Effortless Essay Effort
There are many paths to the summit of your essay and presentation, but some get you there a lot quicker than others, as well as taking you to all the best views along the way and leaving you with energy as you reach the peak. Instead of spending all of your valuable time and energy blazing a new path to the top every time, we can learn how to climb this mountain with ease and efficiency— enabling us to stay focused inside on the experience and growth we seek to teach.
We’ve broken this down into three essential steps. First, we must define our climb with an outline. Second, we learn to 'sit and slide’ through the writing process. And third, we must walk this path through the essay again, and again, through the editing process.
Step 1: Define Your Climb with an Outline
Creating an outline is one of your most valuable assets in the writing process. Interestingly, it is also one of the most overlooked. So many times we feel that we are too strapped for time to create an outline, which is funny, because an outline’s purpose is to save you time. An outline saves you time by ensuring that your path will lead to the intended destination without too many detours. An outline can be adjusted much more quickly and efficiently than an essay, similar to how much easier it is to change the blue prints to a building than to fix a building itself, right?! This is perhaps the greatest strength of an outline, giving you the ability to zoom out quickly and easily whenever needed without getting bogged down by the details. An outline also saves you time writing your intro, as it makes it clear what steps your essay took to the destination.
A good outline doesn’t just save you time, but it is also unlocks your creative potential and empowers you to write at different times. Imagine walking through the woods without a path, you would spend all of your energy trying to mark your trail, and look for signs that you are going in the right direction. Did you bring enough water? You wouldn’t be able to relax and enjoy the walk. With an outline, a path through the woods, you can breathe easier, you can soak up the views, and explore the more subtle aspects of the experience. Also, we don't always have a huge chuck of time to go on this walk— so an outline allows us to walk certain parts of the path when we have the time— instead of having to start from the trail head every time, you can just write one part of the essay, and then come back to it later.
As we approach creating our outline, you can ask yourself ‘How did I climb to my new level of awareness on this topic? What steps did I take? How did I arrive here?” As Shambhavananda always tells us, we can only teach what we have ourselves learned through experience. Your experience may not seem as profound as the teachings of the Sutras, or satsangs, but don’t be fooled— your growth on the topic represents the yogic process itself. Respect your individual growth process as the miracle that it really is— a spiritual transformation.
An outline itself looks like a ladder, with clear simple rungs that your students can climb from their ground level of understanding to a higher level of awareness on the topic. Traditionally an outline consists of 2-3 main points that clearly point us towards our destination. Each of those major points should supported by Sutra/Satsang texts, or a personal explanations and unpacking. An outline should be simple enough to talk out aloud to a friend, or scan through quickly, without getting so bogged down in the details that they forget where you’re going to or coming from. For example, the outline of what you just read about outlines looks like this:
Define your climb with an outline
Outlines save you time
Maps the path
Easy to adjust
Writes your into
Outlines unlock your creativity and empower you
Woods without a path analogy
Outline allows you to focus on more subtle aspects
Allows you to start / stop when you have time
Beginning an outline
How did you arrive where you are?
Teach from your experience
Your experience is real
What an outline looks like
Clear and simple rungs of a ladder
2-3 main points pointing clearly
Support for those points
Step 2: Sit & Slide through the writing process.
As we learned earlier in the training, the process of generating the material for our teaching consists of climbing, sitting and sliding. As we look now at the process of putting that content into a clear and cohesive essay for others to enjoy we find those same principles are still with us. In this case, the ‘climb’ is our outline, and the 'sit and slide’ defines our writing process. As we saw in our content-generating process, knowledge can become bondage if it’s not coupled with our practice. The same is true of the writing process— writing can put you in your head if you aren’t working to bring that awareness within. The more internal awareness you bring to your writing process, the more that writing will reflect and support your highest potential.
We want our writing to come from the heart, not the head. If that connection is there when you write, it will be there when you teach. Similar to our outline process, structure is a great liberator. Having an outline allows you to open and feel as you write, without worrying about where you are going. Similarly, if bring some structure to your actual writing process by taking time to sit, burn a little incense, and get quiet inside, you’ll find that the writing process will begin to unfold from a deeper place inside. Our highest aspiration is actually to ‘get out of the way’ when we write, to go beyond our mind, not to get involved with it. We might associate sentiments like this with poetry, or painting, but in the yogic tradition, this is the foundation of all teaching.
As Shambhavananda teaches:
“How do you grow? You serve others. And how do you serve others? You get out of the way. You learn to surrender yourself and enough of your stuff that something of a purer and higher nature can come through. The highest thing you can do in this world is to be a vehicle for the shakti. That’s what absolutely brings the most growth. The best teachings that come through me are not coming from my mind, my intellect or my knowledge. They are coming from the connection that flows through me for the benefit of my students. Tremendously serving others is one of the highest practices you can do. So how do you do that?… You open your heart and you let go of your little self. You surrender and you allow the energy to flow. Then wonderful energy and deep wisdom can come through you. If you are trying to teach from a textbook, or if you are trying to teach from some rules that you read somewhere, other efforts are meaningless. But when you teach from the heart, when you open up and you gather in the spiritual energy from your connection, then it not only benefits others, but it also benefits you. The things that I hear coming out of my mouth sometimes shock me, because they are not coming from my mind.” - SP, 126
At first this quote could be interpreted as saying that teaching is anti-reading, or anti-outline, etc— but that is a limited interpretation. As Swami Rudrananda taught, we have to do the work so we can have something to surrender— we have to read, research, and outline, so that when we sit down to write we can surrender and feel within and know we are pointed in the right direction as we let the Shakti flow through us. And just like a slide, we only slide down as far as we climbed up, right? If you haven’t done much work with the topic, the slide is over quickly. But if you have done the work, the slide lasts and lasts, and that experience becomes your writing.
On a practical level, if you have taken time to create an outline, and then taken time to sit and connect before you write, the only thing left is to recognize when you need to take breaks. If you start to feel your energy in your head, take a break, drink some water, take a walk around the room, do some yoga. And don’t just give your body a break, give your mind a break. In the medicine buddha practice we are told to “rest the mind in the great seal of emptiness”, the Maha-mudra— this can be a great asset to you in the writing room. Challenge yourself to take a break and not think about anything, just listen to the sounds around you, let everything get quiet. This will allow you to reset, and to let your best ideas can come through in a natural way. I have found this to be true for almost every single essay I have written.
Oh, and one last thing, don’t waste a second writing your intro. That’s last. The introduction is the hardest part— if you start there you may never finish. So all of this writing pertained to the major points of your outline.
Step 3: Climb, Sit, Slide through your editing process
At this point in the process you have created an outline, and then taken time to write your paper from within the framework of that outline while maintaining a connection to your heart. Now we approach the editing process. The editing process is sort of like a kid climbing up a slide, sitting at the top, and then sliding down, over and over again. We do our best to respect the whole process as we edit, to ensure that we keep the level of our work at it’s highest.
Once you’ve completed the body of your work, take time to sit again, re-connect inside with your direct experience of the topic, and then let yourself read your work with a quiet mind. Note where it drifts from the original outline. If you were connecting inside while you wrote, there’s a good chance that this is a very beneficial drift. Take your time, feel with it, and change the outline accordingly. Similar to our writing process, if we are staying connected inside we can trust our intuition. If we get stuck in our heads, then it’s better to take a break and come back later.
There is often a ripple effect when we begin to change our outline— one change begets another change, on and on. Keep using your practice to stay connected to your feeling of the topic inside, the mountaintop this whole essay is driving towards. Respect the whole process, and watch it serve you. Climb through the material, stay connected, and slide down with it. Over and over again, until it feels fluid. Each time you do this, your work gets clearer and clearer— just like a kid who can climb up the ladder and then slide down in what appears to be one fluid motion.— when it feels easy to go through your essay and outline, then you’re probably done!
At this point you can go back and utilize your outline to help you form the body of your introduction. We will be looking alot more at the introduction itself in the next chapter, but for now, the outline you have produced almost writes your introduction for you.