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Zen and The Pen: The Balance of Effort and Ease

When I was a child, seesaws were fun until they weren’t. When I could find balance and unity with a trustworthy friend on the opposite side, there was harmony, levity, and joy. When I exerted effort, I pushed off into the sky. When my counterpart flew, I grounded down with ease. The rhythm continued unless someone jumped ship and the other came crashing down to a tailbone pain like no other.

Like seesaws, yoga and writing can be most productive and fulfilling when effort and ease are in sync. Recently, my yoga teacher, Yhanni, encouraging her students to find such a balance, shared a quote by Joel Kramer:

“Yoga is a dance between control and surrender—between pushing and letting go—and when to push and when to let go becomes part of the creative process; part of the open-ended exploration of your being.”

So, effort, or Sthira in Sanskrit, is the control, the pushing, the stability, determination, and strength. The ease, or Sukha, is the surrender, the letting go, the pleasure, contentment, and bliss. One without the other results in a practice that doesn’t serve the mind, body, or spirit.

For example, when I was teaching yoga, I had a student who only liked Power Yoga. Wanting to move fast and work hard, she had little patience for my multi-level approach. As I tried to accommodate all my students with variations for each pose, she insisted on doing the most challenging options, even if that meant being out of proper alignment, risking injury, compromising her breath work, and sometimes landing on her tailbone. Without ease, she never seemed to find contentment in being who or where she was at any given moment. In pushing, pushing, pushing, she didn’t take time to listen to what her body and mind needed or recognize that those needs might be different day by day, moment by moment. Her practice looked tense and exhausting, counter to the peace and strength yoga is meant to bring.

All ease without effort can be equally detrimental to a practice. Students who never challenge themselves beyond their comfort zones miss opportunities to learn and grow. With no effort in yoga, there is no muscle engagement for stability, no strength building for progress, no satisfaction in growing, and ultimately no bliss. Like unearned vacations, ease without effort doesn’t bring the same rewards and ultimate joy. 

Like yoga, writing is also what Kramer calls “a dance between control and surrender” or a balance between effort and ease. The control is the quantitative productivity, like the daily number of words or pages, hours at the computer, the plotting, outlining, and research. The surrender is the creative bliss, the stepping away from your work to clear your head, dream, read, and experience everything you need for inspiration. 

As a writer, if I find myself piling too much weight on the effort side of the scale, I just think of the horror on Shelley Duvall’s face in The Shining when her character finds her husband’s novel manuscript and the pages contain nothing but one repeating line: 

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

I’m reminded that quantity without quality is nonsense, and effort without ease is a recipe for insanity.

Sticking with movie references, Dirty Dancing comes to mind when pondering a writing life with all ease and no effort. Imagine spending all your time dreaming up story worlds and characters, talking about writing, reading great authors, and never sitting down to work. That wasted creativity and inspiration would be like “putting Baby in the corner.” Baby needs to move, dance, and flourish. Writers sometimes just need to write and maybe do a little bit of yoga to find balance and remember that without ease, there is no story, and without effort, there is no book.

Michele Alouf
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Michele Alouf

Michele Alouf is a founding member of the Story Street Writers and a master's degree candidate in creative writing at Harvard Extension School. When she’s not working on her first novel, What Lies in Orange Skies, she can be found in her kitchen trying to cook, read, and balance in tree pose without getting burned. Her short stories are forthcoming or published in Bridge Eight, Drunk Monkeys, the Wordrunner e-Chapbook Fiction Anthology--Salvaged, Grim & Gilded, and Sad Girl Diaries. Michele previously owned a yoga business and wrote for a local magazine. She has two grown children and lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband, John, and her mini Goldendoodle, Coco "Mo."

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