Existing in creative flow

Or how I became a writer as a result of of being yoga

Sunrise over Balmoral Beach, Sydney, 4 April 2025

Dear Sunshiners,

Today is my birthday. I never used to tell people that but now I think, Why not? It’s a fact, after all. Plus we should all have a ‘festival of me’ at least once a year. So, it’s my birthday and I love that it has coincided with an opportunity to send out a newsletter, the first such opportunity because it’s the first year I’ve had one.

In the way of cosmic timing, as she would call it, I had a phone call with my yoga teacher, Shiva Rea, early yesterday. Early because she is in Los Angeles and I am in Sydney. I see her on screen several times a week; at the moment it’s not live because of the time difference so I practise to the recordings. Originally, nearly two decades ago, it was on DVD. I read about Shiva in Yoga Journal, for which she wrote a column, and ordered her first DVD from overseas. That’s how things happened then: discovering teachers and teachings in a magazine, waiting patiently for the DVD to arrive!

At first I wasn’t sure if Shiva was teaching in a way that was interesting to me, considering I already had a yoga teacher, Judy Krupp, I’d been with for years and I was going to class regularly. And by then I was teaching because Judy had encouraged me – actually, practically ordered me! – to teach.

Then it clicked. More like, it was a waterfall of awareness that Shiva’s way of teaching was so different to anything I had experienced, so interesting and creative and glorious, that the path of following her was inevitable. She also gave me back something I had lost since I started teaching in 2002: being a student. I had missed it so much, and there was a form of grief attached to its absence. But Shiva’s DVDs returned it to me. With her in charge, I was free again.

Both of those women changed my life. Shiva continues to change it. Without her and the way she teaches, I don’t believe I’d be writing.

To my way of seeing things, Shiva exists in constant creative flow. She also does not see any boundaries between me, her, the world, the universe. Distance does not matter; we are together, as she would say, in the quantum space. The way she teaches also elicits creativity from the body, where it necessarily has to live because our body is our home, and body-mind is real in a way I once struggled to understand but now know completely.

She also teaches us to dance. With her MA in dance anthropology, she has an academic grounding in the importance of dance in cultures all around the world. Her Trance Dance teaching – Rhythm and Flow as she calls it now – was the final turn of the key for me to unlock creative flow. I danced for years as a child. Adolescent self-consciousness - and other things - took me away from my body, as it takes so many girls away. Once the dance returned I leapt back into embodied joy.

With Shiva I have danced through the streets and on the beach of Brunswick Heads with silent-disco headphones on. In a massive temporary dome at Moore Park in Sydney on what she called ‘exfoliating carpet’. In an open-sided yoga space in Bali, humidity pressing in. All the while I have smiled and laughed and felt like I was right where I needed to be. That is one of her gifts: creating the space for so many people to be right where they need to be. And another is this: saying years ago that we should not think of it as doing yoga but being yoga. For me, everything flows from the practice. Writing fiction, interviewing country music artists, teaching, making content for social media, writing this newsletter for you – all are being yoga.

So I’m going to dance for my birthday. And reflect on the Jyotish reading I had yesterday afternoon, which Shiva had arranged, with a man named Sastri in India. Jyotish is Vedic astrology. One can, as with anything like this, take it or leave it, but I had my Vedic chart done a while ago and knew it contained accuracies. Far more than anything I’ve seen in Western astrology. The chart is a story, his reading was a story; it could be a story I tell myself or one I don’t.

As a novelist I obviously tell stories. To you, and thank you so much for reading them. I tell them to myself. They haven’t always been good, over the years. These days they mostly are. But it’s a practice. A constant practice of showing up for myself, for others, for the other stories I tell. This is what I’ve learnt too, all these years on the mat: showing up and sticking with it are hard practices and also very much worth doing.

Thank you for showing up here for me. I will keep showing up for you. Not because I have to but because I want to and it’s a privilege to have this means of connection with others, just as I marvel that a WhatsApp call can connect me to a woman whom I first read about decades ago in an American magazine and who I never thought in my life I’d ever meet. But as she said to me yesterday, we were always meant to know each other through time and space.

This is how I always intended to write these newsletters, rather than them being only about telling you news, so I hope this works for you as mostly I’ll keep doing it. But there’s news too, and I’ll keep it brief.

Thank you to everyone who came to Gleebooks to see

Natasha Lester

and, tangentially, me last Sunday (pic below from the event) and special thanks to anyone who came to Panania Library on Thursday evening – what a wonderful group of librarians and readers!

Also, there’s a new episode of Dear Rach & Soph in which

Rachael Johns

and I offer ‘writer therapy’ to WA writer Emily Paull, whose debut novel The Distance Between Dreams is out now from Fremantle Press. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

What I’m reading: After interviewing Catherine Greer for the pod, I was planning to finish reading her novel, The Bittersweet Bakery Café, on screen. But I didn’t want to, so I bought it in print and it is so good. Catherine is a wonderful writer – assured and strong, empathetic and vivid. And I loved hearing from one of the Panania librarians that after listening to Catherine on the pod she read the novel and is now reading Catherine’s non-fiction! That’s one of things I really hope comes from Dear Rach & Soph: readers discovering new writers. So I’m chuffed it has worked.

What I’m listening to: ‘Ardmona Rd’, a country-pop single from young Melbourne artist Tom Nethersole. I interviewed Tom for Sunburnt Country Music (not published yet) and he was a delight.

What I’m watching: Spooky Scary Storytime, a TikTok series that is now on YouTube (although mainly still on TT - her handle is ashleeinc). Nashvillean Ashlee narrates spooky stories that other people send her in such a way that you simply can’t not watch. Other people do this on TikTok (and, no doubt, elsewhere) but she’s the best. Proof in action that there’s no formula to telling stories successfully - so often it comes down to the individual who is telling them.

Thanks for reading this far, and as ever please let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to cover in this newsletter.

Until next time,

Sophie x

Latest novel: Art Hour at the Duchess Hotel

Next novel: Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon