7.1: Harmonizing Breathing and Writing

I share a version of guided pranayama—the Sanskrit term for our meditative, focused breathing practice—I’ve used in my writing courses in order to provoke new ideas about how we might engage students’ writing bodies in our classes and attend to the meaning potential of feeling. Western conceptions of the body have often devalued and dismissed our feeling flesh. Tompkins’ early call in Me and My Shadow to embrace the personal and embodied dimensions of our writing and her entreaty for us to give up the pretense of the disembodied and impersonal voice in our writing and accept the real body, “the human frailty of the speaker … his emotions, his history” that supports the writing persona as well as the “moment of intercourse with the reader—acknowledgement of the other person’s presence, feelings, needs” (1987, p. 175) have since led to treatises on embodied pedagogy, including Hindman’s Making Writing Matter and, recently, Kazan’s Dancing Bodies in the Classroom and Fleckenstein’s Embodied Literacies. Recent attempts to consider the writer’s materiality haven’t always taken a global perspective, however, and have consequently remained silent on one of the most viable ways of attending to the somatics of learning and the physicality of writing: contemplative education. Drawing on an over 2,500 year-old history of Eastern contemplative traditions, contemplative education approaches the learner holistically, as a body-heart-mind, and utilizes contemplative practice to transform traditional curricula. As such, contemplative pedagogies offer writing studies concrete methods of engaging the body in education and a means of developing writers’ mindful awareness of themselves and others as I assert in previous chapters. Because of their ability to help students become contextual thinker-actors and creative global citizens, contemplative approaches to learning are rapidly growing in higher education (see, for instance, Simmer-Brown & Grace, 2011).

In our own field, Moffett was an early adopter of contemplative education, before it was even labeled as such, when he argued that “[w]riting and meditating are naturally allied activities” (1982, p. 231). Despite growing academic interest in contemplative education, few within writing studies have followed Moffett’s early inquiries, even as university culture becomes more and more permeated by contemplative practice and education, what Zajonc calls the “silent revolution” of higher education (2010, p. 91). This book has been organized around an effort to explore what kind of revolution contemplative education might bring to writing studies. As I have outlined it, this so-called revolution might be summed up by the term I coined in my introduction to explain the shift that occurs when we ask students to engage in contemplative pedagogies: the embodied imagination. I have highlighted the consequences of becoming embodied imaginers in my chapters as I explored how we might help students reclaim the meaning-making potential of their bodies in both Chapter and Interchapter One. In the second interchapter and chapter pair, I argued that seeing writing as an embodied process and approaching student writers as writing yogis means that we must approach the learning process differently too, and that conceptions of situated knowledge can help us to do so. Not only does situated knowledge shift our thinking from personal/social binaries to a more inclusive and connected picture of knowledge-making, it also helps us respect the qualities of transformative openness and metacognitive insight developed by contemplative learning and knowing. In this final interchapter, I will conclude my exploration of the embodied imagination as a product of contemplative pedagogy by continuing what I started in Chapter Three: looking at how the embodied heuristic of feeling can help students become more reflective and generative writers.

As I’ve noted earlier, while I could go to any contemplative tradition to transform my classes, I have chosen to use yoga to help teach my students rhetorical awareness and mindfulness of living and learning. It is a commonplace among contemplative educators that individual instructors must choose the practices that guide our pedagogies based on our own practices and interests. My opening points to the ways I intend to use this chapter to further explore an integrated yoga-writing pedagogy that teaches students to embody the writing process with the breath. I am drawn to yoga (which includes the exercises of postures, meditation, and focused, meditative breathing), because it is, like composition, a praxis or an applied philosophy. Because it is a practice of doing, much like writing, yoga harmonizes well with the tenor of writing rhetorics. From this convergence, I will argue that developing writers’ “emotional flexibility” by teaching them to engage their feeling bodies through the practice of pranayama, or meditative, controlled breathing, can not only enrich their felt experience of the writing process and the physical ease and comfort with which they write but can also attune them to the materiality of knowledge making. Students who use pranayama as a regular composing ritual begin to appreciate the body as a site of learning and understand writing as a somatic experience that occurs with and through the flesh.

I will explore how students who self-consciously engage in these embodied writing practices develop, in turn, a greater metacognitive awareness of the writing process, reflected in their writings about writing. “Contemplative practices are metacognitive attention-training … research on learning establishes that since meditation is metacognitive it supports ideal learning” (Repetti, 2010, p. 13). Since yoga promotes metacognition, it follows that dramatic gains can be seen in writing yogi’s writing about writing, a space ripe for the display of their thinking and reflecting. In other words, as students breathe their way into writing, they place new value on observing the writing process as it unfolds, documenting and analyzing the felt experience of composing, which helps them become more generative and reflective writers. Particularly, students’ increased mindfulness and flexibility results in developed focus and advanced coping mechanisms to deal with the negative emotions of the writing process. Because these emotions are most likely to shut down the writing process and encourage our students’ procrastination, which can hinder the development of their thinking and their drafts, we have a responsibility to attend to student emotion in our classrooms, as I argued in Chapter Three.

To give sufficient space to students’ vocalizations of their feeling bodies, as represented in the reflective, metacognitive writings they produced during our class, like my other two interchapters, I will not focus primarily on students’ final products. Instead, in the pages that follow I am most interested in students’ attitudes and approaches toward the process of writing and how these change when they self-consciously embody their writing practices. Yoga teaches us that being on the path is what is important; the focus is always on the practice of a pose, a meditation or a breathing sequence, and not simply the outcome. Even so, there will be organic moments where students’ reflections will lead me to their papers if only to underscore their changing ideas about writing. As will become clear, students’ own reflective writings serve as a testimony that a focus on process doesn’t preclude an interest in the texts our students produce.

While my opening depicts a healthy practice of pranayama, one easily accepted by my writing students and myself, this wasn’t always so. When I started these breathing exercises with my students, I felt guilty. I worried that our breath work would compromise our time to complete the day’s work. I was already devoting class time to teaching various yoga asanas, or postures, and adding another element seemed like it might encroach too much upon our learning routine. Even though I was committed to integrating the contemplative practices of yoga in my classroom, I didn’t want my students to “lose” anything for the sake of their inclusion. So at first, I kept a close eye on my watch and tried to take attendance while I guided my students through their focused breathing. This multitasking seemed to validate any time “lost.” However, it problematically relied on a banking model of learning that implicitly valued multiplying skills over changing attitudes and also encouraged a rather hapless application of mindfulness—one that ignored the irony of attempting to cultivate awareness of the present moment by dividing my attention rather than focusing it. If I couldn’t stop multitasking, what right did I have to ask students to? Was my move to take attendance while engaging them in pranayama any better than their attempts to watch TV or check Facebook while writing assignments for our class? Just as my students were slowly convinced of the effectiveness of mindful breathing through continued efforts, our classroom breathing gradually taught me the importance using contemplative practices in transformative as opposed to additive ways.

I was already witnessing a transformation of the learning culture of my classroom due to our practice. Breathing with my students was organically changing the pace of my teaching from a sometimes-frantic push to just-get-one-more-lesson-learned-reading-completed-writing-workshop-done to a more balanced and measured tempo. While I still felt the urge to push forward as the semester rolled along like a rock down a hill, I was learning the difference between acknowledging the presence of these urges and acting on them—much as I have learned to label my thoughts as thoughts in order to put them aside during my personal practice of sitting meditation. Indeed, the whole class seemed to adjust to our measured pace by more frequently entertaining silence as a strategy for thinking.

I often noticed my students, perhaps in part following my lead, pausing to reflect over ideas in comfortable, thoughtful silence. The silence that characterized our breathing exercises was spilling over into our other classroom practices, such as the discussions upon which I build my lessons. When I was quick to push students to talk before they were ready, they would often correct my lack of mindfulness with the simple query, “Can you give us a moment to think about this?” That this question was even directed to me by my students showed a growing into engaged silence and a newfound respect for it in our classroom; these queries were rarely, if ever, posed by students in my classes where such mindful breathing was not a part. Pranayama, it seemed, was teaching us all how important reflective, quiet thinking was in the writing classroom—and it was reminding me how infrequently such “active” silence is allowed to reign. Before bringing yoga and breathing to bear on the process of teaching writing, it didn’t occur to me that students might need to be taught how to create generative and reflective silence within the space of our classroom, a kind of silence I value in my own writing process. This is a kind of silence students don’t often entertain—largely because they don’t have to since their teachers, peers or iPods easily fill in the void with voice. To construct a simple binary between the silence of mindfulness and the mindless voices of digital technology is not what I am after, but the increased volume and pace of our lives and, thus, classrooms is certainly ever the more reason to find means of refocusing on the present moment and reducing distractions, especially when we are engaged in the process of writing.

Since the beginning of that first semester of bringing pranayama into my classroom, I have come to see time for reflective silence and breathing during class time as equal in value to our time for discussion or in-class writing, and I participate as fully as I can while still prompting my students.²⁹ Mindful breathing and practiced silence, in other words, have become part of the work of my writing classroom, reminding me and my students how important it is for writers to cultivate a habit of reflection and a writing life characterized by awareness if we hope to use the writing process not only to communicate but also to learn about ourselves and the world in which we live. The attentive awareness that pranayama fosters applies equally to the goals of mindful living and also mindful writing, the kind of writing that can support an education vested in the principles of social justice and feminist pedagogy. It also helps create a strong contemplative foundation when paired with the “yoga for writers” practices I outlined in Interchapter Two.