What Yoga Taught Me About Being A Better Blogger

Starting a blog or culture yoga requires the right mind-set (Photo: dollen)

My body screamed in agony.

I blinked hard as sweat poured into my eyes, burning like pickle juice and vodka. My legs trembled, then shook violently as my body contorted in a most heartless way. As I exhaled the shakes started to drive away. Salutation to yoga.

All the cool kids on the interweb seem to be doing yoga these days. As a former champion in submission grappling, my body is wracked with ancient injuries. Hunching over a keyboard sure doesn’t help. I made the declaration on November 4, 2011 to be a cool kid. I bought a sticky purple mat and searched the Youtubes for some yoga videos.

What does this have to do with blogging?

My cocky ego was so out of whack. I was confident I’d have this yoga thing licked in a couple of sessions. I was the same way when I ongoing blogging.

Within minutes I was absolutely lost. There are as many flavours of yoga as Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. How would you choose what kind of yoga to do?

Social media to the rescue. I met Claudia Altucher in one of my G+ circles. She is the better half of a former Wall Street hedge fund manager who now works with Mad Money’s Jim Cramer. Claudia is a ordinary blogger and Amazon author. And she is gifted at yoga. I reached out to her, and to my bolt from the blue she answered. Claudia gifted me a copy of her book, 21 Things To Know Before Starting An Ashtanga Yoga Do. Wonderful. Now I had a starting point.

What was your starting point with your blog?

Between November 4th and December 28th I adept yoga 27 times. The full Fundamental Series of exercises takes about 90 minutes to complete. I never made it owing to fully even once. There are poses called Standing Poses. I constantly fell over, once so terribly that I knocked over a shelf. The do is driven by deep breathing. I never realized the hummingbird shallow gasps I took because of my life glued to a keyboard. I was a complete and utter novice. A rookie. A noob. And I loved it.

Then a touch happened on December 29th. At the points in the normal where I had earlier quit with panting and dry bursting at the seams, this time I focused on relaxing and breathing instead of trying harder. Victory! For the first time in my young yoga do, on attempt 29 I made it fruitfully all the way owing to.

Congrats noob. You permanently made it to the starting line.

What does this have to do with blogging?  

This yoga stuff is uncommon than anything I have ever tried before. It’s non-violent. It’s not competitive. It’s do oriented. How refreshing!

Yoga teachers say stuff like, “I dredge up when my hips were tight like yours. Don’t worry, in about 3 or 4 years they’ll open up.”

3 or 4 years? (Just like blogging!)

That’s when that small voice inside my heads starts. He’s about 3 feet tall, light green, with a slight Irish accent.

“That’s right Mr. FNG, you amusing new guy. They’re all going to laugh at you. Better quit now before it really gets hard.”

Have you ever plotting about quitting blogging?

From the bottom of your heart…at night when you’re tired, do the voices come for you?

I have fought that small green bugger’s voice for the past 30 years. Steven Pressfield in his brilliant book, The War of Art calls that voice The Resistance. Geoff Colvin describes it a small another way in his book Talent Is Overvalued. Naked nerve endings slowly get coated with a protein called myelin in order to speed up responses to traditional routines. You’ve heard that do makes exact? Colvin thanks the coating of myelin for the saying “exact do makes exact”.

That’s why I share this essay as “A Notification To Bloggers”. The utmost threat to accomplishment in your career is your own brain. Not your parents. Not your enemies. Not the regime. Beyond doubt not other bloggers. It’s the 3 pounds of grey stuff on top of the neck that determines the outcome of the game of life.

Did you catch that?

Accomplishment in yoga is akin to accomplishment in blogging. Mind-set determines altitude. A do mentality will help a struggling blogger survive the brutal first year. My best guess is blogging has a 90% obstruction rate within 12 months of start. That’s higher than indemnity salesmen and real estate agents!

You doubtless know the predictable blogger, perhaps warmly. They hear about all the money you can make as a blogger. It’s cheap to get into, and seems pretty simple. They go hung-ho the first month, blogging a couple times a week. Then in a few months the reorganization rate drops to weekly, then bi-weekly. It seems as the reorganization rate drops the number of advertisements on their blog increases proportionately. Sadly within 3-6 months over 9 out of 10 new blogs are nearly dead and collecting internet dirt.

Sound traditional?

That was me. I ongoing blogging in 1998. I have ongoing and stopped many times. Then one day when I was cold my lawn I had a Eureka! moment.

I’m not a blogger.

The very definition of my job description was inaccurate. It was like being an astronomer in the days of Galileo. An astronomer back then was someone who considered the passage of the Sun around the Earth. This job description caused a small friction between Galileo and the nice man in the pointy hat. My job description was making a akin friction in my life.

It was the declaration that altered all for me. I quit calling myself a blogger.

I am a writer.

When I altered my title, my life altered profoundly.

My life is uncommon now. Every day I get up and do my prose. I don’t check stats on my blog. I don’t check emails. I wake up, pour a coffee and I write.

Yoga has become a do for me, 6 days a week for a total of 36 hours a month.

What about prose?

Prose has become a daily do for me, 16 hours a week. In both yoga and prose I do not compete with anyone. I do for the like of improving my do. That like of practicing has given me the frankness to receive the refund of practicing.

As K Pattabhi Jois, the father of modern Ashtanga yoga says, “99% do. 1% theory….Do, and all is coming.”

If you have a friend who is a dissatisfied blogger, promote them to try on a new hat. Perhaps changing job descriptions will be a source of inspiration and new energy for them. The subtle shift from blogger to practicing writer did for me what Morpheus did for Neo.

Let me know how it goes. Excellent luck in your do, and dredge up to breathe!

David Ledoux is the author of half a dozen books including How I Went From Welfare To Millionaire Without Attractive The Lottery. He coaches entrepreneurs, owns numerous businesses and writes a witty and cheeky blog at http://davidledoux.com.  His newest book, 10 Quick & Simple Strategies For Flourishing Living is void for free at his website.

What Yoga Taught Me About Being A Better Blogger is a post from: Technshare

Tags: About, Being, Better, Blogger, Taught, Yoga