I just got back into yoga. It took a while, largely because I was adjusting to life in an MFA program, the routine of writing for workshop, the rhythm of reading so many other people’s works while striving to work on my own. Arguably this would be the time when I most needed yoga, but it took me the better part of half a year to realize that. There were also finances and location to consider. I was making more money as an Uber driver than a stipended MFA student, so yoga felt like less of a luxury. And in New Orleans, my yoga studio was exactly a block and a half away from home. So I didn’t have an excuse not to go. One’s willingness to stick with an exercise routine seems directly correlated to how low the barrier to entry of starting is. The more work it takes to get going, the more chances you have to talk yourself out of it.

For me, yoga is alchemical, bordering on magic. When I do yoga, it’s apparent that I’m tapping into some truly ancient human wisdom, that human progress is not linear or ever-improving. That we’ve managed to lose our way in many instances, becoming separated from deep and powerful insights that early humans took as given. We like to sit in art history classes and make fun of early civilizations’ poor understanding of anatomy, or crack jokes about medieval medicine replete with humors and leeching and casting out spirits. But the understanding of the body evident in yoga, the connection between mind and body and breath, it demonstrates (to borrow a phrase) “deeper magic from before the dawn of time.”

Yet I don’t actually enjoy the practice. The hour I spend in yoga itself is mostly painful. Everything about it is uncomfortable: thinking about how not to think, breathing through my nose when I never do otherwise, holding poses longer than I want, being reminded how sad and non-compliant my body feels. On an intellectual level, the practice is an hour-long session of failure. This, of course, is largely the point: a trope of yoga instructors is that things don’t have to be pretty or perfect or even follow the instructor’s cues. “That’s why it’s called yoga practice,” they all say. I don’t do a lot of things that I’m not naturally good at, much less that I don’t feel I have much hope of ever becoming excellent at.

And thus, I don’t look forward to yoga. I don’t sit around anticipating the joy of the practice, because there is none. I dread it sometimes, the body’s natural reluctance to make itself vulnerable or volunteer for pain. I try to talk myself out of going, make little self-justifying points about how the time might be better spent. Times like now, this week, when the discipline is building but the routine is not quite set, are the most susceptible to caving in. I wrestle with myself to get up, get dressed, grab the teal mat, get out the door.

The strongest lure I have is the knowledge, the consistent understanding, that as soon as I’m done with yoga, I will be euphoric. Yoga consistently, almost without exception, puts me in a state of peaceful satisfaction, a gratification with the world and its circumstances that is otherwise unknown to me. It’s easy to confuse this with the joy of just ending something that’s painful – I used to make fun of my friend Jake for saying he loved cross-country because it felt so good to stop. It’s more than that. The mindful contemplation of place, the deliberate slowing of time, the hyper-awareness of bodily processes, and the willful embrace of both exertion and rest: these all combine to manufacture a mental state that borders on tranquility. The difference lasts for hours, sometimes a whole day. I am slower to anger, faster to hope, more intentional and sure in all my thoughts and actions. I don’t look forward to yoga or enjoy it, but I love the state of having done it.

The core of any contemporary American MFA writing program is the workshop, wherein the participants take turns sharing their writing, usually two people a week, and then everyone reads the piece and critiques it, both in writing and orally in person. The oral critique is extensive (an hour or more), usually landing somewhere between a debate and a discussion, and the author is restricted from speaking except to correct dire misunderstandings or answer direct questions. Workshop is led by a professor, themselves an established writer, who can take a firm or light hand in running the critique according to their tastes.

I love workshop. I love bringing my writing to the table and I love critiquing others’ work. It’s energizing and exciting. I look forward to the workshops where my writing will be discussed for weeks – I’m looking forward right now to workshops for writing I haven’t even started. Writing is such a lonely, empty process that so often yields little direct response. Stories or essays written for publication get rejected in overly-formal trope-laden pre-written mass-messages. Pieces written for this blog garner no immediate response, maybe a stray like or two on Facebook. The point of writing is to connect with an audience and yet that audience is militantly reluctant to engage. All writing is essentially dispatched from a desert island in a bottle: we craft a message alone, in a void, package it up in something flimsy, send it across an empty ocean, and hope it finds a home. Hoping, praying, wishing for a return message, for the bottle to come back to us, is just asking too much.

Hence, the intoxicating appeal of workshop. Not only will people read your stuff, they have to read it and tell you exactly what they think. The questions you always wonder: how did you feel, did I pull this off, did you think this was funny? – you get answers! People are obliged to tell you what the world so guardedly withholds. And they have to do it quickly, within a week of you sending the piece out, while it’s all still fresh. It’s beautiful.

So I look forward to workshop and I really enjoy the process. Silenced and unable to defend my pieces, I scribble notes furiously, an easy callback to flowing in debate (as a judge), trying to transcribe every word. I nod my head and rock back and forth in my chair and imbibe the whole thing hungrily, manna for the starved, oxygen for the asphyxiate. I never want it to stop.

Because, of course, as soon as it’s over, it’s over. Usually you can ask a question or two at the end, inquire about any themes that weren’t raised or whether something worked that you were trying. But then people shuffle their papers and hand them to you, your words returned in all their unshimmering, marked-up gore, and you are once again alone with your thoughts. You know precisely what hasn’t worked and why but not how to fix it. And, if you’re like me and would rather run cross-country than revise your own work, the only thing left to do is put yourself through the most painful and unrewarding process known to writing. I have frequently compared revision to forcing yourself to eat a regurgitated meal that you just finished. But after a workshop, it may actually be worse: it’s forcing yourself to eat everyone else’s regurgitated meals.

So I don’t do it, of course. Last night marked the first fiction workshop of my work to join five nonfiction workshops and I have yet to truly revise any of the pieces. I have stacks of manuscripts and notes, all semi-neatly organized and waiting for my return and the notion of revisiting these once-promising pieces to perfect them is utterly demoralizing. In some instances, the feedback was all over the board, contradictory, frustrating. In others, there were points of consistency and commonality. Reading the letters written by classmates after workshop is over is helpful, a bit of a balm, it usually paints a more hopeful picture than the actual oral critique. But I’m still left with my fundamental weakness as a writer: I can’t revise. I don’t know how to fix things. I’d much rather just start all over again.

So there you have it. Two essential components of my life which ideally might complement each other. In one, I dread it, hate the process, and love the outcome. In the other, just the inverse: I anticipate, adore the moment, and hate the aftermath. And somehow, most perplexingly, the consistency of these emotional wakes does nothing to change the precognition. I have yoga in half an hour and I don’t want to go. I can’t wait for my next workshop.

The definition of insanity is allegedly doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It could be said, thus, that all writing is insane. There is so much failure, so much rejection, so much shortcoming innate to every aspect of the process. And yet every time I sit down to write, I convince myself that this, this will be my masterpiece. This will be perfect in its initial form, read by millions, change the course of history. I literally must convince myself of this every time I try to write something serious, something I really care about, or I cannot begin. And I know, deep down, somewhere, that it’s all artifice, but some part of me must believe it for the action to work.

I carry no such illusions about yoga. I would love to be good at it, would love my body to revert to my twenties and conform to the slinky bendy shapes found at the front of the room. But I have no investment in such outcomes, no real, even temporary belief that it will happen. The first time I popped up into a headstand, back in New Orleans, I was rocked to my core, having never thought it would happen. Whenever something in yoga works, it’s a surprise.

Is this all just a fancy, long-winded way of saying that expectation governs our happiness? That the less you want, the more you’ll gain?

But if I wanted less out of writing, I wouldn’t do it. Yoga can be internal, can just be for yourself, your body, your breath. It may be motivated by an abstract extrinsence: the desire to look good or get fit or stay calm. But it’s fundamentally self-regarding as a process and an outcome. Writing, by its nature, is for others. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be writing. It would just be thinking. The act of putting something into the record is the expression of the desire for it to be read. And in being read, to impact, to change, to do.

Maybe I just need to start doing yoga after workshop.

Or learn to love regurgitated food.