1.1: 0.1 Setting Intentions and Practicing Theory

I begin this introduction with a recent experience from my Iyengar yoga class in order to frame my sankalpa, the Sanskrit word for intention, in this project: namely, exploring the consequences of stepping away from pedagogies that overlook students’ and teachers’ embodiments and toward contemplative writing pedagogies that view the body as a lived site of knowledge and not, primarily, as a discursive text. In response to higher education’s growing interest in contemplative education and a reaffirmed commitment within composition studies to create pedagogies that facilitate a meaningful transfer of skills, this book argues that contemplative practices should be integrated in our college writing curricula. Using the embodied insights from contemplative practices like yoga, meditation and the martial arts, among others, and fusing them with a traditional curriculum is what distinguishes contemplative education from other learning methods. Professor at Amherst University and Director of the Mind and Life Institute, Arthur Zajonc, notes that contemplative pedagogies offer teachers “a wide range of educational methods that support the development of student attention, emotional balance, empathetic connection, compassion, and altruistic behavior, while also providing new pedagogical techniques that support creativity and the learning of course content” (2010, p. 83). Writing pedagogies that integrate contemplative practices are concrete examples of how we might forward—with difference—recent attention to embodied rhetorics. For, contemplative pedagogies not only self-consciously take up the body, but they also direct focus to mindfulness, an embodied intervention that creates a rich source of practice and theory which can be used to transform the work completed in our college writing classrooms and the ways that work is transferred to other writing environments.

The rhetorical primacy of the body is guaranteed within contemplative pedagogy by mindfulness, or moment-to-moment awareness. Mindfulness is the practice of slowing down and paying close attention to the present moment. We practice mindfulness when each “thought feeling or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is” (Bishop et al., n.d., p. 8). Rather than over-identifying with or immediately reacting to thoughts and feelings as they arise, the practitioner of mindfulness creates a critical distance, a space between perception and response, that allows for eventual, intentional response as opposed to automatic, unthinking and habitual reaction (Bishop et al., n.d., p. 9). As my reader will see in the coming chapters, mindfulness forces us to be responsive to the sensations of our bodies and our corresponding feelings; it roots us in the present moment so that we may more consciously shape our future actions. Because it encourages careful consideration and choice, mindfulness fosters in writers the kind of rhetorical responsibility characteristic of embodied approaches to writing and rhetoric.

While embodied rhetorics remain a relatively new area of interest for the field of composition studies, some beginning explorations have started to document the changes that occur when awareness of the organic body productively interrupts our professional writing (Jane Hindman’s Making Writing Matter), reflections on our teaching (William Banks’ Written Through the Body; Tina Kazan’s Dancing Bodies) and our understanding of literacy as primarily verbal (Kristie Fleckenstein’s Embodied Literacies). While no two embodied writing pedagogies are exactly alike, they are all united by the common purpose of inserting the body into education by self-consciously attending to the somatics of learning and teaching. Debra Hawhee points out that recent interest in embodied pedagogy actually returns us to an ancient connection between rhetorical and athletic training. Hawhee reveals that

sophistic pedagogy displayed a curious syncretism between athletics and rhetoric, a particular crossover in pedagogical practices and learning styles, a crossover that contributed to the development of rhetoric as a bodily art: an art learned, practiced, and performed by and with the body as well as the mind. (2002, p. 144)

Whether we view them as contemporary movements or renewals of classic paradigms, these pedagogies have effectively shifted our focus to the material bodies of the students and professionals involved in the act of writing and away from a strict theoretical discourse of the subject who is written.

Raul Sanchez overviews the history of this shift in his recent College English article, Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity. Sanchez argues that the defining feature of the postmodern moment, which he situates in the 1980s to 1990s within composition studies, was an emphasis on “the subject,” a theoretical term that questioned the validity of “the writer,” a term rooted in realist materiality: “[t]he writer and the subject, then, have not been interchangeable: the latter remains a figure with which to theorize systematically, while the former is encountered materially and individually” (2012, p. 235). Noting we are now past postmodernism, Sanchez claims we are once again asking ourselves what’s “outside” of writing. Sanchez’ central query establishes recent investigations of embodied writing—and this project’s focus on contemplative writing, arguably a richer alternative—as part of a contemporary, historical movement to validate “commonsense materiality” (2012, p. 235).

Indeed, embodied writing’s exigency typically springs from the postmodernist zeal to “read away” or narratize the organic body by understanding discursive consciousness as the site of struggle and agency (see, for instance, Fleckenstein’s Writing Bodies). To look for a paradigmatic example of what happens when a pedagogy validates subjects and not writers, we need to look no further than James Berlin’s social epistemicism. Critical pedagogies like social epistemicism have justified the erasure of the organic body by insisting that our coming to consciousness is our coming to language, a powerful move that validates the kind of rhetorical analysis so key to our field. With its attention on the writer, Sanchez’ essay marks the new spaces opening up in our field for teaching methods that neither ignore the shaping powers of language nor condemn the body to a linguistic prison, classified as a trope. It is within this space that I insert contemplative writing pedagogy.

By starting from the perspective of the body, contemplative writing pedagogy represents a hopeful alternative that shares a fundamental goal with approaches under the larger umbrella of embodied rhetorics: to cultivate an understanding of embodiment as more than simply a conceptual framework (even if it may be, in part, this too) but also as a lived, fleshy reality. It is this fleshy reality my students and I encountered in our first practice of yoga together, which I narrate in my preface. Tompkins, perhaps one of the first in composition studies to gain notoriety for her enactment of embodied writing before it was even labeled as such, argues that the separation of the personal from the professional is due to interdisciplinary trends within the professoriate that insist on objectivity as a prerequisite for responsibility and truth. Being schooled within a system that places value on the “life of the mind” over the supposed banality of her flesh creates tension between the particularities of embodied experience and the promise of transcendence in Tompkins’ real life. For instance, Tompkins cannot reconcile her academic persona with her personal embodied reality. She describes in A Life in School an inverse relation between her achievements in school and her body’s physical sufferings, including wetting her bed and developing physical ailments for no explainable reasons. In Me and My Shadow, Tompkins questions this relationship by inserting her lived body into her narrative, saying, for example, that as she writes, she is “thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet” (1987, p. 173). Such a fleshy interjection startles readers and reminds us that when objectivity is construed as an erasure of the body, the split between the personal and academic becomes a metonym for the hierarchical divide between the body and mind. Tompkin’s unapologetic reference to her body doesn’t “belong” in academic writing because it breaks the rules of “mind over matter”— even if readers identify with the reality of her observations given their own lived experiences. Precisely because they disrupt, hers become examples of the body’s refusal to be ignored despite our best attempts at theorizing it away.

It is not surprising that female scholars like Tompkins have been at the forefront of critiques that center on the dangers of a disembodied academe. Historically, women have not been able to elide their embodiment because patriarchal systems have simply reduced them to their bodies, allowing men to be associated with the transcendent mind. Because patriarchal power often rests on the ability to cast women solely as body objects, academic feminism has been wary to claim the reality of the physical body lest it naturalize that body once more. Feminism’s struggle with the organic body was the subject of a talk by Toril Moi who visited my former university as I worked on this project in the spring of 2010. Despite Moi’s warnings, a struggle it remains: feminism has placed women’s bodies at the center of political and theoretical discussion and scholarship since its beginnings, but it too often continues to do so without the aim of claiming the organic body’s ordinary materiality, its integrity beyond language.

No feminist writing pedagogy can stand outside the influence of Judith Butler’s work to rhetoricize gender.² But just as Butler’s work has helped shape what it means to theorize and to practice feminism in our composition classrooms, resulting in popular field readers like Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, it has also served to naturalize the textualization of the body. Susan Bordo, pithily capturing the problem of using Butler to drive our pedagogies, writes, “Butler’s world is one in which language swallows everything up, voraciously, a theoretical pasta-machine through which the categories of competing frameworks are pressed and reprocessed as “tropes” (1993, p. 291). Focused more on what we gain (attention to the social construction of gender and its performance) than what we lose (attention to the physical world and the material body), feminist sociologist Alexandra Howson argues that we have too heavily relied on these tropes. As a result, “the body appears in much feminist theory as an ethereal presence, a fetishized concept that has become detached and totalizing for the interpretive communities it serves” (2005, p. 3). Howson tasks herself the project of corporalizing gender studies and exploring the particularity of embodiment as applied to her field, which shares with our own an interest in real people and authentic spaces of living and learning.

By dialoguing feminism with contemplative pedagogy, I hope to expand the spirit of Howson’s project and make it applicable to our field. The abstraction of the body has left personal experiences and pragmatics of embodiment felt by individual student and teacher bodies devalued for the construction and representation of corporeality as a social performance. To claim these embodied experiences as “personal” does not do enough to insist on their material reality—a reality that extends beyond semiotics. Compositionists, especially those interested in feminisms, have lost too much by resting our critique there. To the revaluation of the personal that Tompkins started years ago, I argue that feminist compositionists must add an unabashed focus on organic embodiment via the contemplative. In this book, I will examine how the metonymic confusion of the body and the personal in composition studies, while pragmatic and understandable, has tended to stunt conversations about the body by simply casting it under the net of the personal, thereby entrenching it in the circular, pedagogical debate between personal writing and critical writing, neither of which can support a serious investigation of matter.

Contemplative pedagogy moves us beyond these divisions and gives us a third possibility. In contemplative traditions like yoga, embodiment becomes the means of knowing, feeling and making sense of the world and not just a physical enactment of social forces. Contemplative pedagogies are distinctive in that they capture the importance of felt knowledge as a creative force on both content and process levels without capitulating to solipsistic or essentialist-expressivist notions of singular embodiment. The kind of felt knowledge to which I refer certainly encompasses Sondra Perl’s exploration of Eugene Gendlin’s felt sense, or the “body’s knowledge before it’s articulated in words” (2004, p. 1), but expands beyond it too, as it doesn’t preclude discursive knowingness nor need it be built entirely on intuition. In contemplative writing pedagogy as in yoga, the body and mind are both agentive and creative forces, companionate in relation to one another. The personal narrative I relate to begin my introduction captures this intelligent interdependence. Respecting the natural or organic body does not mean we ignore the dynamism of nature or the shaping powers of culture: just because I accept my body as real doesn’t mean I can’t also resist notions of authentic feminine essence on and off my sticky mat.

As far back as the 1980s, James Moffett drew our attention in his Writing, Inner Speech and Meditation to the ways Eastern practices like meditation could sustain the development of somatic awareness where our own cultural practices fell short. More recently, Mary Rose O’Reilley has argued that the contemplative tradition of claiming silence central to Buddhism and present in Quaker rituals can be of value to our classrooms. Marianthe Karanikas claims as well that “meditative exercises can help students uncover their tacit assumptions, become aware of their biases, and begin to act mindfully in any number of situations” (1997, p. 161) based on her experiments in the technical writing classroom. My embodied experiences have also led me to contemplative pedagogies. Zajonc has called such growing interest in the contemplative a “quiet revolution in higher education” (2010, p. 83). I am not alone, then, in my interest to explore what contemplative pedagogies might add to our classrooms. Our current decade has seen an explosion of interest in the contemplative within academic circles. Here are just a few of interest to those of us who teach:

• In 2001, the Mindfulness in Education Network (MiEN) was established with the purpose of “facilitat[ing] communication among all educators, parents, students and any others interested in promoting contemplative practice (mindfulness) in educational settings,” according to its website. MiEN sponsors annual conferences on mindfulness in education and maintains an active listserv of over 1,000 educators interested in sharing mindful approaches to teaching.
• In 2003, the Garrison Institute was founded as a non-profit, non-sectarian organization committed to exploring “the intersection of contemplation and engaged action in the world” and education (“Envisioning,” 2009). In 2005, the institute released a report mapping the use of contemplative educational programs and presented this “Mapping Project” at the first Garrison Institute Symposium on Contemplation and Education in April. In 2008, the institute issued a report on the growing trends of contemplative education as discussed at their education leadership forum held the same year.
• In 2006, Teacher’s College Record published a special issue on contemplative practices in higher education, which grew out of a national conference at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, highlighting the growing inclusion not only of these practices within individual classrooms but also the building of centers and programs for mindfulness on campuses (“Contemplative Practices and Education,” 2006).
• In May 2008, The Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE) was launched. Starting as an “Academic Program” of the Association for the Contemplative Mind in Society and after ten years of administering fellowships to contemplative educators, the ACMHE grew into a program of its own standing. Today, the program is a “multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional academic association with a membership of educators, scholars, and administrators in higher education,” which “promotes the emergence of a broad culture of contemplation in the academy by connecting a network of leading institutions and academics committed to the recovery and development of the contemplative dimension of teaching, learning and knowing,” according to its website (Zajonc, n.d).

Important as the above milestones are in establishing the prominence of contemplative education as a central query and legitimate practice for those of us situated within higher education, they are nowhere near the only that might be cited. Large initiatives like the ACMHE and the MiEN network and more local, institutional programs like Brown’s thriving Contemplative Studies Initiative are just a few of the many testimonies we have on how popular and invasive the recent move toward contemplative education has become within American universities. These programs and initiatives echo a larger cultural uptake of the contemplative, a critical mass of public discourse and awareness about contemplative practice. Take yoga, for instance. In 2008, 15.8 million Americans practiced yoga and spent around $5.7 billion on yoga classes and related products, according to a study done by The Yoga Journal. This level of spending amounted to an increase of 87% as compared to the journal’s previous study, conducted in 2004 (Macy, 2008). Such findings hold up locally, I’ve found. In my own small department, there are three of us who regularly practice yoga, and my small university downtown area has two yoga studios (though no stoplights).

Aside from following larger cultural trends, academic interest in the contemplative has also been driven by new scientific evidence that testifies to the beneficial psychophysiological effects of practices like mediation and yoga. Growing acceptance and inclusion of the contemplative within the university “is happening, not coincidentally [then], as the scientific research on mindfulness is expanding and producing results relevant to teaching, learning and knowing,” notes Mirabai Bush, cofounder of ACMHE (2011, p. 183). And, this expansion is itself notable: “[o]ver the last twenty years, there has been an exponential increase in research … from some eighty published papers in 1990 to over six hundred in 2000” (Smalley & Winston, 2010, p. 2).

Bush’s comments remind us that the focus on mindfulness is the key to contemplative education, not which methods are used to cultivate it. Contemplative teachers willingly model mindfulness for their students and coach students to use mindfulness to enhance their creativity, attentional focus, awareness of others and proprioperception. In this book, I am most interested in contemplative pedagogies that incorporate yoga as the primary means of developing mindfulness of the body as an epistemic origin; though, the insights contained within can be cultivated using a variety of other contemplative practices and can be easily translated to other contemplative pedagogies provided that they follow the tenants of mindfulness. See figure 1: “The Tree of Contemplative Practices” for just some of the many practices that engage us in mindfulness training. Barry M. Kroll, for instance, provides a complementary but different approach in his recent, The Open Hand: Arguing as An Art of Peace. Kroll details his creation of a freshman seminar devoted to the instruction of non-adversarial methods of argumentation—deliberative, conciliatory and integrative— through, in large part, the incorporation of contemplative practices and meditative arts. He uses Aikido as a way to teach students how they might “cultivate awareness and equanimity in the midst of conflict” (2013, p. 3). Kroll goes to the movements of Aikido as a humble practitioner and introduces those as “a physical analogy for the tactics of arguing” (2013, p. 12) in much the same way that I introduce yoga to first-year students as a means of reframing and navigating the writing process.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Tree of Contemplative Practices. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, 2012. (permissions granted)

Fellow contemplative educator, O’Reilley, warns of the importance of both finding inspiration from others using contemplative methods in their courses while also staying true to our motivations for incorporating those methods in our classrooms in the first place. In her book on using Buddhism and Quakerism in her writing and literature classrooms, O’Reilley cautions us that “when we talk about teaching within a contemplative frame of reference, I think we should keep our prescriptions to a minimum. I want to sketch the lines of a certain approach, but I don’t want to trespass into another teacher’s prayer hall” (1998, p. 14). I proceed in much the same way here, using this book to document how I have created contemplative spaces in my writing classes inspired by my personal practice of yoga and the ways I have begun to see yoga and writing as complementary creative endeavors. And while I could choose any modern practice of yoga, I’ve chosen Iyengar because it is what I practice and because it is highly adaptable, as I note in my preface, though this style is also arguably the most influential school of modern yoga (DeMichelis, 2005, p. 15). I invite my readers to find their own “prayer halls.”

In concentrating my efforts around yoga, I am echoing the calls within Judith Beth Cohen’s and Geraldine DeLuca’s recent articles, The Missing Body—Yoga and Higher Education and Headstands, Writing and the Rhetoric of Self-Acceptance, respectively, to actively seek out the connections between writing pedagogy and yoga practice. Cohen argues that the most obvious connection between the two is the focus on process and movement, and DeLuca inhabits this fluid process in her article as she documents the difficultly of accepting her limitations as a yoga student and discovers a parallelism in this humbling exercise that she can draw upon as a writing teacher. Through her struggling practice of headstand, sirsasana in Sanskirt, DeLuca learns the pedagogical value of “radical self-acceptance,” or of accepting where she is in the present moment instead of trying to push away the parts of her reality she’d rather not face. In doing so, she challenges the commonplace that forward motion is the only way growth in our writing and teaching of writing can be measured.

Like critical thinking, mindfulness is a particular, intentional application of awareness and is best seen as a skill that can be developed with practice. As a yogi, I practice mindfulness each time I sit on my mat to mediate and each time I flow through a series of poses, a vinyasana, linking breath and movement together. It is this sense of mindfulness I hoped the students in my preface were exposed to as they experienced moving their bodies through poses. But, mindfulness doesn’t just stay on the mat; not only can mindfulness learned through contemplative traditions transfer to our daily activities such as writing, but the very act of performing our day-to-day experiences can become a viable means of practicing mindfulness and learning to develop contemplative presence. Thus, the act of teaching can itself become a contemplative practice when driven by mindfulness, and our most mundane classroom routines (such as taking roll or pausing for reflection) can become contemplative exercises in themselves (by using this time to have students sit in a moment of silence).

It is in this spirit of self-acceptance for where I am in the present moment that I offer this book as an initial exploration of how a feminist writing pedagogue who is also a committed yogi might take yoga into the writing classroom and make sense of what happens in both practical and theoretical terms. My comprehensive goal is to see what feminist theory, writing studies and contemplative practice have to offer each other, and how we might build responsible incarnations of contemplative pedagogy in their generative coupling. This is important work as the field investigates how crucial metacognition is to students’ ability to learn and transfer writing skills and processes. Yoga offers mindfulness as the “meta” link that bridges learning, self-reflection and movement. While my investigation will at times take me to the practical and at other moments to the theoretical, it is grounded firmly in the lessons of my embodied experience on the mat and in the classroom. Like O’Reilley, I “[l]et methodology follow from the particular” (1998, p. 14) in my application of contemplative writing pedagogy.

I noticed early on in my own training that both yogis and compositionists share a fundamental premise about the importance of lived theory: as a master of yoga has put it, “your practice is your laboratory” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 102). This humble attitude means that contemplative educators must be willing to show their vulnerability as learners in the classroom, alongside their students. As a colleague recently said in response to a conference presentation of mine on contemplative pedagogy, the most radical element of this kind of teaching is the way it positions teachers as students too and asks them to engage directly in the learning experiences of their classrooms, destabilizing their complete authority in the classroom. Like others before me, I am not a certified yoga teacher, but I still teach my students basic poses and breathing exercises. Indeed, I have found that approaching these activities as a learner too helps to shift the power dynamics in my classrooms in productive ways. And, while I’ve had the very good fortune of bringing in my yoga teachers to help expose my writing students to contemplative practice, this is not a necessary element of contemplative pedagogy. Despite a handful of visits each semester from these yoga teachers, I remain the primary resource for students since we practice every class meeting. For readers contemplating using contemplative practice in their own classrooms, though, I do encourage reaching out to local contemplative communities to find support. I never expected to find yoga instructors willing to teach my students for nothing but a cup of coffee and a few conversations in return—at not just one but at the two universities I taught during the drafting of this book—but I did. Contemplative communities are full of giving and generous people, as my experience highlights.

In sum, there are many ways to integrate contemplation, silence and focused movement into our classes, and contemplative pedagogy can support all of these ways. What distinguishes contemplative pedagogies is their attention to the body as a primary site for mindful reflection, contemplative awareness and centeredness—not the practice of yoga. Just as a voice teacher might instruct students on deep belly breathing or a drama teacher might get students moving around, we too can teach students mindful breathing and movement to help them work through writing anxiety and show them stretches to help them generate new ideas. The goal of contemplative pedagogy is not to turn students into martial artists or yogis; rather, it is to show them what they can learn by paying attention to their bodies.

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