7.2: Emotional Flexibility

Daniel Goleman is perhaps the best-known popular theorist of emotions in education and the workplace. Of great interest to educators are Goleman’s theories of emotional intelligence, defined as “master[y of] the emotional realm” (1995, p. xiii). In his book, Emotional Intelligence, Goleman claims lineage from Howard Gardner’s theories of multiple intelligences but faults Gardner for focusing on cognitive elements in his categories to the exclusion of feelings. Goleman describes emotional intelligence, calling it a subset of Gardner’s personal intelligences, as an individual’s awareness of her own and others’ emotions toward the ends of self-control and the management of emotional encounters with others (1995, p. xiii). To prove the importance of emotional intelligence, Goleman spends much time working through case scenarios to highlight the benefits of addressing emotional abilities in the workplace and in education. He believes emotional intelligence acts a corollary to IQ so that while the latter is seemingly out of our control, working to “master the emotional realm” (1995, p. xiii) provides “a better chance to use whatever intellectual potential the genetic lottery may have given to [us]” (1995, p. xii). Within Goleman’s economic model, focused on traditional understandings of success in work and school, emotions become a skill of the capitalist who seeks to profit as much from his financial relationships as his personal ones.

While widely popular, Goleman’s term is too problematic for inclusion in contemplative writing pedagogy. First, although he admits that the emotional and the rational often work together in harmony, Goleman ultimately sees them as “two minds” that work as “semi-independent faculties” (1995, p. 9), which problematically gives the impression that comprehension can sometimes be devoid of emotion. This separation stands in stark contrast to a contemplative understanding of emotion as an organic form of our body’s energy so that we can no more stop feeling than cease breathing (Iyengar, 2005, p. 82). Second, Goleman’s theory tends to ignore difference and focuses more on promoting assimilation in a cookie-cutter, male-dominated world. His is a world of capitalists seeking to gain as much ground as possible, which unfortunately reduces emotional intelligence to the level of a commodity. Here, gender is ignored, often along with other factors of situatedness including class and race. Positioned within patriarchal capitalism, Goleman’s term lacks attention to difference and diversity and is fixated on singular self-control of emotions, which are in turn feminized; he thereby constructs emotional intelligence as a site of masculinized social control where the gains lie in “creating ‘smooth’ and efficient worker relations” (Boler, 1999, p. 61).

In my last chapter, I introduced emotional flexibility as a means of approaching the work of feeling in contemplative pedagogy. Here, I suggest we trade talk of emotional intelligence for emotional flexibility. Goleman’s term tends to denigrate emotional awareness to the level of a commodity, which can be deployed for capitalist gains. Because it refuses lineage from such troubled terms and springs instead from a tradition of yogic mindfulness that parallels feminist theories of connected and situated knowing, emotional flexibility is more hopeful and is self-conscious of embodied difference. Unlike emotional intelligence, which works within a genetic range bestowed upon us by fate or divine will (Goleman, 1999, p. xii), I approach emotional flexibility as a skill that can be cultivated, taught and learned—just as flexibility is taught and developed in the yoga studio. Indeed, by utilizing contemplative acts like pranayama as writing tools, my students grow to become writing yogis of their thoughts and emotions. That is, our classroom practice of mindful breathing helps my students develop emotional flexibility they can use to become more generative and reflective writers who are strong and resilient in the face of negative emotions and thoughtful and compassionate in their attempts to understand and utilize the meaning potential of feeling in their composing processes.

Our feelings, whether inspired by the ideas and memories about which we are writing, generated by the writing process itself, or produced by our body’s responses and organic intelligence, energize our writing. I like how Iyengar, puts it: “The very word, inspiration, meaning both to breathe in and to grasp a feeling in the form of an idea, expresses the way the brain is charged during inhalation” and reminds us of the body’s role in meaning creation (2005, p. 75). Iyengar accounts for what we might call felt knowledge after Sandra Perl’s exploration of felt sense, or the “body’s knowledge before it’s articulated in words” (2004, p. 1). If Iyengar accounts for the ways invention is embodied, he does so by linking breath and emotion. According to yoga, focusing on the breath, prana or life force and energy, makes us attentive to our feelings (and thus able to reshape them). A focus on prana also stabilizes our mind by bringing it back into dialogue with our body, connecting us to the rest of the material world, in turn. In the simplest terms, prana situates us. And because prana is never still but rather flows between all material objects, this situatedness is dynamic. The very act of inhalation confuses boundaries between self and environment, insisting on an interrelatedness of all matter. Inhalation, therefore, literally opens us to new possibilities and ways of being and thinking that are in constant flux, teaching us patience in the face of change. Like catching our breath outside on a windy day or grappling with the evolution of meaning over the course of successive writing drafts, we must learn to be responsive to our ever-changing environments.

If situated knowledge, at its best, is attuned to the ways our social and material placement locates us in the world in particular ways, then pranayama, or the practice of focused breathing and awareness, represents how we both surrender ourselves to our environments and how we also exert ourselves on these environments as we filter them through our bodies, changing them and ourselves. By the deceptively simple act of breathing, then, my students learn to embody and enact the reflective and reflexive inquiry at the heart of the embodied imagination and to apply this to their own writing processes. As embodied imaginers, students join the social, emotional and bodily dimensions of knowing and of making meaning. Approaching feeling through the contemplative means that we understand it as, in part, sensational, a slowing heartbeat and steady hands, as well as emotive and conceptual, such as feelings of peacefulness and receptivity for the upcoming discussion and lesson.

Flexibility is the ability to bend without breaking; similarly, when applied to our emotions, it is the ability to balance the weight of our emotional responses and the need to accommodate others’. Yogis can only stretch as far as they can maintain balance; stretching without minding our own positioning will cause us to fall over. Mindful breathing helps us become aware of this need for balance and can teach us how to attain it through our bodies and exercise it in our mental and physical activities. To find this balance, or to become emotionally flexible, we must learn to pair the movements of extension and expansion. Iyengar explains that extension requires attending to our inner space and expansion requires reaching out toward others and the unknown (2005, pp. 33-34). The literal core of both acts is the center.

Respiration is a prime example of the coupling of extension and expansion, learned at the level of our bodies. During inhalation, our lungs expand and we bring the outside world into our body, allowing it to affect us, often in ways we may not initially predict. As we take in a breath, we literally and metaphorically take in and process the new, or that which we label as “other” because it exists outside of ourselves. If “[i]nhalation engulfs the whole body, expanding from center to periphery” (Iyengar, 2005, p. 75), then extension occurs in turn: “[d] uring exhalation, the tide recedes, drawing back toward the center” (Iyengar, 2005, pp. 75-76). For as we exhale, we move inward to our center, refocusing on the self, even as that self has been changed and shaped by the new breath circulating within our inner body until it too is released and the process begins again.

Mindful breathing, or pranayama, becomes a practice and a tool for teaching emotional flexibility in the writing classroom because it asks writers to pay attention to how the body feels and what the body does in order to develop writing habits that apply the strength and flexibility of the yogi to the writing process. Simply put, flexibility is achieved when writers can practice both self/ inner- and other/outer- directedness and balance the two moves in their compositions and their composing processes. Here, the body is used as a hinge for new ways of thinking about writing and new ways of doing writing, or actually engaging in the process of composing. Instead of brains in vats, student writers in this paradigm are best understood as writing yogis, as body-heart-minds who use their physical beings as writing laboratories, or as lived sites for the practice and research of the writing and meaning-making process (enacting the expectation invoked in my epigraph). Mindful breathing thereby becomes an integral practice for instructors who want to forward embodied writing pedagogies that seek to rejoin the meaning-making potential of both thinking and feeling as they come together in the physical writing body. Imagining and enacting writing as a situated and embodied process by attending to the breath specifically invites students to think about how the body is integral to the composing process and how the relationship between thought and emotion shapes the tapestries of words and meanings writers create.

Emotional flexibility becomes a viable alternative to other pedagogical concepts of emotion as it authorizes feeling at the same time it considers those feelings in the context of outside perspectives, ambiguity and possibility. Indeed, traditional models of inquiry and critical analysis can be made stronger by being coupled with feminist acts of emotional flexibility. Too often the structure of “claim plus reasons” that rules academic argument seeks a kind of hollow closure and encourages our students to “play it safe” with surface-level topics that may or may not complicate, challenge or confirm embodied beliefs and values. Just as often there remains little room for students to explore ideas threatening to their identities, which are tied deeply to embodied beliefs and feelings. Within feminist contemplative pedagogies, however, emotion becomes not simply a subject of critical inquiry, but a process of inquiry itself. Teaching students to trace in their writing the entanglement of situated feeling and thinking and encouraging the development of emotional flexibility may prompt them to entertain new viewpoints seriously without the threat having to divorce from their flesh by capitulating to expert ideas or uncritically staying rooted in their own.

Even if it isn’t standard practice to pay attention to the breath during the writing process, understanding meditative mindfulness as a primer for the learning process isn’t as esoteric as it may have been even a few years ago. With the proliferation of yoga retreats for writers and the rise of contemplative education and organizations that promote mindful pedagogies in higher education such as the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society, many educators have accepted the ways contemplation and mindfulness practice, such as meditation and pranayama (which is a kind of meditation focused on the breath rather than on a mantra), can be successfully deployed as part of a holistic learning process that links the body and the mind. Appreciating the breath “as it is” while learning to direct its energies toward where one wants it to be is pragmatic in the writing classroom, in particular, because it teaches students that they must start where they are, or that acknowledging their present reality is necessary to move forward toward new embodied imaginings which unify the body’s desires and the mind’s energies. On the page, these paired actions represent a fusion of the critical and the creative that characterizes the most socially-viable and personally-fulfilling kinds of writing our students can produce. Teaching mindfulness through the breath cultivates an environment of well-being that benefits teachers too. As Repetti notes, “[t]he professor who meditated with students is supporting not only her students but herself against teacher burnout and other ills that threaten motivation on a daily basis” (2010, p. 11).