5: Interchapter Two- Habits of Yoga Minds and Writing Bodies

Your practice is your laboratory
—B. K. S. Iyengar

Yoga helps my writing more than anything else I’ve ever done.
—Student

In the contemplative tradition of yoga, it is customary for yogis to set sankalpas, or intentions. Intentions are reminders that yoga is just as often practiced off the mat as on it; that daily living is as in need of mindful purpose as asana, or posture practice, is. Intentions have always been a key part of my yoga practice and have more recently become just as important to my writing process.

Lately, I’ve been working with the intention of noticing without jumping to judgment—of simply being present and aware of the moment. I set this intention because in the last few months, I’ve been rushing through my practice and have ended my time on the mat with vague feelings of frustration. Putting my intention to work, I was able to see what’s causing this habit: my struggles with forward folds. Just as I folded over my legs during sun salutations, I felt frustration bubble up and the urge to move quickly into the next pose. Staying with this feeling, I came into contact with self-judgment for not being as flexible as I’d wish to be. Knowing why I am disappointed won’t necessarily stop this feeling, but that’s not the point.

Now when the automatic lick of disappointment arises, I follow through with my intention to allow these feelings to surface. But rather than ruminating on what I can’t do just yet, I purposely refocus on the sensations of my body, so that I maintain full presence in that moment of my practice. To learn from it. Can I notice the space in my back body? Is my weight in my heels? Am I lengthening my spine before I fold forward? Am I linking my outbreaths to my downward movement?

This intention-driven learning will eventually lead me to the flexibility I desire because it will increase understanding and acceptance of my present reality. And while respecting my current limits, it will also encourage me to set goals for what I wish to work toward. These are lessons I transfer to my writing. I apply this present-centered attention to my writing process so that when I encounter stuck spots of writer’s block, I rush toward awareness instead of ruminative judgment, which can discourage me from writing my way through these spots or understanding why a restful break may be necessary.

As with all contemplative traditions, contemplative education forwards the intention of awareness. Contemplative writing pedagogies are built on mindfulness in much the same way my yoga practice is. That is, they teach writers how to develop a practice of mindfulness and how to pay attention. These are skills all learning requires but few of us teach explicitly in our writing classes. We assume students know how to be aware, but that they often choose not to be. Attention is a switch that some aren’t willing to flip. This refusal leads to shoddy drafts written in one sitting the night before a paper is due. I’ve found that this understanding of attention isn’t quite right; my students often don’t know how to sustain attention over the extended periods of time they may need to write and revise a paper or read and reflect upon a lengthy academic text. This is why they wait until the last minute, which brings at least a focusing urgency if not the attentive awareness of a carefully-carved reflective space. The multitasking methods of students’ everyday lives have them toggling between Facebook, the latest writing assignment, their cellphone (vibrating to alert them to a new text message), the television on behind them and the Pop-Tart^® in front of them—all at the same time. The continual practice of splitting attention creates a habit they understandably find hard to break. So while my students complain about the consequences of such split focus for their writing and learning, they tend not to know how to choose another method or what other methods exist. Indeed, they feel they have no choice at all.

Even when students do limit distractions enough to classify themselves as “paying attention,” they tend to approach this process statically, as psychologist Ellen Langer notes in A Mindful Education. Langer reports that when high school students are asked what it means when a teacher tells them to “pay attention,” either to “(a) keep your eyes steady on it or (b) think about it in new ways,” almost all students think the instruction means to “keep the stimulus constant” (1993, p. 48). No wonder students find this hard to do; it’s the complete opposite of multitasking, which requires moving, albeit erratic, engagement. What’s more, when most writing teachers ask students to pay attention, I’d wager we’re after more than simply having students keep an idea still and fixed in their minds. When I invite my students to “pay attention” in class, for example, I want an active engagement that questions and creates paths for insight and creativity. It is this latter, more fluid and flexible form of attention that contemplative writing pedagogies teach students. In contrast to paying attention as a means of fixing something in your mind, these pedagogies ask students to develop a practice of noticing: thinking actively about an idea or concept and seeing it from multiple perspectives without automatically rushing to judgment. Contemplative pedagogies do this by linking awareness to context and to the body, which interacts dynamically with the world.

When writers learn contemplative practices like yoga and meditation, they develop a felt understanding of awareness that changes the intention of paying attention and teaches them that attention is a choice under their control. For instance, when students attend to their breath during pranayama, or the practice of breath control, they develop a moving awareness that follows their inbreaths and outbreaths; they do the same when they learn to link inbreaths and outbreaths with asanas, or postures. In my application of contemplative pedagogy to the writing classroom, I ask students to integrate the mindful practices of yoga within their writing processes, seeing them as continuous with the typed or written words-on-a-page they inscribe. Not only does this teach students that mindfulness is developed by bridging body and brain, cultivated empirically and situated in their own flesh, but it also develops their conscious awareness of meaning as material, of writing as physical. Mindfulness is a kind of full body training, then, that helps writers develop flexible attention to thoughts, ideas and themselves as dynamically situated in material environments. In other words, contemplative writing pedagogies explicitly teach students how to pay attention. And, when students exhibit increasing flexibility of attention through mindfulness, breaking from automatic response and moving toward embodied, reflective awareness, they have earned their contemplative moniker, “writing yogis,” discussed in Chapter One.

A flexible mind isn’t only valued by contemplative educators; it has also been deemed one of the necessary eight “habits of mind” integral for college writing success by the recently-released Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. This report represents a joint effort of both secondary and postsecondary educators to examine what skills, attitudes, behaviors and experiences all students need in order to assume a level of “college readiness” (2011, p. 1) prior to their pursuit of higher education and to determine what they’ll need in order to exhibit learning excellence once enrolled in college writing programs. In short, this document marks a guiding intention for our field. As writing instructors, we should intend to develop students’ habits of the following: curiosity; openness; engagement; creativity; persistence; responsibility; flexibility; and metacognition. As with contemplative practices, these habits of mind are practical and help students make choices about their learning and literacy.

In addition to knowing rhetorical skills and how to apply them, the Framework establishes these skills as necessary for encouraging students to take an active role in their educations and for fostering the kinds of critical-creative thinking that will help them excel not only as writers but also as college-level learners and literate citizens. Habits of mind are tools for developing awareness. By prioritizing habits over discrete skills, even if these have a place too, this document argues against formulaic or rigidly standardized writing curricula; the habits are necessarily learned through activities and assignments that engage students in writing for real-world audiences with genuine and not solely assessment-related goals in mind. While rhetorical skills are necessary, the authoring agencies of the report suggest that they cannot be successfully developed and deployed by students who are not simultaneously encouraged to cultivate certain methods of approaching the learning and writing processes. In these ways, we might see the Framework as underscoring the importance of developed writerly awareness, or of approaching writing mindfully. Ways of thinking about writing become just as important as the means of actually doing writing.

When I first read the Framework, I was struck by the congruity between the goals outlined in it and the reflective remarks my students made in their writing blogs about what they learned by integrating yoga within their writing processes and how they embraced mindfulness as a writing intention, concept and tool. Looking at both what writing teachers say we want—at least as represented within this recent document—and what my students say they have learned in the reflective writings recorded on their blogs, I would like to outline in the following pages how contemplative pedagogies can help sustain and foster the habits set forth in the Framework, goals we as a field have established as intentions for our instructional practice. By looking to the situated knowledge students produce within their blogs, I will argue that contemplative pedagogies provide us a novel and useful means of enacting these intentions with mindfulness and give our students means and methods of attending to their somatic development as writers.

The advantages of putting a well-researched, field document that represents the collective wisdom of composition studies in dialogue with my own and my students’ experience of using yoga to rethink the writing process are many, but the one I have been most interested in within these pages is how new pedagogies can help us reach the goals of post-secondary writing instruction while encouraging us to examine the means we use to accomplish the educational ends we say we desire. I want to suggest that not only does a contemplative approach to the writing process help students develop the habits forwarded by the Framework, but also that it uses means that develop them as habits of mind and body, penetrating students’ lives at a deeper level and offering them a foundation to approach their educations contemplatively and their writing mindfully. These two words are never used directly in the Framework, but they still penetrate its implicit call for an education that cultivates inner awareness and teaches students to live more attentively in the world, which they can do to a greater degree when they are in the habit of seeing themselves holistically as body-heart-minds.

As I’ve earlier explored, feminist contemplative pedagogy is a thoughtful, embodied pedagogy responsible to our flesh and maintained by theories and practices that honor the intelligence of the body. Contemplative pedagogy recognizes the link between awareness and self-reflection and values how the body and mind must work together to synchronize acts of knowledge creation. Feminism adds a richer understanding of the stakes of respecting organic bodies as sources of intelligence; it refuses the split between body and mind complicit in so many of our pedagogies and traces this split back to fundamental structures embedded within Western patriarchy. It’s been my intention throughout this project to show how feminism adds a valuable dynamic to contemplative pedagogy by making contemplative practitioners aware of how transformative a heuristic and practice of mindfulness is for the writing classroom.

Mindfulness, as both a heuristic for contemplative pedagogy and a body-minded habit achieved through consistent involvement in contemplative practice, can be seen as a frame for the eight habits of mind listed in the Framework. Consequently, development of these habits results from engaging students in the feminist contemplative writing pedagogy I’ve been utilizing, one that incorporates yoga within the process of writing. Other contemplative exercises may be used to cultivate a similar transformational mindfulness, as I noted in my introduction. And, certainly as Rick Repetti argues, “[a]lmost any classroom exercise may be transformed into a contemplative one simply … by slowing down the activity long enough to behold—to facilitate deep attention to and intimate familiarity with—the object of study, whether it is a slide, textual passage, equation, claim, or argument” (2010, p. 14). While there are just as many ways of enacting contemplative pedagogy as any other pedagogical approach, the use of yoga to engage students contemplatively has been my focus in this project.

While I could go into great detail about how each of these eight habits of mind are developed and strengthened by bringing yoga into the writing classroom, I’d like to focus on three that I believe to be especially illustrative: openness, persistence, and metacognition. The Framework defines openness as a “willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world,” or a responsiveness to differing and alternate perspectives, using these to inform our own; persistence as “the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects,” or the ability to follow-though with tasks by applying focus and developing attentiveness; and metacognition as “the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes and systems used to structure knowledge,” or the ability to examine the writing process and how it structures knowledge and the contextual merits of personal and/or substantiated evidence (2011, p. 5). As defined, these three habits can be understood to largely encapsulate the others. Many would agree that anyone open to the learning process would have to maintain a strong sense of curiosity and eagerness to explore new and unfamiliar ideas, for instance. I will use these three representative habits to examine students’ responses to contemplative pedagogy and the ways yoga can support a writing process that strives for mindfulness and, therein, rhetorical awareness. As students use yoga to navigate their writing processes, they generate habits of mind that both ensure their present-moment success (since they are approaching it purposefully) and enable them to transfer theses habits to other endeavors as their whole beings become engaged in learning.