7.4: Breathing In Focus, Breathing Out Negative Emotions

Breathing not only teaches us balance by unifying the energies of self and the world but also helps us to concentrate on the present moment and to be attentive to our embodied needs in it. Meditation, whether on the breath, an intention or a mantra, has long been known to increase our powers of focus and concentration. As Iyengar states, “[w]atching the flow of the breath also teaches stability of consciousness, which leads to concentration …. The power of concentration allows you to invest your new energy judiciously” (2005 p. 72). By paying attention to our breath, my students learn to focus the energy of the physical and mental body, which can result in more productive writing sessions wherein they feel in greater control of the distractions that surround them. The stronger their powers of attention, the more likely it is that they will stay motivated to continue writing and the less likely they will be blocked by stress or anxiety.

While these are lessons individually felt, they are collaboratively learned. Because students do not always arrive on time to class and because we start with our breathing exercises, we’ve had to learn as a class how to deal productively with the interruptions not only caused by other loud classes heard through the thin walls of our room but also by our own members entering the room after we’ve started. When we first started our breathing exercises, my students would open their eyes to see who had entered; later in the semester the majority remained focused on their breath, a demonstrable effect of their learned attentiveness. Not responding to distraction is an act of agency and of choice that many students hadn’t considered prior to the class. Our age of multitasking and my students’ almost absolute reliance on technology hides the choice; the cell call may go unanswered and the blinking Facebook message ignored. Sam noted in her blog that before our class, she never thought about the importance of focus during writing, but that now she understands it and attributes her success to our practice of pranayama: “I would have never guessed that yoga … could help a person focus as much as it has for me. My new writing habits are definitely more productive that the ones in the past like watching TV and Facebooking.” Part of what students are learning during these classroom moments is the difference between contemplative beholding what happens around us (noting the noise caused by a late classmate and then letting it go) and attaching to these events (peeking our eyes open to observe the entering classmate).

Students can apply these lessons to their own bodies as equally as to other bodies and their environments. Because breathing rejoins our body and mind and urges them to work together for a common purpose, it is a helpful practice for writers who find their own bodies sources of distraction when attempting to focus—a common problem. One of my students, Steven, said this:

Through the last few weeks, I have been able to concentrate in English a lot more because of the breathing exercises. At first, I had a lot of trouble concentrating. My nose always itched, or I had to cough, or something like that. But after the first few times I learned to tune this out and concentrate on my breathing …. I am amazed at the changes that have taken place in my writing since I started this class. I now see writing as a lot more physical and I can really jump right into it with the right combination of breathing exercises and habits. I always look forward to using these methods while I write papers.

Deciding what distractions are enabling versus those that are disabling is a strategy students tell me they often use to stay focused on their writing when working in loud dorms or heavily-populated libraries on campus. Even in the library, where many of my students go to escape from the noise, is distracting for many. Some of my students were worried about peer judgment if they used pranayama in these public spaces: “I didn’t like doing [breathing exercises] in the library at first, where I write most of my papers, because there are a lot of people there. I don’t like closing my eyes, thinking about my inhalations, when others are around.” The usefulness of the breathing exercises, however, tended to win out over the fear of peer judgment: “I don’t mind [breathing exercises in the library] anymore, I just do it; I figure no one cares if I close my eyes for a minute. I mean there are people taking naps in the library, so really a breathing exercise isn’t that weird or out of the ordinary there. I feel much more concentrated after the exercise so I’ll do it in the library.” The sheer number of students who reported performing pranayama in the library and other public spaces on campus testified to me just how much they valued the practice. Pranayama also encouraged students to re-evaluate the moments of the writing process when they weren’t breathing. Another of my students, Cindy, noted in a blog entry that she took to listening to classical music on her iPod as a way of maintaining her mindful and peaceful state after completing breathing exercises. Cindy states that she “learned how important it is to develop and maintain focus this semester and to be aware when focus is lost. I didn’t do this before.” As a result, Cindy had come to my class with much frustration over writing. She was able to finally dispel this frustration through her breath.

Pranayama teaches writers that where the breath is, the heart will be as well. Cindy’s response illuminates how the inability to focus can become both the cause and the source of the negative emotions of the writing process. If emotional stress pulls the body and mind in separate directions, then these moments of appreciating the breath teach students that to alleviate such stress, it is necessary to rejoin the body and mind; the breath becomes a vehicle for this. Iyengar tells us that “[t]he breath, working in the sheath of the physical body, serves as a bridge between body and mind” (2005, p. 73). Developing skills to channel the breath in hopes that the mind will follow can help writers cultivate successful strategies for navigating the demands of the writing process, demands that are often emotional and anxiety-producing for our students (and ourselves). Breathing mindfully can create positive feelings and cultivate a quieted and calmed consciousness, ready to create and problem-solve. We know this instinctively as we unconsciously take deep breaths before walking on stage, and we are even culturally reminded of the ways conscious breathing promotes focus when a friend encourages us to “just breathe” when we are in the midst of a trying situation, wondering what course of action to take.

Learning how to use the breath to refocus their emotional states is important for students who rush from one class to another, hardly giving thought to the ways their performance in one will impact their successful learning in other. For instance, leftover anxiety from a test taken in the class before mine can chip away at my students’ concentration, leaving them to fret more over the correctness of their answers on that test than to learn a new reading or writing strategy during our time together. One of my students noted that these stressors, “like [his] math test … fall away when we breathe at the start of class,” allowing him to apply a fresh mind and calmed emotional state to our classroom work. “After each exercise, it’s like all my concerns for other classes evaporated for a while, and I could focus solely on English class. I feel not totally, but somewhat relaxed. It’s a good start for the class and writing.”

My student might be alluding to the ways pranayama helps develop mindsets that encourage awareness and acknowledgment of feeling in ways that are enabling rather than disabling. This is an applied skill of emotional flexibility. These “motivational mindsets” contain “scripts for dealing with competence-related setbacks” and “beliefs about the malleability of abilities as well as strategies and scripts for how to cope with inevitable setbacks associated with learning new and challenging things” (Roeser & Peck, 2009, p. 129). Feeling itself is not unwanted in the writing process, since with feeling comes motivation; what is disabling is when negative emotions like stress and anxiety overwhelm the writer. Because emotional flexibility centers on balancing inner and outer pulls, it can help writers “avoid reactive attachment [to feelings and thoughts] … allow[ing] us to observe the contents of our consciousness rather than simply being absorbed by them” (Hart, 2008, p. 33). In the end, this override of unthinking reactions to feelings doesn’t so much invalidate their importance as it allows students to better understand them, and greater intimacy breeds emotional maturity.

For example, instead of just seething with anger, the contemplative mind may allow a little more space between the anger [or other emotion] and us. We might both have our anger and also notice it—“Look at me being angry, what’s that about?”—rather than simply being lost in the anger. (Hart, 2008, p. 33)

As students learn to first notice and them accept emotions, they become more metacognitively attuned to themselves, which can significantly impact their behavior and can encourage development of adaptive writing strategies that positively transform the process.

Intimate awareness of our feelings is therefore a key step in developing an emotional flexibility that will allow writers to develop coping strategies and motivational mindsets that help them overcome negative feelings. Highlighting how this process works by attending to the breath, Boris shared the following story on his blog:

Today I was feeling really down on myself and felt as though I needed some type of pep talk. After going through the breathing routine on my own, I actually was able to re-energize myself. Afterwards, the work that I had done was so rewarding that I feel motivated to continue writing. Sometimes if I get myself in a slump I need to remember that just one exercise can help me feel better, help me to be able to focus on homework, and to make me want to continue. This is what’s so good about the yoga I do, it has a day to day use … [making me] emotional[ly] and mentally flexible.

Boris finds a source of resilience and “emotional and mental” flexibility through pranayama. Meditation and yoga has indeed been shown to “promote the construction of attributions to malleable source of difficulty and adaptive source of coping, particularly when confronting setbacks” (Roeser & Peck, 2009, p. 129). It is this adaptive coping Boris alludes to when he uses breathing as a soothing and calming exercise, much like a private pep talk. As in the discussion of anger above, my student is able to step back from his depressed mood which seemingly leaves him devaluing his abilities as a writer to ask, “What’s up with that?” An alternative to seeking out assurance from another, an act that may be stilled by embarrassment, is a conscious channeling of positive energy using his breath. This work to transform his mood increases his motivation such that my student feels emotionally-rewarded by the writing that follows.

These examples from our breathing practice show how yoga helps writers displace negative emotions and embrace self-compassion, which is a quality upon which the contemplative arts are built. In their article on the usefulness of contemplative pedagogy, Roeser and Peck argue that teaching students to exercise self-compassion helps them “take a kind, non-judgmental, and understanding attitude toward [themselves] in instances of pain or difficulty rather than being self-critical” (Roeser & Peck, 2009, p. 129). Given that so many of my students describe the writing process as painful and emotionally dissonant, such an attitude is essential in our composition classrooms. My students’ testimonies embody the additional benefits of self-compassion for writers including greater feelings of confidence and competence and an increased, intrinsic desire for growth and improvement. Indeed, college students who exhibit self-compassion focus more on their learning and improvement as opposed to their performance in comparison to others. Studies have shown that students who have developed self-compassion are more likely to approach setbacks with a positive mindset and to correlate academic failures less with their sense of self-worth. Self-compassion is specifically correlated to students’ understanding of moment-to-moment fluctuations in perception, taught by breathing exercises, and their increasing ability to become aware of habitual responses in order to redirect them and “create a calm and clear mental context from which to act” (Roeser & Peck, 2009, p. 130).

It is this calm and clear context my students describe: “I definitely used breathing exercises to help calm myself down. I get so stressed and generally I use crying as a release for the stress but in this case, it was breathing exercises that helped me to calm down and get my focus back when I got too overwhelmed. I think it worked … only one instance of tears!” And, “I used the breathing exercises to stay calm when things were not coming together as quickly as I planned. I knew that I was on the home stretch of finishing my portfolio so when I went to the library to finish up little things and compile it in the folder I thought it was only going to take me two hours, but it ended up taking me six.” A longer than expected revision process, however, wasn’t enough to derail my student: “I began to get frustrated knowing that I had other stuff I wanted to get done too, but instead of freaking out and getting frustrated like I did in the past I took deep breaths in and tried to stay calm.” Breathing gives my students the ability to override their habitual and negative responses to feelings of stress and anxiety and helps them find control in their emotions, allowing them to redirect the energy of their feelings in more positive ways.

Attending to the energy of the breath attunes us to the flow of our emotional states because it requires us to be in the present moment and to judge ourselves less harshly as a result. In the end, increased compassion and mindfulness results in growth, according to my students:

Using the breathing techniques, I think that emotionally, I got a lot more relaxed about writing, and that is growth. To be able to accept something as imperfect because it doesn’t have to be perfect yet is growth. To be able to know that you can improve in the future, and to be able to find your own flaws and then smooth them over is growth … yoga helps to allow me to sit and concentrate and not need to constantly move. It allows me to sit. And write. And put my body into the paper. I can use all my senses to their fullest, and I can use myself and my ideas and my inclinations to truly write a good paper, one that shows my growth.

Acts of emotional flexibility are directly applicable to the writing process and can be learned through the practice of pranayama. 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. Students who accept the duality of extension and expansion, learned first at the level of their bodies by means of their breath, more easily accept change and are therefore more likely to see writing as a process and complete multiple, global revisions; students who can better cope with ambiguity are more likely to respond productively to their classmates’ opposing viewpoints, may be more open to multiple perspectives in other writings, more accepting of the situatedness of knowledge claims and less likely to ignore such complexities in their own writing; students who are able to face with coping strategies the negative emotions called up by writing will not only spend more time and energy on their writing but will also take more risks in their writing, leading to increased learning. On the page, the paired actions of extension and expansion represent a fusion of the critical and the creative, which characterizes the most socially-viable and personally-fulfilling kinds of writing our students—and we—can produce.