Last night I dreamed that it was the last night of teacher training, and before a final meditation I decided to go for a walk. The meditation was nearly over when I returned. I wanted to join everyone as they woke up, but my teacher told me to be careful. “You are not in the same space as the rest of them.”
The obsession showing up in my writing lately is the collision of creative processes in the brain. I wonder sometimes if the reason we fall for each others’ paintings, poems, and other art is because all creative acts register in the same place in the lizard brain: that ultimately, it’s all sex, every last bit of it. Music is a little different – it is so overtly sexual that there is not much mystery to it (although in college I had this whole riff about why drummers almost never get the girls).
As I continue teaching and practicing, I’m catching on to the idea that art comes from the body, that it is something visceral and physically lived. The body is the vehicle that carries us through the experiences that are transformed into art, the body sends us all kinds of information about these experiences. I had this moment in meditation a couple of years ago when I figured out that the mind and body are the same thing, that thoughts are largely electric, physical responses to what the body is doing and where it has been – responses tied in to a big web of all of the other responses over a lifetime. It was an indescribable epiphany (although I’m trying), about how things work, and what can be controlled and what can not be controlled in the mind.
Yoga means “union,” and we talk about it in the context of mind and body, body and breath, us and the great everything. The dichotomy is that we learn about all of these things being united, so that ultimately, we can detach, and then unite again.
So, back to art: I suppose this is how we get the lusty artist / writer / etc. archetype. It all cuts right through the loftiest, high-concept creative enterprises, back to the physical body that created them, all the way back to the first things we know about creation. It works the other way, too: what on earth has inspired more art than sex?
