6: Chapter Three- Situating Feelings in Contemplative Writing Pedagogy

It is difficult to speak of bodily knowledge in words. It is
much easier to experience it, to discover what it feels like
—BKS Iyengar, Light on Life

In 2003, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) began a multi-year study to document the emotional and spiritual development of undergraduate college students. Researchers based the study on the premise that institutions of higher learning “have increasingly come to neglect the student’s ‘inner’ development—the sphere of values and beliefs, emotional maturity, self-understanding, and spirituality” (2005, p. 5). In 2005, HERI released its report on this study. This report found that of college students “more than twothirds (69%) consider it ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ that college enhance their self-understanding, and a similar proportion (67%) rate highly the role they want college to play in developing their personal values” (2005, p. 6). Another 63% of students want college to provide for their emotional development (HERI, 2005, p. 6). These high percentages should give us pause. Our current educational default is to divide a student’s so-called personal life and growth, what the study refers to as “inner development,” from the critical enterprise we often take as the sole ground on which we can and should teach. But, this is not what our students claim they need.

The results from the HERI study directly support the pragmatic mission of contemplative education to teach the whole persons in our classrooms, taking an integrative approach to students’ outer and inner lives—in precisely the ways they are asking that we attend to them. To learn in their bodies, students must consciously approach their thinking, feeling and being as joined. A contemplative approach is fueled by mindfulness, awareness cultivated by present-centered attention that seeks to watch and not immediately judge unfolding experiences, ideas and feelings, anything that passes through the filter of our mind-bodies. In their attempt to create an operational definition of mindfulness through a careful review of existing literature in both Buddhist and secular traditions, Scott R. Bishop and his team of researchers note that mindfulness establishes a change in perspective when attending to our inner experience. That is, while open to present-moment experience when engaged in a practice of mindfulness, we learn to focus on the process of our awareness as opposed to simply its content. We become more process-directed. So, “in a state of mindfulness, thoughts and feelings are observed as events in the mind, without over-identifying with them, and without reacting to them in an automatic, habitual pattern of reactivity” (Bishop et al., n.d., pp. 8-9). Through this process of self-observation, we learn to monitor and regulate both our thoughts and emotions using a conscious mode of acceptance. This mode of acceptance is contemplative, not conventional; it does not reduce the self to its thoughts and emotions because mindfulness creates a space between perception and response. This space invites recognition not unconscious attachment, which can be used in a complementary process of delayed assessment and, perhaps, eventual change. These mindful self-observations are “meta” moments of awareness. Educators call this process “metacognition,” naming the strategy that learners use to manage and monitor the learning process; contemplative practitioners, like yogis, call it “insight” for the same reasons. Because “mindfulness is thought to enable one to respond to situations more reflectively (as opposed to reflexively)” (Bishop, 1997, p. 9), we can understand it as a conscious strategy of metacognition.

Contemplative pedagogies that use mindfulness as a heuristic, practice and tool to build students’ awareness therefore have the ability to increase students’ development of metacognitive insight, as I explored in my second interchapter by looking at this term through the lens of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. This process has implications for the HERI findings: the cultivation of mindfulness through contemplative practice has the potential to increase students’ self-understanding and, in turn, provide them with the tools to better understand their cognitions, feelings and personal values, characteristics of education that students claim to be missing in traditional educational structures. These structures, according to Fleckenstein, in privileging only the mind’s role in learning, have “divided human beings from the affective or spiritual basis of learning” (1997, p. 26). Contemplative education’s mission of mindfulness attends to students’ whole being, addressing previous omissions of emotion and spirituality in learning. And because mindfulness involves both a process of rooting into oneself as well as shifting out toward others, as I’ve explained in earlier chapters, it can help students learn to pair inner awareness with social responsibility. Indeed, the integrative approach of the contemplative insists that we stop dividing our educational missions along an inner/ outer binary: it isn’t possible to teach social responsibility without attending to inner awareness. In the words of contemplative educator Zajonc, “[w]e attend, the world forms around us … and so on cyclically. In this way, attentiveness works back on us as formation” (2010, p. 91). Our students’ emotional lives are intertwined, then, with their intellectual and civic pursuits.

Feminist theorist Allison Jaggar argued for an inclusive view of emotion years ago, well before Antonio Damasio (cf. The Feeling of What Happens) reasoned that thinking and feeling aren’t divisible since the mind is embodied. Jaggar warned us that

time spent in analyzing emotions and uncovering their sources should be viewed, therefore, neither as irrelevant to theoretical investigation nor even as a prerequisite for it; it is not a kind of clearing of the emotional decks, “dealing with” our emotions so that they not influence our thinking. Instead, we must recognize that our efforts to reeducate our emotions are necessary to our political activity. Critical reflection on emotions is not a self-indulgent substitute for political analysis and political action. It is itself a kind of political theory and political practice, indispensible for an adequate social theory and social transformation. (164)

Our pedagogies are nothing if not political, making Jaggar’s statements valid for the contemporary writing classroom. In what follows then, I hope to examine the theoretical and the practical consequences of making emotions pedagogically visible in the contemplative writing classroom by teaching our students the skill of embodied imagining. Feminist theory within and outside our disciplinary bounds creates an exigency for such visibility within contemplative writing pedagogy and anchors my investigation of how we might enable students to become passionate, embodied imaginers, constructively engaging their emotions instead of simply managing or dismissing them. Such efforts support our students’ quest for a meaningful education, as represented in the HERI findings.

In a spirit of inclusivity, I refuse the closure of defining feelings as entirely linguistic or organic and of delineating between cultural affect, psychological emotions or physiological feelings in what follows. Instead, I borrow education theorist Meghan Boler’s comprehensive definition of feeling¹⁹ as “in part sensational, or physiological: consisting of the actual feeling—increased heartbeat, adrenaline, etc.” and “also ‘cognitive’ or ‘conceptual’: shaped by our beliefs and perceptions (1999, p. xix). If feeling is material, it also discursively shaped too: “[t]here is, as well, a powerful linguistic dimension to our emotional awareness, attributions of meanings, and interpretations” (1999, p. xix). A holistic definition of feeling appeals to me because it recognizes the organic body’s shaping of emotion as well as the ways our feelings are always situated within a culture and a specific material placement in the world, a double gesture maintained by contemplative pedagogy and by yoga.

I will extend my previous analysis of Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, which I engaged as part of a contemplative epistemology in the last chapter, to include a corollary dimension of what I call “situated feeling” in the pages that follow. By recognizing how emotions and knowledge are entangled, I argue that feminist contemplative writing pedagogies give us ways of recognizing exactly how emotions impact writing and provide us a method by which they can be productively theorized and engaged within composition studies. As I locate my enactment of contemplative education within the practices and philosophies of yoga, I will suggest how we can involve our students in a situated process of feeling by teaching them an Eastern-inspired “emotional flexibility” that establishes feeling as part of the body’s agency and reclaims it as a teachable skill with social effects. In simple terms, I argue that we must teach students, understood to be writing yogis in contemplative pedagogy, to approach their feelings with openness and resilience in order to become more flexible writers. But first, I briefly turn to the tendency to manage emotions, an impulse driven not only by our canons of scholarship but also by the teaching lore of our field. My discussion of emotion will, in the end, lead me back to the embodied imagination as a space wherein students’ emergent body identities can be made agentive and the negotiation between situated thinking and situated feeling can become a means of meaning making and self-determination within the praxis of feminist contemplative writing pedagogy.