1.2: 0.2 Practicing Theory

Just as my writing classroom is the locus of invention for my teaching theory, my own yoga practice was the first research space for this project. While I’ve followed a home practice of yoga for years, it was only more recently that I began to explore the connections between yoga and writing—and only because they kept colliding in ways I could no longer ignore. Knowing how centered and calm I felt after practicing yoga, I found myself naturally creating a writing routine that integrated yoga breaks. As often as my schedule would allow, I’d wake up early to write and when I felt my attention wander, I would break for time on my mat. Initially, these breaks were simply geared to get me away from the computer and were taken more with the intent to develop my sadhana or practice of yoga than to sustain my writing. Even so, after these breaks, I felt revived and … something more. I began to see that “something more” as a sense of mindfulness and clarity cultivated through my yogasana practice that transferred into my proceeding writing sessions. These were different breaks than those I took to watch television, take a nap or fold laundry; none of those acts felt like a continuation of the writing process the way that yoga did. Yoga, true to its promise to cultivate mindfulness that transfers off the mat, was helping me grow a deep awareness I could feel seeping into my writing. Of course, this awareness remained only as strong as I was; my motivation to write still threw a fence around my attentiveness.

It only seemed natural to begin integrating more yoga into my long writing sessions, leaving my mat open near my computer in order to isolate poses as needed, such as stretching my rounded “computer” shoulders with gomukhasana arms, hooking the hands together near the shoulder blades by sending one arm up to the sky and down the body and the other around the back body to reach up and meet the first. I didn’t see this practice in line with the commercially-popular “office yoga,” which is stretching for its own sake, but as part of a writing process that worked with the body and respected its effect on making meaning as much as that of the mind. When my body was tense and tired, I was less likely to read my sources compassionately and more likely to skim them for points of weakness without listening to their arguments. As my body self-awareness grew through a combined practice, I gradually came to see yoga not as a miracle cure to all of what ails writers, but as a helpful tool for us to transform our mental and physical writing habits and rituals.

The metaphoric and the literal began to bleed together through my integrated practice and made me begin to question the value for writers of not just practicing yoga but also understanding the philosophies behind such contemplative practices. I was drawn to the metaphoric connections between the practice of writing and the practice of yoga; they suddenly screamed for my attention. Yoga, both as a philosophy and as a tradition of movement and breath awareness, is highly literary and symbolic. Literal balance developed in asanas or poses is thought to translate to a metaphoric balance in the yogi’s life. In tree pose, for instance, you learn to find balance in the constant sway of your body by developing a mindbody awareness and strength that works with such movement in order not to dominate but to channel the sway productively. Tree pose literally trains the body to find balance, and this is understood to transfer off the sticky mat and to give the yogi poise and balance amidst the undulations of life. Nothing ever simply stays on the mat. The body is the hinge for such lessons so that when we learn to work with it, we grow and advance in all aspects of our lives. Yoga’s core focus on balance, flexibility, consciousness, non-violence and awareness was intimately familiar since these were qualities I recognized in good writing and as possessed by strong, feminist writers. These were qualities I could appreciate in both forms of self-expression before I ever began to write my way through them. I’d taught Rogerian argument in my writing classes as a means of encouraging students to question our society’s “argument culture,” as Deborah Tannen (1998) calls it, for instance, and I’d long admired disability studies writer Nancy Mairs for her pithy and often humorous reminders to become aware of our writing bodies.

At the same time that I was exploring the union of yoga and writing, I came into contact with Jeffery Davis’ The Journey from the Center to the Page (2004), which advocates infusing yoga practice into the creative writing process. Davis’ intent to use yoga to get writers to work with and through the physical body and its experiences resonated with me even if his call for “authenticity” and his concentration on fiction writing did not. In the end, his book serves more as an inspiration for what I describe here rather than a source. As my own sustained practice of yoga converged with the process of my burgeoning academic research on embodiment and writing, I saw how yoga provided not only a new lens for my work but also a set of practices I could use to bring the body into the domain of the writing classroom, hopefully teaching students to think about their bodies as generators of meaning. This contemplative goal has consequences for feminist pedagogy.