“I don’t see you in ashtanga yoga,” a respected studio owner once told me. “You’re too creative for that.”

She had a point. Why even try to deny the absence of creativity in a daily ashtanga practice, when, well, that’s kind of the point?

Indeed, ashtanga teacher David Robson emphasized exactly that when he floated into DC last winter:

“The idea of the vinyasa is that it is setting conditions– parameters that you are supposed to operate within as you transition, as you move, right? So it’s these rules, it’s a structure for movement– it is almost like a tunnel. It should take away all of your options, so there is no creativity in what you are doing.”

That’s right: you get on your mat and do the same things over and over. You don’t ponder “oh, maybe this, maybe that.” You don’t have alternatives to weigh about how to get into and out of postures. You don’t have a choice about how many breaths you take (unless survival wills them). There is a tunnel carved out, and you have to stay within it.

Sometimes that sounds terrible. That doesn’t sound very nice: “Oh, I’m going to go into a tunnel and not be creative for an hour and a half.”

The reason why we do that is so that there is an opportunity for your mind to quiet down. You don’t get to make any decisions. You don’t think “hmm, ok well I did that pose last time; what am I going to do next time– what comes next?” You don’t do that because there is a fixed sequence of postures. “Ok, I know I have to do that pose, but how am I going to get into it? That’s not an option. You’re told exactly how you are going to get into it. You’re given a cue: supta inhale jump through, cross the legs, get set up, astau exhale fold. You’re even told where your eyes should be while you do that. Everything is determined for you…it’s all to bring you to this place where your mind can focus.

(please watch this wonderful clip of David Robson here: I’m not kidding when I say I’ve watched this over and over and it still speaks to me).

I am well aware that there are many things you might find in a vinyasa class that you won’t find in the mysore room–after all, I still take vinyasa classes here and there, and I teach them. They may contain a whole array of colors and movements and poses and breathing and things to think about. There may be music, alternatives, and exhalations galore. There will be the regular cadence of a teacher’s voice swimming throughout your practice.

In ashtanga, we black it all that out like we’re making newspaper blackout poetry a la writer/artist Austin Kleon—poems formed by taking newspaper clippings and blocking out all but a few chosen words with the aid of a permanent marker. One of my favorite Kleon pieces (pictured with this blog) seems to carry his motto:

“Creativity is subtraction”

Sometimes I get lost. Sometimes I wonder why I practice ashtanga and if it is right for me. Sometimes I play in other realms of movement. And then the limited limitlessness of it all calls me back.

When I practice ashtanga, it’s as if I’m standing in the middle of a vinyasa class frozen in time, holding a thick black sharpie. The teacher’s voice—blacked out. The stereo? Eviscerated. The options, gone. The “what’s going to happen next?” — a memory. The unregulated breaths (inevitable even in vinyasa classes with dictated breathing) – sucked away.

Or it’s as if I am stranded in the midst of the mundanities that overwhelm my daily life – the alarm, the toddler scream, the to-do lists, the dog vomit, the music, the worries, the thinking, thinking, thinking, the profligate breathing, the profligate living, the smiles, the laughs, the happy conversations, the online dramas, and the omnipresence of feces-both dog and human– wielding nothing but a big black marker. Cover it all. Well, almost all–I’ll try, for 90 minutes, at least.

What’s left? Breath, bandhas, dristi and focused movement — a precise tunnel of focused light carving through the blackness —

unleashing the source of my creativity.

It may even form a poem in its own right.

What is creative in ashtanga isn’t in what is taken away. It’s in what grows out of that which is carefully left behind.