1.4: 0.4 Your Body Is Your Muse- The Embodied Imagination In Yoga

And so I arrive full-circle back to my opening narrative in this introduction. My struggle in downward-facing dog highlights the potential value of yoga’s insights for the writing classroom and provides the thread that ties together the braid of this book’s chapters and interchapters. Namely, my difficulties in downward-facing dog attest to the ways yoga asks its practioners to be embodied imaginers, realizing meaning with and through our feeling flesh, against modern impulses that deny the intelligence of the body. If I hope to improve my practice of Adho Mukha Svanasana, I have to learn to use my body awareness to feel my way toward full expression of my asanas. This requires me to lay aside my academic neurosis of attempting to control, ignore or transcend my body for the sake of identifying myself solely with my mind. It’s not that I must define myself as only body, but that I must begin to imagine myself as an interrelated whole, not in parts, in order to grow intellectually, spiritually³ and physically.

My practice of poses like downward-dog teaches me that verbal abstractions in the form of the directions my yoga teacher gives to her students must pair with our actual experiences of them. For instance, Holly’s frequent injunction to push the front knee into the back knee in down-dog means nothing to me unless I can both imagine this process and make real these imaginings though practiced embodiment and self-awareness. In my struggle recounted at the beginning of this introduction, I knew where, in theory, my body should be placed for successful execution of the pose, but I couldn’t connect this with my practice because I assumed that the theory was what mattered most. But, as I have learned, it is only with awareness of my organic body and my physical and emotional feelings can I be “in” the pose as opposed to simply forcing myself through its actions.

Moving from the mat to the classroom, I correspondingly define the embodied imagination as the faculty by which body, heart and mind work together to bring meaning and understanding to writing under the praxis of contemplative pedagogy. Imagining, as I see it through a feminist and yogic lens, is integrative, thoughtful and emotive. Its axis is the heart; what is felt both physiologically and psychically shapes the interrelationship between the body and the mind. I recognize the ways imagining is often limited to describing fantastical or illusory mental processes, flights of fancy. But, following feminist usage and the yogic philosophies of Iyengar, founder of the yoga method that I practice, I hope to extend the concept of the imagination to talk about the creative fusion of the intelligent, organic body and mind toward the construction of present realities and future possibilities in writing. These realities and possibilities are based on the knowledge we construct from our experiences (what we understand) and our affective positions toward other bodies as a result of these experiences (how we feel). The imagining process is therefore a situated and recursive one that involves our bodies and minds. Put differently, our imaginings always occur in the context of our material environments and within the frame of our flesh; similarly, our bodies must embrace and enact the dreams and ideas of our intellect for them to mean and to be acted upon. As bell hooks puts it in the opening quotation of my epigraph, what we imagine helps to create our reality, which shapes what we believe to be imaginable from the start. In the embrace of imagination, the body interprets and structures our ideas, lending validity to the idea that responsible imaginings are those that remain accountable to our flesh.

The embodied imagination provides a new method of inquiry in composition studies, one that takes its lineage from feminism and an Eastern tradition of Iyengar yoga that challenges hierarchical dualities and seeks integration and mindfulness at its core. In their recent College Composition and Communication article, Gesa E. Kirsch and Jacqueline J. Royster trace contemporary feminist usage of what they coin the “critical imagination” which becomes one of the three “terms of engagement” they trace throughout their historical survey of feminist rhetorical practices (2010, p. 648). Working alongside “strategic contemplation” and “social circulation,” the critical imagination is a strategy of inquiry or a tool “to engage, as it were, in hypothesizing … as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth, but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand” (Kirsch & Royster, 2010, p. 650). A look at Royster’s earlier Traces of a Stream gives a fuller picture of their concept.

In her book, Royster develops this conception of the imagination in order to propose how feminist reconstruction might aid in the making of historical narratives about ancestral African women’s history. Within the historical narrative, the

imagination becomes a critical skill, that is, the ability to see the possibility of certain experiences even if we cannot know the specificity of them …. So defined, imagination functions as a critical skill in questioning a viewpoint, an experience, an event, and so on, and in remaking interpretative frameworks based on that questioning. (2000, p. 83)

The imagination so defined enables conversation and interaction between the feminist researcher and her subjects, according to Kirsch and Royster, as it connects the past and present with future “vision[s] of hope” (2010, p. 652-53). Because it is grounded in the particularities of experience, the critical imagination helps facilitate an embodied practice that focuses on research as a lived process (2010, p. 657).

In another permutation, feminists Nira Yuval-Davis and Marcel Stoetzler have claimed the “situated imagination” as necessary to the workings of transversal politics, which seeks to dialogue through difference without overwriting it (2002, p.316). Yuval-Davis credits feminists in Bologna, Italy for the cultivation of this democratic, feminist political practice based on three interlocking concepts: standpoint theory’s reminder that because differing viewpoints produce varying bodies of knowledge, any one body of knowledge is essentially unfinished; that even those who are positioned similarly may not share the same values or identifications; and that notions of equality need not be replaced by respect for difference but can be used to encompass difference (Yuval-Davis, 1999, pp. 1-2). As I will in Chapter Two, Yuval-Davis uses Haraway’s notion of situatedness, which is multiple and embodied, to underscore the importance of differential positioning in knowledge-making practices. She and her co-author introduce the situated imagination as a conceptual tool that works in tandem with situated knowledge in feminist epistemology.

Working at the intersections of present reality and future hope for change, the situated imagination shapes experience into knowledge by helping to construct meaning as well as to stretch it in new directions. Even if situated like knowledge, the imagination, which is both self- and other-directed, can help to establish common ground, especially important to transversal politics (Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler, 2002, p. 316). Imagining is understood within Yuval-Davis’ project to be both a social faculty as well as a bodily one, or a “gateway to the body, on the one hand, and society, on the other hand” (Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler, 2002, p. 325). Imagining and thinking aren’t just bridged in the process of understanding, however, they are inseparable and contingent on each other so that, as both authors note, “intellect and imagination, these terms do not refer to clearly separate faculties or ‘spheres,’ but merely to dialogical moments in a multidimensional mental process” (Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler, 2002, p. 326). The circularity is key. I take this as a reminder of the companionate nature of thinking and imagining which converge in the physical body to create knowledge as well as hope.

For my conception of the embodied imagination, I chose to stitch the best together from this quilt of feminist definitions. What I like about Kirsch and Royster’s critical imagination is its focus on the skill of imagining; what this means for our writing classrooms is that we can teach students to deepen their imaginative embrace when constructing new ideas, filtering through their own experiences or when presented with others’ experiences or ideas. The embodied imagination I propose resembles the critical imagination in that it too works as a method of inquiry that allows us to imagine creatively that which initially may not be a reality, that which may yet be eclipsed by our personal experience or that which we would like to change, remake or revise. But, I don’t accept the critical imagination as my own because I find it engages too weak a model of embodiment, even if it does acknowledge materiality in the process of researching, reminding us of the personal bodies who investigate as well as the particular bodies studied. And partly because I do not come at my project from a historicist perspective, I find it too limiting to talk mostly about the imagination as a frame for possibility and not also as participating in a concrete reality; I wish for a less speculative application of the imagination. Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler provide an earthier or more rooted definition for my tastes, and it is happy coincidence that they too draw from Haraway’s theories, connecting, to an extent, our projects. But while Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler divide their episteme into two functions, that of imagining and knowing, I feel this is a restrictive model that eclipses the role feeling has to play in meaning-making. Consequently, I concentrate on three related processes brought together under the rubric of embodiment and representative of the contemplative: imagining, thinking and feeling.

The embodied imagination, as such, can be understood as a space for negotiation between situated thinking and situated feeling toward new possibilities and a mindful awareness of the present (and, therein, the future). Thinking of the imagination as the spider that spins the sticky web that helps connect our feelings and thoughts to fashion such awareness coincides with yet another feminist forwarding of this facility: Haraway’s definition of the imagination as the connective tissue between feminist networks of meaning wherein individuals are not simply involved in critiquing or distancing, but are interested in establishing coalitional epistemologies and methodologies to bring people together. Haraway claims she “hates” the model of negative criticality that only sees value in dismantling arguments so that you don’t have to implicate yourself in the struggle, “rooted in the fear of embracing something with all its messiness and dirtiness and imperfection” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, pp. 111-112). Of course, the body stands as a living symbol of the “messiness” we have often locked out in fear of losing the certainty of closure. Working from a place of connection, Haraway is not simply involved in critiquing but is “involved in building alternative ontologies, specifically via the use of the imaginative” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 120). Feminist contemplative pedagogies provide such an alternative.

Also working within a framework of connection, I will be less interested in delineating the lines between the organic body and the cultural body (or, incidentally, feelings as biological or social) and more interested in a holistic approach that respects the companionate nature of the body as both marked and marking. Haraway explains to her interviewer in How Like a Leaf that defining her methods as part of a “worldly practice” as opposed to aligning them with either side of the inherently problematic nature/ culture dichotomy emphasizes the “imploded set of things where the physiology of one’s body, the coursing of blood and hormones and the operations of chemicals—the fleshiness of the organism—intermesh with the whole life of the organism” (Haraway & Goodeve, 2000, p. 110). In the same way, contemplative writing can help form a “worldly,” “whole life” pedagogy that takes into account the ecological connections between the body and mind, nature and culture, rationality and emotion which we tend to elide for the relative simplicity of academic processes of inquiry. Owing more to Aristotelian logic than inquiry vested in awareness of the contemplative connections between body, heart and mind, traditional processes of academic inquiry focused on objectivism have excluded and/ or marginalized alternative ways of knowing such as contemplative and connected knowing. As these typical processes are driven by narrow applications of problem solving through logic, they tend toward closure via disconnection and skepticism as opposed to the open-endedness of the imagination.

When inquiry is driven by the imagination, we end up with projects of connected knowing, or the process of understanding difference through connection, not distance. In contrast to separate knowers who experience the self as autonomous, connected knowers experience the self in relational webs (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1973, pp. 113-123). If the primary action of separate knowing is that of breaking down, connected knowing is characterized by building both on and anew. Likewise, we can see the process of embodied imagining as connected; to genuinely connect, we need to be aware of our thoughts and feelings and attend to others’ whether real or anticipated. In these ways, we can extend positioning not only as the key for grounding knowledge claims but also our imaginings. When we focus on the imagination, we change discussions of inquiry from finding the answer to a problem to investigating multiple possibilities and testing these alternatives against our embodied realities, lending more weight toward embodied pragmatism than a transcendent critical analysis that ignores our corporeality. In other words, the embodied imagination becomes a tool of mindfulness for feminist pedagogies. As we imagine, we slow down and pay attention; we reflect and notice; we connect and draw together.

In the afterword to The Teacher’s Body, Madeleine Grumet notes that the “body throws a horizon around [the] imagination … it tethers [the] imagination to a set of possibilities which, although they are protean, are not limitless” (2003, p. 274). Yuval-Davis and Stoetzler say much the same: “Imagination is situated; our imaginary horizons are affected by the positioning of our gaze” (2002, p. 327). How we imagine ourselves and our world matters because it shapes the meaning we take from our experiences and the receptiveness with which we approach others’ realities. Imagining ourselves as situated, embodied beings accords respect for differential positioning and compels us to respect the very real consequences of our materiality in our worlds and in our words. Connected to the body and attentive to difference, these feminist versions of the imagination are a far cry from the neo-Romantic “creative imagination” of expressivism.

Yoga philosophy can be seen to build on Grument’s idea that the body serves as an anchor for the imagination. Yoga is also a contemplative practice that actualizes the mindfulness at the heart of the embodied imagination. Iyengar’s thoughts on the imagination are the second wellspring for my concept because they stress the application of the imagination in our ordinary lives as we bring our imaginings to bear on our realities in order to shape and to change them. Iyengar explains that the imagination must be steadily applied to our reality. Comparing this application to the writing process, he notes, “[a] writer may dream of the plot for a new novel, but unless he applies himself to pen and paper, his ideas have no value …. Never mind the idea, write it down”(2005, p. 156). The embodied imagination described here is the fire that transforms the writer’s thoughts into reality on the page and in her life, differentiating imagining from daydreaming; the latter of the two lacks the pragmatic pulse. Asana, or practice of the physical poses of yoga, is the link that trains us to bring our thoughts to bear on our realities: “[a]sana practice brings mind and body into harmony for this task …. The coordination between them that we learn in asana will enable us to turn the shape of our visions into the substance of our lives” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 157). Asana teaches us to claim our materiality by developing our physical and imaginative faculties. This is not just about imagining possibility then, but using the imagination as a source of intentional doing. Just as in writing, it is the process that becomes the focus.

Asana teaches us to embody our imaginings by bringing together the intelligence of the body, which “is a fact … is real” and the intelligence of the brain which “is only imagination” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 63). “The imagination has to be made real. The brain may dream of doing a difficult backbend today, but it cannot force the impossible even on to a willing body. We are always trying to progress, but inner cooperation is essential” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 63). To return once more to my own practice as an example, I must make my imaginings of Adho Mukha Svanasana “real,” or embodied, by listening to my body and tapping into my feelings through continued practice of the pose. This means I can’t simply overwrite by body’s intelligence, which grounds my intellect: “the brain may say: ‘We can do it.’ But the knee says: ‘Who are you to dictate to me? It is for me to say whether I can do it or not’ (Iyengar, 2005, p. 30). It means that I must begin to imagine myself as not just consciousness or body but both by interweaving brain and body into intelligent movement that respects the limits of my present practice while stretching toward a future of what may be. The greater my personal awareness in the pose and the more experiential knowledge I gather, the more possibility my current and future pose holds. This reality rests in my present actions so that my imaginings are embodied through the fruits of my labor. That is, embodied imaginers develop awareness of habits by tapping into the intelligence of our cells so that we are able to challenge old patterns of doing and entrenched beliefs by being in the present moment, for it is the actions of today that will bring about the growth of tomorrow.

To be present, we must be flexible and must respect the fluidity with which we interact with others, be they subjects or objects, in the world. I will capitalize on this literal-metaphoric flexibility in Chapter Three. Gloria Anzaldua is an example of an author who embodies this sort of flexibility and awareness in her writings. It is for this reason that I often use her as a resource in my writing classes. In Borderlands, she argues that while “we are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the head,” “the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to ‘real’ events” (1999, pp. 59-60). With the congruence between her thoughts and those I have just explored from Iyengar, it is no surprise that Anzaldua adopts the concept of “yoga of the body” in a 1983 interview to explain the ways a writer’s creativity is filtered through the body and how readers respond to this viscerally (2000, p. 77). This author’s essay in Borderlands, Tilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink, dramatizes the process of writing from the body and with the body while viewing the text produced as taking on a fleshy presence itself. About the visceral reaction of reading and its connection to a yoga of the body, Anzaldua reminds us after reflecting upon the 1983 interview years later that

[e]very word you read hits you physiologically—your blood pressure changes; your cells; your bones, your muscle [stet] are moved by a beautiful poem, a tragic episode. So that’s the kind of yoga that I want: a yoga filtered through the body and through the imagination, the emotions, the spirit, and the soul. (2000, p. 77)

Over thirty years ago, Anzaldua started a conversation about yoga, writing and the imagination that I want to continue here within the frame of composition studies and contemplative writing pedagogies.