On teaching, and the power of blankets, breath, and touch....

As you know, yoga and my academic life are increasingly intertwined, particularly as I work on a book on yoga history and its relationship to gender and empire. Developing the ongoing project of a yoga studio, is also like a “lab” of sorts—a space to integrate aspects of yoga practice and philosophy, teaching, community building, and social justice. The impact of yoga upon my life as an associate professor and as a person is longstanding and beneficial beyond words. I began to practice yoga consistently as a grad student and teach it soon after, so teaching both yoga and literature simultaneously has been my practice for over fifteen years. This post traces a personal experience of yoga and its impact in my academic classroom. This story frames what was originally a paper presented at a panel for NWSA (National Women’s Studies Association) organized several years ago by my friend and fellow yogi, Suzanne Bost, and is now part of an essay completed for a book collection in progress, “Mindfulness and Resistance,” edited by Cara Hagan, on yoga and social justice. Here is an excerpt from the intro to my essay:

In 2011, I taught a senior seminar in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech on “The Body and Cultural Representation.” The course examined histories and politics of the body and focused closely on issues of gender and identity. We read material on racial science and Victorian medicine, discussed texts from the fields of literature, medical humanities, critical theory, and feminist criticism, and viewed films and visual images that addressed topics including histories of medicine, gender representation, and ethical, political, and legal issues surrounding the body. For the first time, I included texts that analyzed yoga as a cultural phenomenon and considered its migration to the West. Students read selections from Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford, 2010) and Robert Love’s The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (Viking, 2010). These books, both published the year before, explored the historical contexts of yoga and discussed its growing emergence within popular culture and as a subject of interdisciplinary scholarly study.[1] Along with excerpts from these texts, the class analyzed dominant narratives shaping our notions of gendered, healthy bodies, commodity culture, and communities of practice. We viewed popular images of the stereotypical “yoga body” in contemporary advertising as well as the YouTube “Yoga Girl” video which was circulating within social media sites at the time. 2011 seemed to be an important turning point for the emergence of yoga as a subject of intellectual inquiry as well as a darling attraction of popular culture. 

During this segment of the semester, I was faced with a quandary about how much to share with students about my own longstanding relationship with yoga. I had been teaching at studios in Atlanta ever since being hired as a faculty member at Georgia Tech, but these two teaching experiences had resided in separate realms. Sharing this information could create a critical turn in our discussion, but could also impact and unsettle the classroom dynamic. Dominant images of yoga associate the practice with slick magazine images of slender figures performing what sometimes look like contortionist poses; individual bodies tend to be highlighted and sexualized while the mindful, thoughtful, collaborative side of yoga is often ignored, or simply harder to capture and convey in popular media. I feared the ways that the image of “yoga teacher” or “yoga girl” collided with that of a professor at a research institution. I was also concerned that students could see me as, and primarily through, my body—the dominance of physical images of yoga and the focus upon asana in the “instagramming” of yoga in Western contexts has the potential to present yoga as an anti-intellectual pursuit focused just upon physical fitness. Further, in a class that addressed issues of bodies, race, and identity, students could read my South Asian background as a lens for my relationship with the practice and assume my interest in the subject simply because of my ethnicity. While it is important to critique the dominance of whiteness in yoga representation in the West and issues of appropriation, making authoritative claims about “authentic” yoga roots or one’s own cultural and ethnic relationship to that history as privileged is equally problematic. Yoga as we know it is, and has been, a fusion of practices made possible through colonial histories and global interconnections. It currently tends to flow in privileged spaces, and is not always practiced with its philosophical and historical roots in mind.

As feminist critics have long argued, the devaluing of women and their efforts has often been through the association of femininity to bodies and bodily processes[2] and in the same way, yoga’s physical dominance can relegate it as a marginal practice disconnected from explorations of mental evolution. Sharing my experience with yoga could shift the dynamics of the classroom by exposing a largely personal physical and spiritual practice and creating an image often perceived in opposition to professorial authority. And then I did it. I told my wide eyed and somewhat perplexed students about my experience as a yoga teacher and practitioner highlighting how yoga did, indeed, benefit my scholarly thinking and teaching practices, and also how Purna Yoga trained me to think critically about what I was doing in and for the world. I shared some of my research on yoga and its relationship to globalization and feminism, placing some of my work outside of the academy more closely within it.

In one of the final weeks of the semester, the class surprised me when a group of students showed up to take my restorative yoga class at a local studio (Yoga Samadhi) as part of an end of semester celebration that they organized. Suddenly, my worlds collided—my college students mingled with the regulars in my yoga class (some of whom had no idea I was also a college professor) as we all lined up our mats. We all shared a new experience as they witnessed a different side of my teaching outside of a traditional classroom setting. By reading their bodies and watching them move through poses, I perceived my college students in a new way and could recognize the burdens they carried in their bodies. The act of bundling students in blankets in savasana broke through the barriers that were held when we sat around a seminar table—so much of what we carry in our academic lives is held in the body, contained and restrained, and through yoga we can learn to let it go. This is why yoga had always been the perfect antidote to my work as a scholar. I had known that practicing yoga made me a better teacher to my academic students—more intuitive and aware of their needs, and more conscious of the subtle forms of communication that can occur through the body. However, their inclusion in my studio class taught me even more about how to incorporate the principles and practices of yoga in the academic classroom. The act of touch, a practice we often cautiously avoid in our classroom teaching, could be enacted in a careful way in the safe environment of a cozy studio and, further, the shared experience of focusing upon breath and quiet reflection served as an antidote to the active pace and sometimes stressful space of a seminar classroom. The experience de-centered our classroom in a new way—I wished that students could have joined me in a yoga class at the beginning of the year and not the end, because now, through the experience of breathing deeply, meditating, moving through poses together we could see that we all indeed were, and always are, embodied subjects in the process of learning.

We had two final classes on campus that semester after this experience, and the students who came to yoga connected with each other and with me in new ways in our classroom setting—the time for meditative reflection shifted the dynamics of the classroom. Students were more willing to share and confront their academic stress and connect themselves more deeply to material we were reading. Since the class had dealt with issues that were sometimes divisive and tense—addressing topics that raised ethical questions in the areas of the reproductive technologies and the intersections of race and medicine for example—awareness of our own embodiment and the living, breathing, interconnected qualities of our seminar environment gave students new ways to listen, analyze, and contribute within discussions.

The experience made me more aware of the ways to read and “hold” both of the teaching spaces I inhabit—the shared experience of yoga cultivated a more open and intuitive classroom space on a college campus, and allowed me to interact with my students in a more productive way. And the nurturing qualities of my hands and a blanket—experiencing a sense of touch and comfort, created new way to spark human connection with my students. Using props like bolsters, blankets, blocks and belts to set my students up in gentle restorative postures allowed me to support the tension in their physical bodies and be more aware of the human need we all have to be cared for. The props surprised students, and by using them they discovered new ways to support themselves and take the time to be contemplative and thoughtful. As a scholar in the humanities, that focus upon contemplation, feeling, and human contact could, and should, be central to the ways we think about our teaching—if the books we teach and the subjects we embrace ask our students to think about the world, and the concerns and feelings of others, and the critical complexity of the quandaries we face, then we have to experience those issues head on—but not only with our heads and minds. We need to think beyond purely intellectual realms of the mind and consider how we communicate with our hearts and bodies and how our embodiment and movement within communal spaces matters. We need to practice what Becky Thompson proposes as a “pedagogy of tenderness,” which “makes room for intimacy and vulnerability alongside deep study of guiding texts” (Thompson 7).

The relationship of yoga with my academic life does not circulate only one way. The practice of being a yoga teacher and being a professor/scholar are becoming more deeply entwined—having an awareness of language and of “reading between the lines” is a necessary part of the practice of teaching yoga just as it is critical to the work of a humanities scholar. Just as in my college classroom I can’t always predict where a class will go, in my yoga classes, I am always trying to find intuitive clues for what my students may need, what pose may align best after the other, and when to create the space for a more quiet or meditative practice. Yoga, like feminism, and like the collaborative classroom, is engaged with transformation and flux; it requires a process of balancing and unearthing the questions, the memories, the thoughts that reside within. Feminism and yoga are interwoven—both encourage awareness, kindness, and compassion, and both work towards the recognition and balance of stillness and change—of remembering the potential to grow and evolve. Both also engage with issues of community and collaboration. These qualities are central to my yoga classes as well as the academic spaces I live in—and how we speak, listen to, and care for our students is critical to how we create spaces of learning in yoga classes as well as college campuses. 

[1] Critical work on yoga and its relationship to Western culture began to emerge in the 1990s with seminal work by Joseph Alter, Elizabeth De Michelis, and others, but much of this work was by scholars in the fields of anthropology and religious studies. More recent texts have begun to analyze yoga in its contemporary and popular culture contexts. The publication of 21st Century Yoga (Horton and Harvey eds.) in 2012, the year after I taught this seminar, and more recent works such as Yoga, The Body, and Embodied Social Change (Berila et al eds.) which addresses yoga, feminism, and intersectionality, reveal the ways in which yoga is emerging as an important interdisciplinary subject of study. These recent texts also focus upon analyzing the potential of yoga as a means of social justice.

[2] See the long tradition of work in feminist theory that grapples with Cartesian models of a mind-body divide and addresses ways that women and bodily processes are devalued. This tradition begins with the work of figures such as Simone deBeavoir and continues with more recent critics including Denise Riley, Susan Bordo, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and many others. Mary Douglas has shown how the body can be powerful symbolically, and Michel Foucault has theorized how it can be regulated and monitored in our daily lives. Following Foucault, Bordo notes how “the discipline and normalization of the female body—perhaps the only gender oppression that exercises itself, although to different degrees and in different forms, across age, race, class, and sexual orientation—has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control” (13). As we acknowledge our bodies in classrooms and spaces we inhabit, we need to also recognize and challenge the ongoing regulatory qualities of the body and its cultural representation. So, the work of acknowledging the importance of “self-care” also requires transforming dominant ways of thinking about physical practices of the body as frivolous or unproductive acts. Further, we can theorize the value of yoga as a “transformative practice” that challenges the ongoing binaries of our culture and the devaluation of the body and its relationship to the mind as a vital collaboration.