It wasn’t until the week before my book launch that I thought to tell my yoga teacher how much her classes had influenced my book, even though there is no yoga in the book.
I have been doing yoga for 19 years! I am crap at meditating. My mind is highly distractible. Over the years, I have become less flexible and less able to balance. I am, after all, 20 years older. Also, my mind is what it is. What I have learned in my decades of yoga practice is something about acceptance.
Yoga is not just stretching postures and breathing. For me, each yoga class is a story, a chance to stop and dig into my mind, my heart, my behaviours, my beliefs about myself and others.
I don’t do yoga for my writing, but my writing is me, and as I absorb yoga (like the Abzorbaloff on Dr Who), logically, yoga influences what and who I write. All writers are Abzorbaloffs. But I have been distracted again.
Specifically, in my book Cassandra, here is a girl who can predict the future. She is obsessed with the future. Her head is always there. We can all be a bit like that sometimes. Planning, imagining, but it will be like when we get what we want in the future, worrying about something that may or may not happen in the future. When Cassandra’s head is not in the future, she is regretful about the things in the past that she predicted and could not change. Some of us also live this way (without the psychic gifts!)
The lesson Cassandra has to learn is to be in the moment. I can’t say I have mastered this practice, but I know the contentment of being there when I find it. It is something yoga has taught me. It is the best future I could envisage for a girl who will always see the bad things before they happen.
How does it end for Elton and Ursula? Damnation and salvation.
Finalist Best Fantasy Novel 2017 Aurealis Awards
Is the future set like concrete or a piece of clay we can mould and change?
On a remote farm in Queensland, Cassie Shultz feels useless. Her perfect brother Alex has an uncanny ability to predict the weather, and the fortunes of the entire family hinge on his forecasts. However, her gift for prophecy remains frustratingly obscure. Attempts to help her family usually fail.
After meeting with her new genius neighbour Athena, Cassie thinks she has unlocked the secret of her powers. But as her visions grow more vivid, she learns that the cost of honing her gift may be her sanity.
With her family breaking apart, the future hurtles towards Cassie faster than she can comprehend it.
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like you, i am a regular yoga practitioner. as you say, less flexibility and less ability to balance as we get older. but all good. was the book launch a success?
The launch went really well thank you! A lot of wonderful people came along to support me and buy a book.