Category: yoga

body · teaching · yoga

Embodied / Teaching

aimeemorrison6 Comments

Before class, I changed my shirt–I was just reviewing my lesson plan and I could see that what I was wearing was going to work against my teaching.

In class, I got a student to come to the front of the room. We linked arms and sat waaaaay back. People partnered up and swayed together.

“Watch me,” I said: “Can you see the curve in my low back?” And then: “Put your hand on your lower back–can you feel a curve there?” And then, turning around, “Now look–watch my shoulder blades come together when I move my arms like this.” (This was why I switched to racer-back tank top from the Internet t-shirt I had on originally.)

Obviously, this was an “Introduction to Yoga” class, not a “Digital Photography–Writing the #Selfie Online” class. These are the two courses I’m teaching this term, one to 11 graduate students in the English department, and one to 16 beginning yogis at Queen Street Yoga. My two classrooms are about a block and a half away from each others–in fact, I can see the yoga studio from the design classroom, and vice-versa–but they are worlds apart in how I experience them as a teacher.

I’ve written a lot about self-presentation as a teacher before: looking “professional”, from head to toe, and mostly about manifesting a particular kind of ethos and authority, where I want my embodiment to be, let’s face it, functionally invisible. I don’t want people to look at my body or my face the way we are all conditioned to look at women: as potential sexual conquests or rivals, as things to be looked at and assessed. When I’m teaching English, I want to look “nice” and “stylish” so far as matches some sort of sense I have of myself (blazers, but with sleeves rolled, and maybe a t-shirt from the internet) without really drawing attention to that as a performance of attention-seeking. I want to fall somewhere being effortlessly professionally cool and recognizably just myself. I often have an acute sense of myself as open to bodily scrutiny even as I try to focus on putting my ideas and teachings forward–this is particularly true in undergraduate classrooms where I stand at the front of the room in front of rows of seated students, where I frequently turn around and write things on the board and can’t see what they’re doing. This is uncomfortable and it often feels like I’m looking for a magic solution to make my self-presentation–my embodiment in the classroom–both acceptable and invisible. It’s a kind of awkward and self-conscious self-denial.

I note this particularly since I’ve begun teaching yoga. I teach beginners, and I teach intermediate and advanced students. I teach people older than me, sometimes by a lot, and people younger than me, sometimes by a lot. I teach people whose bodies do not much resemble mine, and some whose do. I teach students who are stronger and more flexible than me, and students who are weaker and tighter than me. Through it all, we bring our bodies to the forefront. I choose my clothes so that students can see my body move and align in particular ways when I demo poses, or mirror them in a flow. Sometimes we try things together: let’s all do this with our left arm, and I’ll do it with you.

I’m totally unselfconscious about this. My body feels right, even in its forties, even lumpy and full of moles. My body and my ideas and my teaching work together. I feel whole. “Look at the angle of my pelvis,” I ask them from downward dog, “see how I point my tailbone up to the ceiling here? And what happens to my low back when I don’t?” Or, in Firelog pose, “You’ll see that my leg doesn’t go very far here: I have very tight hips, but yours might be more open and your knee will get closer to the floor.” My body becomes a functional thing, a purposeful thing, a beautiful machine that is fully me, for the moment unlamented.

I’ve never felt so unified, and I’ve never felt so complete and so capable, even in my idiosyncratic frailties and my imperfect embodiment. I feel like I’m using my whole self, not squashing a big part of myself away from view, a potential liability to me and my goals. It feels good; it feels weird to feel good in this way. I begin, more and more, to wonder what I lose the rest of the time, when I’m so self-conscious, fighting myself, trying to hide away everything but my Brain.

balance · grading · yoga

Holding your sense of humour

aimeemorrison3 Comments

I just got my braces all readjusted yesterday. I had been on tray 28 of 32, but everything had to be recalibrated, and after an hour of my orthodontist yanking on my face and doing what felt like hammering, I restarted on my new tray 1 of … 34. That was bad news. And it hurts like hell.

My daughter’s teacher sent home a note indicating that Munchkin is “significantly behind in what concerns the homework assignments.” Oh great. That’s on me, because the homework needs to be explained and supervised and I’m the French speaker at home.

My husband fell down the porch stairs in the rain, while putting up Halloween decorations.

My class got shifted to another room for a special event, and when I put the poster on the door, I listed the wrong room number.

The indignities and injuries are piling up at the same time as the grading and the writing deadlines and SSHRC adjudication season for me. I’m grumpy. But this:

I went to yoga last night, and as we moved into a tricky and extended balance sequence, my teacher instructed us to hold our hands in this tented-fingers position. It was, she told us, so that we could hold our sense of humour, keep it close.
So there we were, on one leg, tipping forward and kicking back and rolling up into some awkward and unstable sort of floating half moon pose, trying to keep this soft tent of fingers together, gently cradling our sense of humour, delicately, in the midst of difficulty and effort and sometimes falling over.
It’s hard to keep your hands like this when you are getting a foot cramp on your standing leg and your thigh is burning and your balance is super off and you’re about to fall over. The tendency is to let the arms flail out for balance, or, conversely, to jam the hands together, in a hard clench. It takes real skill to go through the hard stuff and keep your fingertips softly touching, but if you can do it, your jaw unclenches. You relax a little. You remember to laugh when you fall.
At the point in the term, then end of Week 9 for me, with 40 new papers to grade every week, and a final to plan, and two more online quizzes to create, and managing the graduate program and adjudicating the SSHRC apps, and trying to not get any more notes home from grade three, well, it’s hard to not clench. It’s hard to hold onto my sense of humour, gently.
I’m trying colourful pens, mint tea, shared videos of adorable animals on Facebook, early bedtimes, and some self-compassion.
How are you managing to ‘keep your fingers tented’ at this tricky balance point in the term?
ideas for change · pedagogy · slow academy · yoga

What the doctorate can learn from yoga teacher training

aimeemorrison3 Comments

This weekend, I did so many down dogs for so long that today I can hardly lift my arms parallel to the floor and draw them to touch in front of my body. It was a yoga teacher training (YTT) weekend. It strikes me that YTT is both very much like, and very much unlike, the doctorate.

Many people join yoga teacher training programs for the same reason they start doctorates: they are skilled and enthusiastic students of the discipline in question, and want to “go deeper” or “take the next step.” They may admire their primary teachers and start to imagine what life at the front of the room might be like.

But the academy and the kula diverge at the point of advanced study. In my doctorate, I received a lot of training in how to be an even better student of my discipline: how to do advanced research, how to gain field coverage, what books to read and buy. And this is true of my YTT as well: my physical asana study has gained a new intensity and depth. However, in my YTT, I’m receiving explicit and sustained instruction in how to be a yoga teacher, and a yoga professional. I didn’t get either of those things, or in nearly such depth, in my doctorate.

For example, in my YTT, we learn what kind of language is most effective for helping beginners move their bodies into the shapes we want. How to modulate our voices to create a rhythm in class, how to use enthusiasm to create energy. How to create a safe and effective sequence and lesson plan. What it means to ask students to look at our bodies, about sexualization and transference and asking someone you trust to tell you if your pants are see through. How studios operate, how to market ourselves and get work as teachers, what the going rates are. What techniques can help students with injured bodies, with round bodies, with aged or otherwise non-normative bodies.

Here in the academy, we talk a lot, currently, about ‘professionalization’ of the PhD–by this we seem to mean, “teaching students skills they can use in jobs that are not professor jobs.” This implies that the doctorate is already teaching students the skills of being a professor, and professionalization means everything-but-professor training. But we’re not training people to be professors now, nor have we ever, really. Because as far as I can tell, the doctorate is just an advanced-practice workshop of studentship. Are we incorporating pedagogy training into the core of the degree? Training students how to craft a successful article submission, conference presentation, or job letter? Offering strategies for teaching non-majors, or non-native language speakers, or non-traditional students, or service courses? Outlining the political skills of grantsmanship, or curricular overhaul, or program review?

Mostly, no.

My YTT has advanced practice and pedagogy and ethics and business and see-through-pants-ness woven through it to tightly that there’s no real boundary between something purely “professional” and something purely, well, “pure.” Professionalization is still a dirty word, though, in the academy, and the boundary between the pure pursuits of studentship and the more prosaic or workaday labour or skills or economic aspects is rigidly, emphatically, sometimes even self-righteously enforced. We might ask ourselves why.

body · language · pedagogy · yoga

Jargon, expertise, exclusion

aimeemorrison

My last twenty-hour yoga teacher training weekend intensive featured a full day of anatomy lessons. It was great! Jesse Enright came, with a bag full of variously sized bones and skeletons, and some other props, and we all worked on learning some of the technical terms for bones and how they move.

We stood up and practiced a kind of anatomy-dork “Simon says”: flex your left shoulder! pronate your right wrist! extend your right knee! invert your right foot! both feet dorsiflexion! adduct your left forearm! It was embodied pedagogy of the best kind.

But here’s what knocked my socks off: you know that what we call ‘the hip socket’ is just the colloquial term? The joint in question is referred to, medically, as the “acetabulum.” All the bones have Latin names. It’s all very precise and sciency and much more objective and important and learned than our analogic or metaphoric terms like “knee cap” or “collar bone” or “shoulder socket.” Doctors and scientists use the real words, the science words, right?

You know what “acetabulum” means, in Latin?

It means “small vinegar bowl.” Because the joint looks, to a vinegar-bowl-using anatomist who devised the term, like a a small vinegar bowl.

Wikimedia Commons

What?

There’s another bone, inside the whole shoulder apparatus, a little knobby pointy thing. It’s called the “coracoid process”. Want to know what that is in English? “Like a raven’s beak.” See?

Wikimedia Common

As a culture, we’re so very quick to draw hard lines between objective, scientific domains and squishy, subjective humanities domains. Even those of us who might decry the hierarchy this creates sometime even forget that this is a forced and ideological distinction in many ways. This is disingenuous. Anatomy is metaphorical, and, as my teacher suggests, speculative.

Speculative? Yes. Did you know that until a couple of months ago, humans only had four ligaments in our knees, but now we have five? Yeah. I’m going to guess that fifth ligament was there the whole time, but anatomists and doctors and other scientists just learned not to see it because they were told there was nothing there. Hm.

I’m going to let you assemble your own conclusion from this. Maybe it’s about how becoming a student in a new domain of knowledge can really add zip to your day job. Maybe it’s about the inevitability of metaphoric thinking. Maybe it’s about how jargon serves sometimes to clarify, but often to mark the boundaries of a community of knowledge and exclude outsiders. And maybe it’s about how sometimes the stories we tell ourselves turn out to be really wrong, and yet somehow persist in the face of a million knee surgeries that might daily correct the record. Maybe it’s about why we’re so invested in the difference between objective and subjective even when this distinction keeps collapsing in on itself. Huh.

balance · day in the life · jobs · organization · productivity · time crunch · transition · work · yoga

Relearning How to Get Things Done

melissadalgleish3 Comments

For the year between my Master’s and PhD, I worked as a sales and marketing coordinator for the Canadian branch of an international academic publisher. As a coordinator, a lot of what I did was, well, coordinate–organize meetings, provide people with support, do marketing and outreach and answer customer emails. There was always a lot going on, a dozen voicemails to be responded to, and I got used to juggling All The Things and making sure that none of the balls got dropped.

And then I went to back to grad school. And instead of All The Priorities, my workload shifted to just about five: reading and writing for each of the three classes I was taking, teaching, and my service commitment (which was often, pleasingly, party planning). Instead of focusing on how to juggle an ever shifting and constantly growing list of things to get done, I was trying to reclaim the focus and concentration I had worked so hard to develop during my Master’s. Fast forward to the dissertation writing phase, and my major priorities narrowed even more: writing and teaching. Life seems pretty simple when your to-do list, on many days, says “work on Chapter Three.”

Fast forward to now, and I’m back where I was when I started my PhD, but in reverse. I’m so used to working on a few large projects, ones with not terribly many moving parts (or with far more people to share the load), that juggling the myriad priorities and tasks of my very busy job can often be overwhelming. And I’m not good at overwhelmed. Overwhelmèdness tends to turn into anxiety, which turns into procrastination, which turns into guilt and more anxiety, which…you get the picture. And can’t afford to be overwhelmed, or anxious, or behind, or guilty–there’s too much to do! And for those of you who are old hat at juggling All The Things as a matter of course (I’m looking at you, parents), and are smiling wryly at my fledgling attempts to seriously Get Things Done–I salute you.

It’s taken me a fair bit of trial and error over the last five months, but I’ve finally figured out a few things that can help take my 9-5 from crazed to calm(ish). Being a bit of an app junkie, some of these solutions are technological, but some are about as low-tech as you can get:

  • I do yoga and/or meditate as soon as I get up in the morning. A friend posted this image on Facebook the other day, and that’s precisely the effect I’m going for with my daily mindfulness practice–less mental clutter to wade through, less anxiety, less distraction. If I also want to do some meditation practice while I’m in transit, I quite like the Buddhify guided meditations that are designed specifically for commuting. 
  • Anything that needs to get done goes in Remember The Milk the very moment that I think of it or someone asks me to do it. It is the only to-do list program/app that works for me. Everything gets tagged by which area of my life it belongs to (Work, Academic, Personal), which project it belongs to, what priority it is, and when it needs to get done. Life is so much lower stress when half my brain isn’t taken up with trying to remember the things I think I’ve forgotten. I subscribe to the Pro version (about $20/year), which means that I can easily view and add tasks on my phone and tablet and they’ll automatically sync to my web and desktop to-do lists. 
  • I keep my desk clean, and I close all my files and turn my computer off at the end of the night. Arriving to a messy desk and a messy desktop makes me feel behind before I’ve even started, whereas a lack of visual clutter (and a pretty desktop background) lets me start the day with a fresh mind and fresh eyes.
  • I check my calendar and my to-do list as soon as I turn on my computer, but I don’t check my email. I’m a morning person, which means that I have to be careful to protect the early part of the day for serious thinking and/or writing work. I try not to schedule meetings in the morning for the same reason. The world is not going to end if I don’t check my email until 10:30 (emergencies are what phones are for), and so I often don’t. I’ve also turned off all of my email notifications, which means that I pay attention to my email only when I choose to.
  • I don’t send emails to people in my office. Ever. Unless they’re working from home, or I need to send them a file. One of the things I love best about my Faculty is the culture of in-person communication. From the Dean down, if someone needs something, they come see you to get it. My Associate Dean and I can often be heard carrying on conversations to each other from our respective sides of the hallway (I like to think everyone else in the office thinks it’s charming). But it helps cut down on inbox clutter, it gives us a chance to connect on a personal level every day, and the walk down the hall is a great change of scenery and of pace (literally).
  • Coffitivity + Songza form the soundtrack of my days. Coffitivity plays coffee shop white noise (which is phenomenal for both creativity and concentration) in the background, while Songza plays whatever I want over top. I work in a traditional-concept office (i.e. my office has a door), but we all always leave our doors open and it’s nice to be able to block distracting chatter (or my colleague’s 70s rock radio station).
  • I take an actual lunch break at the same time every day. Sometimes I spend it chatting with my colleagues in the kitchen, sometimes reading, sometimes going for a walk, but I never eat at my desk, and I never work through lunch.
  • I use the Pomodoro technique, especially when I’m trying to power through a whole bunch of little things that are swarming around my to-do list like a cloud of mosquitoes I’m desperate to escape. It’s amazing how many one-paragraph emails you can send in 25 minutes, and how blessedly uncluttered my to-do list and mind suddenly become.

I imagine that my Get Things Done routine and techniques will shift and change as I continue to more fully inhabit my new role, and as I discover things that work better for me (or stop working). But for now, this combination of tools and strategies leaves me feeling competent, calm, and in control at the end of the day. Or most of them, which is the best I can ask for.

Have any productivity and time management tips and tricks you’d like to share? What keeps you from feeling like someone put your brain through a blender? 

balance · body · classrooms · learning · openness · teaching · yoga

In which the teacher becomes the student. And it’s weird.

aimeemorrison

I spent 18 hours of last weekend in stretchy pants, making deliberate contact with various weight-bearing points of myself to a sticky mat, in a big sunny room, with 20 other people, taking notes, touching people with my “magic button” hands, directing their sun salutations, and being quizzed on the broader points of Ayurveda.

I’m in yoga teacher training. And it’s really weird to be a student.

Obviously, I’ve been a yoga student for years already, relinquishing the seat of the teacher to someone up at the front of the room, keeping my eyes on my own mat. Being a yoga student for me was an exercise in letting go of control, of letting someone else direct the show for a while, of keeping my eyes on my own mat and learning to be mindful. Getting into that flow is fairly easy for me. Yoga is a practice, not a perfect: you do it right by showing up, and continuing. Yoga in this way is a lot like writing: a lonely endeavour requiring grit and steady effort, over the long haul, accumulating into strength that manifests in individual ways.

But yoga teacher training is more like class: there are tests, and homework, and other assessments and you’re being taught a body of knowledge you have to master before you’re done.

So I’m that kind of student again, and it’s probably a useful experience for my life as a professor, now that I’m (ulp) fifteen years out of the graduate seminar, and seventeen years away from my undergradute experience. The gulf between my experience of university classrooms and that of my students is growing: I see class more and more as a pure learning space, as an obligation that needs to be regimented, too, if I’m going to get my other work done, as a luxury of dedicated time to be curious and access a subject area expert, as a set of names and stories I have to manage to make a connection, without burning out. I don’t know, really, how my students see class anymore.

But I just spent a weekend in their shoes. (Or bare feet. On a medidation cushion rather than a chair.) I have worried about how I’m going to find time to get the homework done–two hours of home yoga AND two classes a week? That’s hard! I can do the written homework fairly easily … oh and someone made digital flashcards for Sanskrit pose names. When is the courseware package going to be available? I’ve shot up my hand and given the wrong answer in front of 20 other people and been met with, “Yessssss, that’s interesting but no.” And I’ve shot my hand up enough to have my teacher’s eyes slide past me with, “Can we hear from someone who hasn’t given an answer yet?” I’ve been puzzled and I’ve been confident. I even got a little bored and my back hurt and I wanted a nap, at a certain point on Sunday. I’ve done group work, introducing myself awkwardly to strangers, and figuring out a process to take turns pushing on each others’ inner thighs, or leading sun salutations with verbal cues. the whole time I’m wondering if I’m doing it right, and how I would know that. It’s exciting and exhausting and confusing and worrying and fun.

At yoga teacher training, it seems, I’m learning (again) what it’s like to be a student, in a formal learning endeavour with real stakes. It’s humbling and illuminating.

I went back to my own class on Monday–the one I teach–and looked at my 14 sudents with a new kind of perspective. I heard what I was saying to them with a sort of doubled consciousness, like I used to when I was just starting. I could imagine what they felt like as students, even as I continued to occupy my role as teacher. Some of them are more or less curious. More or less prepared. More or less awake, or hungry, or distracted. Some have a burning desire to just graduate and others have a burning desire to learn to use Photoshop and some are too overwhelmed by the bombarbment of new information to desire much except a little respite and maybe a muffin. Just like me.

I am grateful for this unexpected extra benefit from my new training. I guess I forgot how long I’ve been in the classroom just as a professor, and not as a student, and didn’t realize what impact this might have on my teaching and on student learning. As I whipsaw between intellectual and physical/spiritual pursuits, between student and teacher, between satisfying learning and frustrating learning, I’ll keep in mind that that is what it is like to be a student. Any student. And we’ll see where that takes me, and my own students, in our time together.

Embodied learning: feet truly parallel, and active

health · mental health · yoga

Maintaining healthy habits

erinewunker1 Comment

I’ve finally done it! Unbelievable as it still seems to me, I’ve managed to undertake a regular yoga routine at home. Even more startling? I’m doing yoga in the morning. I know this revelation might cause more of a “duh”-style reaction from you inveterate yogis, or disciplined part-takers in physical activities of different kinds, but for me, it finally signals a return to a less hectic era in my life, when my time was mine to schedule and dispense with as I pleased [cue violins and nostalgic waxing]. That it took my hitting a wall to reinstate this routine got me thinking: what’s the key to maintaining healthy habits, especially this time in the year and academic term, when the beginning of cold and flu season colludes with high-volume marking or deadlines of all kinds? (I’m not even looking at you Aussies, Kiwis, and your fellow hemispheric dwellers basking in spring sun and the many possibilities of incipient summer.)

When the brick-laden cargo of September fades into the past, October brings the expectation of a more routine, tamed, under-control chaos, but it also carries shorter, darker days, the impending doom of ______ (insert # according to geographical region) months of winter and cold weather, and a general malaise that’s hard to counteract. Just as with September’s ton of bricks, in spite of knowing about this cyclicity, I’m still surprised and disappointed when it happens. It’s like, in the interest of survival, I forget the pain. I think I’m all set: here’s my SAD lamp, here’s my determination to go for runs, walks, etc. The reality is that the SAD lamp helps, but it’s not enough when the crazy schedule means there is no time for leisurely walks and/or runs.

So what gives is always the very activities vital to survival, because I always trick myself that “I’ll just finish marking this batch,” or  “I’ll just do another pomodoro to better structure this section of the paper,” and then I’ll go for a walk. Mmhmm. Exactly! The walk never happens, because the daycare program ends at 5:30, but if we don’t get the kids home earlier, they’ll eat a hole through my head, or throw a tantrum so big, even the easy-going, spring-sun-basking Kiwis might feel it.

And that’s why finally starting a routine of morning yoga seems like such an accomplishment to me: it might just save my sanity. I’m determined to make it into a habit, because I’ve put it in my schedule: every morning, after my partner takes the kids to school, I allot it 30 minutes. Après yoga, le déluge, I say! 

What’s your healthy habit (aspiration), and how do you (strive to) maintain it? The more we talk about these health-determining habits (no, I don’t actually speak for your public health authority), the more potential they have to become reality, and keep us sane through the winter.