Against Motivation

on ghost yoga & the power of routine

When I’m in Florida for an extended period of time, I often have at least one beyond-the-veil experience. But by week four–my last week down here–all my days had remained very earthbound: writing in the dark hours of early morning, the struggle and sweat of training, taking my dog to the New Smyrna Dunes Park, where he rolls and rolls until his golden coat is heavy with sand. And then, earlier this week, I went to a sunrise hot yoga class at a place I have been to before and like. At the end, the instructor turned out the lights and came around to place cold towels over our eyes. A little while later, I felt the weight of someone’s hands on the top of my head. The pressure was strong but also calming. The instructor had mentioned hands-on adjustments and I figured she had come back around, but the feeling of touch stayed, that firm steady pressure. I lifted my little towel, rolled my head to the side, and could see that the instructor was on the other side of the room.

I straightened my head and pressed the towel over my eyes. Maybe I’d just drifted off for a minute and slipped into a dream-space. But the feeling was still there, the clear strong sensation of hands pressing down on top of my head. I thought immediately of my dad, even though I find it hard to believe that my dad would be hanging out in a hot yoga class at seven in the morning. If he could go anywhere he would be off having adventures. Maybe the yoga studio just has a haunted corner. Who can say. Still, he was the first person I thought of and then I felt something in my chest crack open and I started to cry. Fuck this, I thought, and tried to sit up but the pressure kept me on the mat, crying in the dark room.

When I was young I developed a trick for when I felt like crying: I would shake my head three times, like a dog throwing off water, and then the sensation would go away. To this day I have a horror of crying in public.I would rather write through it, run through it, punch through it, lift through it, fight through it.

After what felt like an eternity the pressure vanished as quickly and completely as it had arrived. The instructor turned on the lights and opened the door.

A few hours later, I got a notification from the studio reminding me to leave a review.

How many stars?

I was at the sunrise class in the first place because it was a variation on my morning routine: get up early-ish, feed dog, drink water, make coffee, stretch, take three deep breaths, don’t look at phone for at least an hour, start writing. Very simple. I had just finished reading a draft of a new project and needed to take a few days to untangle some mental knots, so I found another activity (quiet, screenless) to replace the writing part. Sometimes there is this idea that routines are rigid and dull, but repetition can actually lead us to very unexpected (possibly supernatural) places. Equilibrium as a gateway to wildness.

I wish I wrote more. I want to finish my novel but I don’t know how to stay motivated. I want to prioritize writing but other things keep getting in the way. I work with a lot of writers and these are things I hear all the time.

Find a routine. This is the advice I press upon my students more than anything else. Simple, yes, but sometimes the simple stuff is the hardest. So many writers have an idea of the work they want to be doing, but they have not attended to the how. When will I write? Where? And what in my life needs to change in order for this space to become available? What do I need to do differently? What do I need to start saying no (or yes) to?

A routine is not a rigid list of requirements; it is a spectrum of activity that can be adapted as needed. Which is to say that routine is less about the specific actions taken and more about a steadiness of presence. Routine is a form of self-hypnosis, a way to imagine ourselves as capable of whatever feat we are attempting. Every time we abide our routine we put a stone in the path to the place we are trying to reach.

Steadiness does not come naturally to me. For a long time I had no routine. I had places I needed to be on a regular basis and more often than not I was there, but my days did not have any kind of internal structure. Some nights I slept for six hours and some nights I slept for two. I’d blow through meal times until I started to feel “weird,” only to realize I’d not had anything but coffee and soda for hours. My mornings were a blur of oversleeping, scrolling, and then rushing, rushing, rushing. Where did the hours go? It was often hard to say.

Then we adopted a dog with enough energy to power a small city. We were living in Brooklyn at the time and soon I was waking early to walk Oscar two miles to Prospect Park, so he could burn some energy during off-leash hours, where he made friends and enemies in equal measure, hunted for discarded food in the bushes, and wallowed in the occasional mud pit. I started to do more-or-less the same thing every morning. I would see the same people and the same dogs. I would get coffee at the same place.

[Oscar at the beach]

Years later, boxing would overhaul my day-to-day. When I was training for my first fight, I was forced to attend to the basics, like going to bed and getting up at the same time, eating well, drinking water, mobility (which is how I started with hot yoga in the first place). I noticed a shift in my writing life too. For years, I had relied on artist residencies for the deep hard work; I’d retreat into the woods, stay up for days at a time, have at least one emotional meltdown, and emerge with a big chunk of a new book. But once I was moving within this new design I found it possible to work alongside my life. Instead of having ideas about writing in the morning I actually started writing in the morning (this is by far the best time for me creatively). Sometimes people ask me if I worry about boxing taking time away from writing but boxing has so totally rehabilitated how I treat myself and how I organize my time that I now have more energy to give to my work and not less.

One thing that really helped me was discarding any attachment to motivation. Motivation is the fun-but-flaky friend who overpromises and underdelivers. Motivation is unreliable, and it is not going to get most of us through a book or any other long-range project. Octavia Butler: “Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.” A routine or a practice, meanwhile, is not dependent on how we feel in a given moment. On some days I am possessed by “an enthusiasm of the moment.” I can’t wait to write or to train. On other days I dread the work that awaits. Or just feel a little indifferent. But this is the beauty of routine, the way it can carry you from one day to the next. You don’t even have to believe in yourself all the time if you can just believe in the process you have committed to. That steadiness of presence.

I can remember my dad getting up before dawn to walk a few miles before he went to work. Routine is a scrap of stability in an unstable world.

This time of year is always a bit of a weird transition. Ever since I moved from Florida to New York, I’ve come home for a chunk of winter break, a lucky thing to be able to do. It’s always hard to go. I was in Florida just long enough to slide back into my old rhythms, just long enough for it to feel like my life again. But this is another thing I love about routine: you can take it with you wherever you go. Routine is a shelter. It gives us someplace to be, regardless of the moment we’re in. It gives us a place to metabolize experience. There’s a good chance that tomorrow morning, when I get up early to write, I’ll attempt to put language to what it felt like to attend a sunrise yoga class only to be held in place by an invisible presence that might-or-might-not have been my dead father until the work of the morning was done.