The Missing Body–Yoga and Higher Education

Abstract

When I practice Yoga, I imagine a female serpent awakening at the base of my spine. My breath moves her slowly upward to the crown of my head where she will emerge to unite with her spouse. This erotic metaphor of mind/ body integration helps me to experience breath as a form of thought linking me to invisible sources of energy. After half a life as a fairly sedentary academic, I’d become a serious student of Yoga. Skeptical of New Age fads, I was reluctant to plunge in, but after months of practice my energy level increased, my concentration deepened, and my mental acuity sharpened. Hatha Yoga’s relative absence of dogma and its rigorous mix of breath-work, strength, and flexibility training helped to demolish many assumptions about my aging female body. In a strange reversal of time, I’d become physically stronger and more flexible at sixty than I’d been in my youth. Yet in class I continued to behave as if my students and I were no more than talking heads. During one day long seminar, I noticed many of them sprawled on the floor in various postures as if their bodies were crying out for movement even if it wasn’t on the syllabus. So I posed myself a challenge. If I was serious about mind/body integration, why did I continue to operate like a Cartesian dualist in my classroom? This led me to explore the body’s role in development and learning and to change the way I teach. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to educational engagement is our student’s learned passivity, the result of years spent watching television or sitting in school. When their bodies are not engaged, they easily tune out or turn off. Yet they willingly pay for dance, martial arts, or Yoga classes as extra curricular activities. These body-based practices are most often sought for reducing health problems, lowering stress, or meeting spiritual needs, but I was curious about the overall cognitive advantages that come from somatic engagement. Beyond the obvious benefits of harnessing attention and relieving stress, such activities promote the kinesthetic, somatic, and cognitive integration that most accurately reflects the way our brains operate. When I coordinate inhaling and exhaling while moving, simultaneously attending to breath, balance, and alignment, I harness my energy for a single purpose. My thoughts scatter less, and my concentration deepens. This inward focus does not lead to self-obsession; in fact, bringing the body into the classroom makes us better observers of the plight of human bodies, whether the issue be prisoner abuse, starvation, terrorism, or war. The educational fragmentation that leaves the body out of learning, despite ample evidence of its centrality, is more likely to produce further such abominations. In this essay I hope to provoke many ideas about ways to actively engage the body in learning.

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