3.2: Body Blogs Part Two and Three

If the first blogs were to gauge my students’ initial reactions to our investigation of their bodies as central to writing and meaning-making processes, the second and third installments of the body blog were geared toward my attempt to help students work toward an understanding of embodiment in line with those found in Hindman and extended by the feminist writings of Haraway and popular yogic texts like Iyengar’s Light on Life and Light on Yoga (1965), approachable modern tomes of ancient philosophies updated for modern audiences. Embodiment seen from Haraway’s feminist lens, as earlier stated, is neither about a “fixed location in a reified body” nor about “the body as anything but a blank page for social inscriptions” (Haraway, 1991, pp. 95-197); rather, it is about the relationality and co-constitutionality of the fleshy, material body, a presence whose situated reality cannot be exhausted by discourse, and the semiotic body, situated and located by means of our discursive mapping practices. Because these mapping practices are constantly changing and our bodies are in constant flux as with the rest of the material world, embodiment is never static and cannot be essentialized within this feminist-contemplative picture.

Showing the kindred nature of feminist theorizing and yogic philosophies, Iyengar, founder of the yoga method that shares his name, says much the same in his own writing about the dynamism between the individual body and the world. Iyengar states that the lived body cannot be conceived of as separate from the material world, both of which are “constantly changing so that we are always looking at nature from a different viewpoint” (2005, p. 7), as our bodies and environments constantly shift, change and adapt. The body I want my students to claim in and through their blogs, following such ideas, is the lived body, which is understood through material dynamism as connecting us to the larger material world of which we remain, through our flesh, an inextricable part. Embodiment is both a social mapping process, signifying and marking our social interactions, as well as a material reality. As a result, experience is a way of naming our embodiment, which can never be fully exhausted by discourse since our bodies retain agency both within and beyond our discursive conventions. These body blogs put these ideas in action as they ask students to think about the ways they experienced their bodies as writers and felt the consequences of both their interiority and exteriority unfolding into and onto each other as so many layers of phyllo dough.

To tap into my students’ existing knowledge of the reality of their lived bodies, I asked them in the second installment of the body blogs to answer the question, “Beyond writing, how do you otherwise express yourself as a body?” I wanted them to think through the daily movements of their bodies and the kinesthetic knowledge their bodies held when viewed through the lens of the activities in which they actively participated. Central to my whole project was getting students to view body expressiveness as tied to critical writing. I explained to students that “activities” within this context could certainly include sports such as running, exercising, playing tennis and could also include such actions as playing instruments, talking nature walks and even primping and prepping our bodies for the day by doing hair, makeup or dressing.

Given that it has only been in the past decade of my own life that I’ve become interested in physical activities like running and yoga, I was keenly aware that some of my students may not be involved in team sports and might, as a result, feel they had nothing about which to write. I wanted to stress that we all have a connection to our bodies and hoped my students would accept my open invitation to take the prompt in the direction they felt adequately addressed their body movements, as uniquely situated as each body from which they sprang. No matter the direction, I asked my students to consider questions such as, “How does your body express itself in these activities? How do your body and mind work together? Or, how do your thinking and movement fit together in these activities? Can you give specific examples (take time to detail them)? How might your body sometimes lead your mind in those activities (my favorite example here is how we often just drive without thinking and wonder later how we ever got to our destination). You should also think about what have you learned about your body and its expression from these activities. As you reread your writing here, what have you not thought about before about being an active body-mind that this blog is making you explore?”

Not surprisingly, the most active athletes in the class relished the opportunity to discuss their activities and kinesthetic knowledge for this blog. And what surprised me the most was that so many of my students were involved in university teams as well as intramural sports. Others were similarly committed to playing instruments or continuing activities, such as running or swimming, performed as part of a high school team, which remained a crucial aspect of my students’ identities. Even if they did not compete at the university level on structured teams, my students described their physical activities as central parts of themselves and their weekly schedules. Everyone agreed that this blog was the easiest to write because it was the closest to their daily experiences and allowed them to share bits of themselves that would normally remain hidden in a writing class.

Lacy, a student swimmer showed a great level of proprioception in her second body blog response:

Nothing beats the feeling of my muscles working, pulling deep into the water, propelling me forward. The complete physical aspect of the sport is so enticing to me when my brain feels like it might explode. However, swimming is not only a physical sport, but it is a mental sport as well. Swimmers have to be totally focused, especially in practice. Practice is the time to think about the technicalities of the stroke. “Is my streamline tight enough?” “Are my elbows high enough to catch the maximum amount of water?” “Am I kicking the right distance off the wall to maximize my momentum from the turn?

For Lacy, the physical strength necessary to succeed at this water sport must be accompanied by a great body awareness, so great that she must rely on her body’s intelligence to maximize her winning potential, which comes down to fractions of a second as she explains later in the same response. Lacy’s description nicely points to the ways she uses a version of the embodied imagination to feel her body’s spatial positioning: only by learning how her arms feel and which muscles tighten can she sense how high her elbows are when she is in the water. Mindfulness of her body and its placement and desires is necessary for her success as a swimmer, and she can only achieve this level of awareness when she sees herself as a whole piece, as body and brain working together to achieve future goals and embrace present realities. Lacy’s classmate, Will, a golfer, describes a similar experience of embodied awareness on the green:

I play golf very often, as much as six days a week during the summer weather permitting. My body has the movements of my golf swing deeply engrained. However I often make minor changes or tweaks to my golf swing as needed to improve it or put it back into place if pieces have moved around a bit …. Pieces are never in exactly the same place, as many things can affect the way you set up to the ball. And any change in the set up will change the swing. I have found that even the clothes I wear can affect the way I set up. For example, I have discovered that I more easily get into proper set up position if I wear pants compared to when I wear shorts. My theory is that the pants give me the feeling of having a slightly lower center of gravity. But if my body and mind weren’t connected, I would never remember from day to day how to hit the ball …. I am trying to connect my body and mind in golf more by trying to be better able to visualize my swing and learn to play more by feel and instinct, which is hard to do when you are given all this time to think about what you are going to do before you do it.

This response is exemplary in its detailed description of how this student’s body and mind work together when playing golf, which is why I quote it at length. The way Will works toward the importance of visualization for his sport and how he pins the successful expression of his swing on the integration of his physical body and mental body are examples of insights I hoped some students might stumble upon in these blogs. Will not only imagines himself as an integrated whole as a golfer, which will hopefully encourage a transfer of meaning so he will eventually see himself as a writing body, but he also articulates a version of the embodied imagination I proposed in my introduction and expanded in the last chapter.

Will continues to describe his attitude toward change as a competitive golfer on the university team. He notes particularly the ways imagining changes and differences as embodied, as impacted by materiality and rooted in the real, gives him a freedom of expression he cannot capture solely in language:

When making changes [to my swing], I have discovered it’s easier to make a visual of the change and feel it compared to trying to put it into words. Our bodies have a harder time interpreting words than images and feelings of movement. But what is maybe the most important thing in golf is making sure your body and mind are aimed at the same target. For example, if your body is aimed the pond, but you are thinking about the green left of the pond, chances are you are going to hit the ball towards the pond …. This really makes me wonder how the mind-body connection is present in all activities.

For Will, the imagination is situated quite literally in the body and impacted by it. As he states, his swing is shaped by his body’s positioning, no matter where he hopes the ball will land. In this way, he knows to be sensitive to his flesh and to respect his sport’s engagement of both his body and mind. Mindless fragmentation of his being is detrimental to his success as a golfer and, he will soon learn, to his effectiveness as a writer. So perceptive about his remarks is his focus on how feelings and sensory images are just as meaningful in the process of his practice as fully-formed verbal thoughts and words. This student is already versed in the ways that imagining ourselves as embodied necessitates an understanding of situated thinking and feeling as mutually constitutive and reinforcing. Will testifies to the ways the body as signifier cannot exhaust the meaning of materiality which exceeds even language.

Of course, not all students’ prior experiences lend for such for such easy transfer. For some students, the body-mind connection is much more troubled at first and presents a confusing paradox. Caleb states that

[As a musician and guitarist] I guess I can never really be one hundred percent certain if it is in fact my mind telling my body what to do because sometimes I feel like my body has a mind of its own. Wow, I find it ironic the way I just worded that because it seems to have disproved my point. Everything is much more complicated than people would think things to be …. When I hear a song I log it mentally in my head and then I pick up my guitar and start playing. Sure, it takes a few tries for me to get a song down correctly, but I learn to play it pretty fast and I haven’t forgotten a song that I learned yet. My fingers just happen to go to the right place at the right time and it works. I think it’s something that happens unconsciously at first, and then I realize what is going on and I work with it.

Caleb, a guitarist, understands on a felt level that his body is at work in his learning to play new songs, as his “fingers just happen to go to the right place,” but he still seems disconnected from the process. While he might recognize his body as an epistemic origin, he doesn’t have the conceptual maps to understand how this might work, likely because our learning culture often doesn’t provide these. As a result, Caleb “feel[s] like [his] body has a mind of its own,” and he says he doesn’t understand this mind—even when he follows it after a while, after realizing “what is going on” as his fingers move on his guitar strings. This description is fascinating for its revelation of how much body awareness and attentiveness to his corporeal orientation could help Caleb unify his fingers’ energy and intelligence with his mind’s desire to learn a new song. With mindfulness of his body, Caleb might be able to understand the playing of music and the composing of writing from a new, contemplative and visceral perspective. And this might help him appreciate why his body moves in unpredictable ways at times:

Unfortunately, I feel like the body, even though it is connected to the mind, acts on its own sometimes. I think that some of the time the body reacts to things before the mind comprehends what is going on. For example, when I’m bored in a class or in anything my body shows that boredom even when my brain knows that I shouldn’t be slouching or anything. My body moves on its own even if I tell it not to and to pay attention. Things happen that I can’t control sometimes …. [My body] moves in ways that I can’t understand, yet it also helps me in my music and in other areas. Having the two connected is better than having them as separates.

Caleb’s continued meditation on the body reminds me of the first lessons I learned in my yoga classes about respecting the body by asking less for control over it. Exchanging connection for control helps us to channel the body’s energies in pleasing and productive ways, eliminating the frustration we might otherwise feel. While Caleb knows such connection is ideal from his experiences playing, he is unsure how to facilitate it and sees his body as disruptive in more formal learning environments, beyond the limits of his control. Of course, we may begin to wonder if this is more a result of restrictive learning environments that are not guided by embodied-contemplative educational principles which would have students learning how meaning is made with and through the body, by focusing its energies.

After asking for the first two blogs and noting in my students’ responses equal measures of understanding and confusion, I then asked students to bring together any insights they might have made in the process of completing this assignment and to forward any interesting, new questions, bringing both to bear on their writing. The third body blog’s guiding question was, “How can you become a better writing by using body-mind skill sets you already have?” I explained to students that the blogs were meant to get them thinking about how their bodies might play a larger part in our thinking and expression than we normally realize. By building off the last set of responses, I wanted them to analyze the irony of imagining themselves as bodies during certain activities in which they were encouraged to see themselves of a whole, integrated piece but not during others, such as writing.

I didn’t want students to begin to reify their bodies or account for every movement in the writing process as bodily; rather, I wanted them to discover the agency of their writing bodies in partnership to their minds, to see their intelligence as a union of both. In all, the final blog entry asked students to reflect on the ways the body and the mind are connected in interesting, inter-related and interdependent ways. Building on the guiding question, the full, detailed description for this blog read: “To finish your final installment, bring your insights from the first two blogs together. Read them over and revisit your thoughts and feelings. Discuss your initial responses in the first two installments. Anything you’d change now? Any new insights you’d like to bring to bear on them? Think specifically about the body-mind awareness you may have discussed in blog two in terms of your physical activities. How could you draw on this awareness to become a better writer? Can you apply some of the same techniques, say, that make you a good swimmer or baseball player, etc., to your writing process? Be specific and give examples/details. Can you learn anything about listening to your body as you write, either metaphorically (ie., in terms of calling upon personal experiences in essays) or literally (ie., in terms of endurance)? How you might bring more awareness to the process of writing? What parallels can you make? Where do the two not seem to fit? Where are there tensions and why might they exist? What may you realize now that you’ve completed the body blog that you didn’t before?”

An overriding theme in students’ responses to this final comparison of body blog installations one and two is that of body appreciation and a budding corporeal awareness. To quote Nikki, the student I open this interchapter with, is to echo the rest: “I always believed in the concept of the body being far less important than the mind. But after some thought about the subject, I have come to the realization that the body and mind are equally as important in making up an individual … and that affects my writing.” That these blogs helped students like Nikki begin to think of themselves holistically, as one piece, was crucial in their beginning learning process for our class. Not only would they appreciate the lessons of our units on disability, eating, body image and identity more from this point on, but they would now be ready to investigate the physicality of the writing process through other embodied acts such as yoga. While obviously not the final step in accepting themselves as writing bodies, my students were now questioning the ways they saw writing as “mind work” and why they divided this kind of work from body work. They began to wonder with renewed appreciation the ways their other classes locked their bodies out. And, they began to inquire how this new knowledge could change their experiences of the writing process and the ways they approached writing assignments from this point onward.

For instance, Lacey, the swimmer, found new meaning in the drafting process; for her, understanding her writing body as a viable player in the meaning-making process meant respecting the ways that body-based skills take time to develop. She notes, “I really think that now I should begin my assignments when I get them assigned because I feel that I will now need to revise many of my papers and writings before they are due and that time is limited if I begin the assignment the day or night before.” Instead of procrastination, Lacey believes she should start to apply her “swimming stamina of being able to be focused on one goal” even when the finish line is nowhere in sight because her “body is at stake.” Given that we all want our students to spend more time and effort in their writing and to take their drafts through multiple, global revisions, this is an important discovery this student may not have made if she weren’t invited to apply the body skills and knowledge she already has to the writing process, helping her begin a process of demystification that encouraged motivation. Not to be overlooked is the way reconceptualizing the writing process as visceral helps such students actively engage their bodies in it rather than trying to ignore them, which may prove to be distracting. Because she had previously conceptualized writing as a process distinct from swimming, Lacy noted, in fact, that when “normally when engaged in writing, my body is tired and bored.” Learning to respect her body and investigate why it was bored (in part because it was ignored) helped this student create new writing rituals that resulted in less painful writing sessions and recognize the need to give himself ample time for writing breaks, cutting through her habitual procrastination.

This student notes that using this “swimming stamina” will allow her to apply a new measure of focus to her writing as well. Lacy states, “That way when I write I am only focused on the subject of the paper and not who is on Facebook or who just texted me. For example during a swim race I rarely ever think about anything except my stroke, turns, and winning the race or beating my most current time.” Noting as well the overwhelming nature of being constantly surrounded by technological distractions as he wrote, another student, Steve, agreed that he learned through the blogs that slowing down his writing process would help promote focus and increase the quality of his writing in turn. Steve claimed he could apply lessons of focus and interconnection to his writing, drawn from his experiences playing baseball. Steve reflects,

One principle I can maybe apply to better my writing is to slow down. As I mentioned in my earlier blog, when I’m playing well in baseball (or any other sport for that matter), everything seems to slow down for me. I feel like I have more time to react, and therefore am able to better affect my results …. If I were somehow able to slow my mind down and pick what minor details are important, while maintaining focus on the larger issue, I feel like I could improve my writing significantly. Often I am too straight to the point, and I rush to get down my ideas and prove my thesis. I need to slow things down, like I do in baseball, and put some of the smaller things that I admire into my writing

Steve might be hinting at the ways our minds and bodies work together in what has been called physiological coherence. In activities like sports and many disciplines of contemplation like meditation, the body, heart, brain and nervous system synchronize with one another, which can lead to improved attention often perceived as a slowing down of time and described as being “in the zone.” At these times of body-mind harmony, students may experience increased performance and a decrease of stress and anxiety because of a “regular heart rhythm, decreased sympathetic nervous system activation and increased parasympathetic activity and increased heart-brain synchronized (the brain’s alpha rhythms becomes more synchronized to the heartbeat) (Schooner & Kelso, 1988; Tiller, McCraty & Atkinson, 1996; quoted in Hart, 2004, p. 31).¹⁰ This knowledge can be applied to the reverse as well. That is, when students don’t feel this kind of physiological coherence, they might take a writing break in order to later return to the writing process later with a refocused mind—a valuable lesson. Mary vocalized this insight: “When you write, you can also listen to your body by learning when you’re tired. Writing when your body and brain are tired is a waste because your work will come out sloppy and rushed. When I write and become tired or sick of writing, my hand or foot will begin to tap. If I know my body well enough, I can take this as a sign to take a break and finish my writing at another time.” This is a lesson of learning to work with as opposed to attempting to overwrite the body’s intelligence and of being mindful of our embodied feelings in the present moment, which is the practice of mindfulness. In their movement toward imagining themselves as writing bodies, students work toward more reflective and less reflexive understandings and negotiations of the writing process.

Finally, some students noted that their bodies could become sources of inspiration and energy for the writing process, drawing off the idea that the physical writing body can provide shape to writing through feeling and the motivation to write. Jamie, challenging her previous belief that her body has no place in her writing so that to accommodate it would surely “do her in” noted, “Often times when you are assigned a writing assignment about an event in your life, you need just look at your scars for reminders on what to write about.” In her later blogs, Jamie became interested in the ways emotion could be seen as a link to the invention state of writing, giving her an impetus to write: “In addition, I could also draw on the energy I get when I am feeling upset, angry, or stressed into writing. I would normally take this energy into a physical activity and feel like I could achieve the impossible because my mind just went through the motions of the activity … .my body goes hand in hand with my emotions.” It is no coincidence that students like Jamie are articulating a premise of contemplative pedagogy, or the need to respect the visceral nature of feeling and the ways the heart can be a bridge to the mind and body.

While more a start than an end, these body blogs asked students to investigate seriously their writing identities and personas as necessarily embodied. They gave my students a foundational understanding of what it means to write aware of both body and mind and how a focus on self-examination and awareness can help increase their productivity and enjoyment of the writing process. As students crossed the threshold of knowing they have a body to becoming aware of how that body impacts the meaning they make in their writing, the made adjustments to their writing processes in order to respect their flesh. They began seeing themselves as writing yogis who enacted the principles of the embodied imagination.