6.3: Bringing Theory to Practice- Situated Feeling Through Emotional Flexibility

Western conceptions of the body have tended toward devaluation and dismissal of our flesh. However, Eastern practices are able to sustain the development of such somatic awareness where our own cultural practices may fall short. Yoga, like composition, is at its heart, a praxis or an applied philosophy. Because it is a practice of doing, one that enforces process and practice just as writing does, yoga harmonizes well with the tenor of writing rhetorics. What may matter most to contemplative writing pedagogies is that yoga also takes the body as an epistemic origin so that embodiment becomes the means of knowing, feeling and making sense of the world and not just a physical enactment of social forces. Locating ourselves in our bodies, or developing a corporeal orientation that can translate to our writing, is a skill useful on the mat and in the classroom. A corporeal orientation insists on viewing knowledge as situated and therefore suggests that just as we are positioned by our material situatedness, the places and spaces our bodies occupy, we are positioned also by our feelings, which can be seen as negotiations between the agency of our bodies and the social circulation of affect in society. Yoga recognizes not only the theory but also the practice of situated knowing and feeling.

As I explored in my first and second interchapters, the practice of yoga can provide compositionists new theoretical lenses and practical methods to teach students how to create an embodied writing process. My central premise there was that yoga can show students on both a metaphorical level as well as an embodied, pragmatic one that our materiality helps shape the meaning we make in our writing. It follows that body awareness is a skill that can lead to more successful and generative writing sessions as well as a deeper understanding of the meaning-making process. And while I could potentially follow any contemplative practice to develop my argument, I concentrate on Iyengar yoga, a branch of Hatha, because of my experience with it and because of its core value of adaptability based on student needs and abilities.

I’ve argued that feminist contemplative writing pedagogies engage in a feminist epistemology of situated thinking and feeling. These pedagogies are consequently invested in getting students to practice connected knowing, a mode of knowing that is personal even when the object of knowing is not (Belenky, et al., 1973, p. 21). In contrast to separate knowers who experience the self as autonomous, connected knowers experience the self as always in a webbed relation to the material world and to others. Yoga theory and practice ultimately follows a similar connective impulse: it seeks balance and integration; it recognizes difference but does not see it as divisive. When placed within embodied writing pedagogy, the knowing facilitated by yoga can be seen to result in the formation of connected, situated knowledge that sees diversity as a generative force balanced by a commonality of flesh. Our bodies literally and conceptually provide the structure for the awareness, respect and mediation of difference.

Part of this awareness entails being receptive to our and others’ situated feelings, which is a skill teachable in the writing classroom and necessary for students’ lives outside of it. Far from promoting solipsism, attending to situated feeling attunes us to others and to the outside world of matter as it underscores the physicality of our knowing processes and the idea that understanding is itself material, not simply cerebral, in nature. Rooted in our bodies, we are also connected to other forms of matter. Calling to mind many of yoga’s themes of interconnectedness, philosopher Richard Shusterman argues that we feel our bodies in relation to other bodies of matter:

One cannot really feel oneself somatically without also feeling something of the external world. If I lie down, close my eyes, and carefully try to feel just my body in itself, I will also feel the way it makes contact with the floor and sense the space between my limbs. (2008, p. 70)

Of course, the practice of asana asks us to make sense of these feelings, both sensational and emotional, in order to better understand ourselves and the world in which we live. In my yoga class, these feelings also help build a sense of community that links together individual bodies as we move and breathe in harmony, often unconsciously synchronizing our actions and drawing a sense of strength and solidarity from each other even as we move through asanas on our own mats. Linda Adler-Kassner sees the potential of yoga to teach writers and program administrators the importance of communing with others in her 2008 book, The Activist WPA. Using her experience as a yoga student, Adler-Kassner argues that yoga teaches that “[o]ur breath is our own, yes. But when we hear the breath of others and develop our practice in concert with others, that practice changes in ways we don’t always anticipate” (Adler-Kassner, 2008, p. vii). Together, these ideas testify that a turn to the self does not close out others, but can indeed make us more aware of our relatedness to the larger world of matter.

My experiences as a yogi suggest how I might bring such a focus on situated feeling into my writing classrooms. Using yoga as a creative guide, I’d like to suggest a pragmatic approach to attend to situated feelings within contemplative writing pedagogy, one that provides a positive hermeneutic and gives viability to their instructional inclusion. I argue that we should strive to teach our students emotional flexibility, or to be yogis of their emotions, in order to engage them in producing the thinking and feeling processes that will lead to situated knowledge. Doing so affords students the agency to negotiate their embodied realities in relation to the reflective discourse on experience we encourage them to develop as part of the process of critical analysis. It stands opposed to asking them to somehow transcend these realities for the sake of a disembodied textual-social analysis or simple appropriation of a new discourse community. Emotional flexibility is part of a feminist process of critical engagement and inquiry that does not cancel out feeling and focuses on a holistic notion of “critical being” rather than simply critical thinking. In working through a new notion of emotion through flexibility, I am hoping to address the problem Worsham articulates in Going Postal, that we will continue to struggle with emotion’s inclusion in our pedagogies until we refuse to allow it to remain “beyond our semantic availability” (2001, p. 240). A contemplative means of talking about emotion may just give us the impetus to work through its effects in our classrooms and a language to share with our students. If situated feeling can help guide our theories, emotional flexibility can gives us a means of talking about emotion in the classroom.

Developing Flexibility on the Mat

In his definitive book on yoga, Light on Life, Iyengar targets two complementary skills necessary for the development of flexibility through the practice of asanas or poses: “extension,” attending to our inner space, and “expansion,” reaching out toward others and the unknown beyond us. Both acts are situated within a personal body but teach this body simultaneously to be inner-directed and outer-directed. Extension and expansion are interrelated actions because to reach out and create new space, you must first understand your own locatedness, or be aware of your center—what we might otherwise call our situatedness in a particular body in the world. Extension is attention to our immediate space, focusing on being in the personal body. Actions of extension include centering oneself through reflection and developing awareness of one’s thoughts and feelings. In other words, this skill includes reflection on the processes of situated knowing and engaging in situated feeling, actions which insist on a personal attentiveness that joins the “sensitive awareness of the body and the intelligence of the brain and heart … [together] in harmony” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 29). Extension asks us to marry the thinking and feeling postures that permeate the doing of a pose and is practiced attentively when both means of expression are balanced. Feeling in this equation may be understood as, in part, sensational, a slowing heartbeat and steady hands, as well as emotive and conceptual, such as feelings of peacefulness and receptivity

While vision isn’t unimportant here, it does get dethroned from its typical position of authority since yoga recognizes the limitations of sight. Increasing flexibility through awareness “is different from seeing with your normal two eyes. Instead you are feeling; you are sensing the position of your body” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 29). Feeling can indeed be more powerful than sight because it exchanges the receptivity of two outward-looking eyes for the awareness of the entire sensitive body which folds in on itself (through extension) as well as out toward the world (through expansion).²⁵ When practicing warrior III, for instance, I cannot see the leg I lift behind me as my body leans forward and I balance on the other leg; nor can I always see if my outstretched arms are parallel to the floor—if I try to look behind me, I lose my balance. Instead, I must learn through practice to feel the positioning of my leg behind me and to use my feelings as a guide to how to maneuver my body in space. To find balance, I need to be aware of the sensations of the pose, the emotions the pose calls up and the ways my intellect processes this bodily input and language captures and shapes it. It’s a bridging of body, brain and heart so that I experience myself as dynamically rooted, since the means of this bridging changes moment-by-moment as I take in the outside world with my in-breath and release with my out-breath. The acts of extension root us in the personal body, helping us understand our immediate material-semiotic placement and provide a path toward self-determination, but they are not to be completed alone.

Expansion complements extension because it reaches beyond the self’s perceived center. The body unfolds and energy flows outward. Actions of expansion include the experience of creating spaces in new directions; an opening of the inner body and expanding to the experience of the external. Using a concrete example of expansion to show how it works together with extension to promote awareness and increase flexibility, Iyengar states, “When most people stretch, they simply stretch to the point they are trying to reach, but they forget to extend and expand from where they are. When you expand and extend, you are not only stretching to, you are also stretching from. Try holding out your arm at your side and stretch it. Did your whole chest move with it? Now try to stay centered and extend out your arm to your fingertips …. Did you notice the space you created and the way in which you stretched from your core?” (Iyengar, 2005, pp. Light 33-34). I invite my reader to try this exercise. The space created through this stretching is the space for new ideas and transgressed boundaries. We experience our limits differently when we expand; for when we only extend, we may feel limited by the length of our grasp. But, when we also expand, we recognize that we can stretch out much further than we first thought; we create new openness. As this simple exercise shows, we actually create more space by being aware of our bodies and centered in them as opposed to simply reaching out with no thought as to the embodied origin of that movement.

In warrior III, expansion encourages me to reach my leg out from the center of my body, but extension reminds me to ground the stretch in the resistance I create by pressing my tailbone into my pelvis instead of reaching my arms out as far forward as possible. A lesson I relearn each time I practice is that mindlessly reaching out without conscious extension will push too much weight on the ball of my standing foot and not enough on my heel, making me tip forward. Without a balanced sense of self, I cannot reach toward the unknown. Instead, I must feel my arms create space against the resisting pull of my leg in the opposite direction as if I were pinching a rubber band with two fingers and attending to those fingers as much as the feeling of pulling the rubber band in the opposite direction. This pose makes me understand the importance of feeling centered in my hips and middle body so that I can reach beyond the center without losing myself for the sake of the movement itself; it’s a conscious action. Attentive form makes this pose a freeing experience at the same time as a rooted one, dependent quite literally on the stability of my standing leg as if it were a tree trunk sinking roots into the earth—an imaginative visualization I often use. Literally and metaphorically, this kind of movement increases flexibility at the same time that it demands we remain accountable to the limits of our flesh.

Emotional Flexibility in the Classroom

Extension and expansion are useful terms to use when working through the kind of emotional flexibility we might guide our students to develop as part of the embodied rhetorical process of contemplative knowing. Teaching emotional extension would entail helping students extend awareness to their emotional states as they write and the ways in which their bodies speak through their feelings. Students can be guided to articulate their situated feelings and the personal knowledge that has been shaped by and helped to shape those feelings in turn. In my classes, I’ve used reflective blogs as low-stakes journaling spaces wherein students can express their feelings and explore them in relation to what we are learning in class as well as the meaning they create through their writing. I also ask them to reflect on the emotional endeavor of the writing process itself, encouraging them to metacognitive insight. As I detailed in an earlier chapter, completing a regular asana practice as part of the composing process itself helps students tune into their feelings, sensational and emotional, in order to garner a better sense of what they take into their writing and how certain topics may incite feeling responses that they pass on to the page. These actions of turning in do not encourage self-centeredness. Reflection on personal emotional states develops flexibility and not simple solipsism because students can learn to move beyond crippling self-consciousness and concentrate on exploring how they feel and not what others might be thinking or how they believe they should feel. This validates students, giving them agency to make sense of their experiences in light of others’ and guarantees a rhetorical process invested in the creation of new knowledge and not an exploration of already-formed ideas by published authors, experts.

It is precisely this agentive impulse that generates Hindman’s argument in Making Writing Matter wherein she argues against the theoretical status quo that insists our rhetorical realties are more important or genuine than our embodied realities. In this article, Hindman uses her own lived experience as an alcoholic to argue against such already-formed “expert” ideas that our identities are ideological constructions that interpolate us into certain master narratives. Instead, she insists she is unwilling to transcend the body she knows has a reality outside of discourse; that the rhetoric of alcoholism helped to define an embodied reality she was living long before she ever stepped foot into an AA meeting and began to accept their language of recovery. Hindman concedes that when she constructs herself as an alcoholic, she is submitting herself to a discourse, but she argues that this is an empowering choice, or a “way I could hope to escape the deterministic and bleak physical aspects” of being an alcoholic (2001, p. 99). In other words, in choosing to control what it means to be an alcoholic and taking the language that labels to make it enable, Hindman creates a kind of embodied agency within language. Her body is a source of agency and power, allowing her to escape the dominant yet negative understanding of alcoholism and to recognize the role of her flesh in making meaning and, especially in this case, in the process of revision (ie., her revision of the alcoholic’s identity narrative). To the extent that we see our own students as “recovering alcoholics” who abuse the comforts of the status quo by ignoring the ways in which they might be interpolated by their cultures and societies and relying too heavily on emotional discourse as opposed to alcohol, we may treat them as Hindman fears: as pawns of ideology who need to be taught to appropriate the theories of experts in order to complete smart social analysis. Incorporating attention to extension may encourage students’ development of an emotional flexibility that validates their embodied feelings. In turn, they can enter into discourse communities as bodies with resistances, the first of which is feeling itself.

Even so, to balance this act of understanding feeling as residing in us, as a part of our corporeal fabric as embodied beings, we also need to teach students to see emotion as that which connects them to social structures, or how affect works in between cultures and individuals in addition to within individuals. That is, how feeling spatializes our body in relation to other bodies in the world by web-making through connections. As a result, feeling is a tangible way to localize our knowledge-making practices. When we see feeling as an enabling marker of local knowledge, we attend to how our affective relations to the world are mapping practices that materialize in the social interactions of bodies, which disturbs easy categories of private and public and inner and outer. In turn, we begin to respect the ways we should accept the openness of their definitions, refusing hard and fast delineations between the two. Finding comfort in closure is an act of unbendingness or inflexibility.

Emotional expansion is useful here because it pushes us out in new, sometimes uncomfortable ways and gives us means to see how the social circulation of emotion between bodies works. We must give up control, to prompt a flexibility of thinking and feeling with others and beyond the insular self. Vulnerability becomes strength for those who reach out and increased self-awareness is often an unexpected outcome. Famous yoga instructor Rodney Lee states this eloquently saying, “I believe we’re doing yoga so that we can be strong enough to be fragile …. I don’t think yoga is to keep you from feeling fragile. I think it’s to enable you to be consciously fragile but still feel like, ‘I’m fine with this fragility” (2002, p. 4). Teaching students to consider seriously their classmates’ ideas helps to achieve this end. I’ve had students practice contemplative listening in written responses to peers who disagreed with their ideas, asking them to write back to their peer in ways that attempted to respect the dissension and work with it as opposed to simply negate it. Even more than such strategies alone, introducing the embodied imagination as a method for the process of inquiry in composition studies, one that takes its lineage from feminism and an Eastern tradition of yoga that challenges hierarchical dualities and seeks integration at its core, may show students how to stretch themselves without denying or hurting their embodied selves in the process. I enflesh the contemplative theory of situated feeling presented here in the next interchapter by exploring how it translates to the classroom and gives meaning to a practice of breath control, or pranayama, in the contemplative writing classroom.