1.3: 0.3 Bringing Together the Feminist and the Contemplative

My practice of yoga has been a space for me to enact my feminism. Through yoga, I continue to learn acceptance of my body while not reducing myself to it. When I read the Yoga Sutras and stumble across passages about moving toward self-understanding and enlightenment through union of the body, heart and mind, I am struck by the congruence between these goals and feminisms’ focus on egalitarianism and experience as the means by which change and understanding occurs (the personal is always political). And so my thinking about contemplative pedagogy is filtered through my feminism and, indeed, strengthened by it. In turn, I use this book to explore not only the theory and practice of embracing contemplative pedagogy in the writing classroom but also to explore what happens when we consciously approach this pedagogy as feminist. Yoga can be seen as a feminist’s guilty pleasure, a time when she submits to our society’s obsessive regulations of women’s bodies to be tight and toned, and feeds the capitalist-patriarchal system by purchasing hundred-dollar Lululemon (lululemon athletica®) yoga pants because they make her backside look good. What this characterization points to is the problematic ways that yoga has been commercialized and gendered in American society and not necessarily an intolerance for feminism at yoga’s core.

Yoga’s commercialization has sometimes reduced this contemplative practice to a form of exercise, and a hypersexualized one at that. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the most committed of yogis. A popular journal for practioners, Yoga Journal, recently published a letter written by the publication’s co-founder which condemned the magazine’s ads for their use of almost- or completely-naked models to sell products ranging from yoga clothes to yoga mats. If modern incarnations of yoga reveal capitalist misogyny, and classic yoga texts like the Yoga Sutras are immersed in Eastern patriarchy, then what makes yoga—or contemplative philosophy and practice altogether—useful for feminist inquiry?

While I recognize the important historical and cultural complications raised by this line of questioning, my use of Iyengar yoga and yoga philosophy as a mainstay for my pedagogy’s implication in the contemplative takes a hopeful view of its usefulness for feminist writing pedagogies. While I do recognize that ancient yogic texts are steeped in the traditions of patriarchy and that some modern Western applications still reflect these traditions as well as our own, I believe there are just as many congruencies between yoga and feminism ripe for consideration, such as a commitment to change through transformation as well as a spirit of equanimity that eschews binaries. While the task of delineating the ways in which yoga philosophy is reflective of the patriarchies in which it is practiced is worthwhile, that is not my aim here. Rather, I am engaged in understanding how yoga can sustain the kind of feminist, embodied-contemplative inquiry I am after.

Feminist studies is uniquely situated in the university as interdisciplinary. This refusal to sit still and play nice when it comes to matters of academic institutionalism is a feature it shares with contemplative pedagogy, which has sprung up in departments as diverse as biology and religion. I use this interdisciplinarity to my advantage. A key figure for me is scientist-theorist Donna Haraway who provides a means to reclaim our writing bodies as lived, fleshy presences—the kind around which Tompkins creates personal vignettes—while avoiding essentialist criticism that tends to follow claims to the organic body. Because Haraway speaks from the point of view as a scientist, she is interested in models of subjectivity that better reflect our lived realities as biological beings living as part of and among a material world; and because she too writes from her perspective as a feminist theorist, she wants models that do not eschew the theoretical progress we have made in the name of postmodernism, which has helped us understand the social construction of many of our “givens.” Instead of seeking any sort of definitive answers by drawing new lines between nature and culture, Haraway finds promise in the indeterminacy of materiality and the way respect for our flesh necessitates a stance of openness as opposed to the false closure of other postmodern variations of the subject, which tend to espouse a thinly-veiled linguistic determinism. Haraway’s alternative epistemology consequently offers an alternative to the etheralization of the body that Howson targets by leaving the organic body as a source of necessary tension to keep our theorizing in check—a tension too often lost. As a result, she mediates contemplative pedagogies’ focus on the center and poststructualist decentering by insisting on the generative paradox of embracing both simultaneously. Simply, she helps me to theorize the writer within a field of “commonsense materiality” (Sanchez, 2012, p. 235) while remaining sensitive to the rhetorical acts that situate this writer also within a field of discourse. While feminists writing today have sometimes leapfrogged over her in attempt to embrace newer theorists, Haraway, I believe, leads the way in our journey to rethink the body materially and in a spirit true to contemplative practice.

Haraway doesn’t just address our dangerous tendency to efface materiality; she pins hope on the body for revamping our systems of meaning-making and epistemologies in order to bring about real change in the world, converging her project with the central foci of writing studies and contemplative practice. What’s more, she corrects those who claim the body without asserting its agency by insisting that we need to be concerned not only with the materiality of subject formation but also with the agentive status of bodies themselves—bodies that shape language as much as language shapes them. It’s not just that the body is involved in our meaning-making processes, but that it conditions our systems of knowledge from the very start. This is consistent with contemplative pedagogies’ reliance on the physical body as the primary structure for self-realization. With Haraway, I will theorize a feminist-minded “writing yogi” for contemplative pedagogies, a mode of authorship that agentizes student writing and validates students’ experiences of embodiment. My notion of writing yogis insists on a level of conscious awareness of our writing bodies; we certainly always write as bodies, but few of us are ready to claim them—especially in academic environments beholden to disembodiment. Further, a focus on writing yogis within this book indicates a concern with how writers experience their embodiment and practice it rather than on a semiotics of material placement, even if situatedness will be a key term to define this experience. The writing yogi is a concept that I play off of in my project’s title, and one I will further flesh out in the following chapters.

Writing yogis is an appropriate marker because contemplative pedagogy both re-theorizes the writing subject as writing body-heart-mind and actualizes this theory by engaging writers in contemplative acts that move their whole beings. Such pedagogies are important to writing studies because they encourage mindfulness of writing and learning processes in ways that promote the academic work accomplished in our classes while at the same time remaining committed to a larger scope of a writer’s physical and emotional well-being. What further marks these pedagogies is their combined focus on self-examination and awareness of our connectedness with others as complementary understandings that can be deepened by the learning process. In a widely-cited article on contemplative education, Tobin Hart claims that contemplative knowing rests on opening the “contemplative mind” which is “activated through a wide range of approaches—from poetry to meditation—that are designed to quiet and shift the habitual chatter of the mind to cultivate the capacity of deepened awareness, concentration, and insight” (2004, p. 29). Once the mind is opened in such ways to create inner awareness, a “corresponding opening occurs toward the world around us” (2004, p. 29). While I can’t take his term as my own since it advances the misnomer that contemplation is solely a practice of the mind, Hart’s understandings rearticulate what it means to be focused on a “whole life” pedagogy and show how a developed sense of embodied interiority necessitates an equal connection to exteriority and to others. Mindful knowing is, by default, connected knowing as it refuses the mindless fragmentation of our scattered lives. Along the way, this contemplative model may help student writers find balance and compassion on and off the page; teaching difference as embodied may lead to stronger and more pragmatic understandings of social justice and personal transformation through the formation of an embodied, feminist-contemplative ethics.