is vital to developing a consistent and sustainable practice. Here’s why.

That elegant sequence

As a person who can put together a yoga sequence, I always enjoy taking classes from other teachers. I like to see what they add, which words they use, and what unique transitions they’ve found. Depending on whom you ask, there are well over 100 poses, and within each of these, there are limitless variations. We can stick these together in an even more significant number of ways. I appreciate an elegant sequence.

No two classes are alike to the student, even if (as is typical in some schools) the sequence is identical every time you practice. You are the artist behind your experience when you go into a class. No matter what your teacher tells you, it is your habit energy, your motivation, physical condition, and your headspace that determines how the class will land. The teacher serves as your guide through the possibilities you can encounter on your mat.

Move away from the result

American culture is results-oriented (though I'm seeing signs that we're getting better about balance). We like to look up how to do something and have five easy steps for making that thing happen. I am interested in traditional Japanese stitching called sashiko. My teacher often laments American students’ desire to know all the answers. We want instructions and definitions. We want to know what something is or isn’t. We want to find ways to use the word to describe what we do, but we often leave the heart of the word behind. We want to know the quickest way to go from being an amateur to being an artisan. It sounds funny to say it.

I didn't consider that this was something ingrained in me until my sashiko teacher pointed this out. I quickly realized I’d been doing the same thing with everything… including yoga. When I came to yoga, I wanted to master it. I wanted to know each aspect perfectly, and it wasn’t to reach enlightenment or make the world a better place. I wanted another skill.

I’m not suggesting that we abandon our goals or give up on trying to understand where this yoga stuff comes from. I want to pose the suggestion that we consider what it is about yoga that we’re drawn to. Are you focused on the achievement of a specific goal? Is there something more nebulous you hope to capture through continued practice?

I often encourage people to set an intention in my yoga classes. I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone to check an intention. I’ve certainly never been asked to do that. It might even be a little weird to do that in a 60-minute class. That’s the beauty of writing about yoga, though. We can think about these things on our own.

Twyla Tharp and the “eggs-ercise”

Twyla Tharp, an award-winning dancer and choreographer, wrote an excellent book called The Creative Habit. In many ways, it’s about how we can set ourselves up for creativity through our routines and practices. She does this thing she calls “The Egg” every morning.

It’s been ages since I’ve read the book (and I don’t own it– please forgive me if I botch this…), but as I recall it, she’ll curl herself into a fetal position with her arms wrapped around her legs. Then, she challenges herself to move from that space into an upright position without immediately unwrapping her arms. She must make incremental movements until she finds a way to free herself. It's the opposite of someone handing you a step-by-step guide on how to unknot oneself. This exercise undoubtedly introduces her to new subtleties of movement, which informs her work as a choreographer.

“The Egg” in yoga

What I really love about “The Egg” is that we can use this sort of activity in yoga too. Instead of beginning in a fetal position, you could start anywhere you’d like. Let’s say you want to move from a low Cobra Pose to Downward-Facing Dog. That’s a pretty standard thing to see in a class. We might move from Cobra to high plank to Downward Dog.

What happens, though, if high plank doesn’t feel good in your body? Do you just sit it out? You sure could, but there are other steps you could take so that you could keep moving forward. Maybe instead of that plank, you head to a tabletop pose, and from there you send the hips up and back into Downard dog. You could push back into a Child’s Pose as the middle step between Cobra and Down Dog.

Depending on how your body is feeling, you can set different conditions for yourself. Once I was moving, and I injured my wrist putting a TV into a box. For the next several days in yoga, I modified by doing EVERYTHING on my forearms instead of my palms. Downward Dogs became dolphins. High planks were forearm planks. I used blocks to account for lost space. It was so challenging, but it’s what I felt I could do to continue to follow the sequence and also give my sore wrist time to heal. It was also fun to see what I could come up with.

Our bodies are all magnificently different. I’m not very tall, but I have yoga friends that need to buy an extra long mat. Some people are hypermobile, and others among us are locked up. Some of us think it’s easy to close our eyes and remain still in savasana. For others, that’s downright anxiety-inducing.

We can look at things that take us outside of “the norm” as deficits, but they sound like opportunities to me. These are opportunities to make your practice yours. When you come up against a struggle in your practice, notice what happens in your mind. Is there a level of frustration or jealousy? Do you just not give a rip and keep going? What you observe can inform your practice, and it can tell you a whole lot about how you handle adversity.

Take it home with you

I’ll admit that sometimes when I come to class, I just want someone to tell me what to do so that I don’t have to think about anything for an hour. I get it. I encourage you to practice at home on your own too, though. Consider the areas in your practice where you wish you had a bit more time to explore. I know Rex builds some time into classes for that, but curious students may wish to investigate more. Do a little workshopping. That’s your version of Twyla Tharp’s Egg exercise. It’s improvisational. It’s reliant upon your capacity to notice the subtleties in your own body.

We need this creativity. Time and circumstances are constantly changing our bodies. What works at one time may be completely inappropriate at another. For this reason, we have to cultivate agency in our practice. We have to learn to be okay with a little (or a lot of) improv. This capacity to create, adapt, and change gives us the means to carry our practice with us regardless of where life takes us. I know I talked about physical practice a lot today, but the same holds true for all aspects of our practice.

Fish in a tree

When I taught in public school, we used to talk about the fish in a tree. The idea was that as teachers we had to be cognizant of how we approached our students because they all have unique abilities.

A popular image for explaining this is one of a group of different animals gathered around a tree. The teacher tells the animals to climb the tree. The monkeys scale it with no problem. The giraffes are already eye-level with the top. Then there’s a fish that, although fabulous in every way, simply can’t climb the tree. It has no legs, and it can’t breathe. Instead of instructing students to climb a tree, we ought to ask them to make it to the top. That’d give the fish a chance to hang out in a bowl while a giraffe gives it a lift, for example. This is yoga all day long. There are many ways to get to the top of the tree.

If you’ve ever felt like that fish being asked to climb the tree, forget the climbing. Get creative. Can you make it to the top instead?