Michael Huffmaster, UPR-M
The Most Valuable Professional and Life Lessons I Learned from My Yoga Instructor and Why They Matter for the Humanities
Tinta regada
1 de mayo de 2024
While studying Germanistik and Russian at the University of Vienna in the late nineteen nineties and early aughts, I enrolled in several physical education courses offered by the Universitätssportsinstitut, the USI (rhymes with Suzie), as it’s called: basketball, boxing, weightlifting, step aerobics, in-line skating, massage, meditation, autogenic training, and yoga (I think that’s all). I loved the USI. And looking back, I believe that, of all the teachers I have had throughout my life, my yoga instructor in Vienna, Andrea, has probably had the most outsized influence on my daily professional practice as a teacher as well as on my daily life experience as a human. This thought piece is dedicated to her in gratitude.
In my daily teaching practice, I have adopted Andrea’s ritual of initiating every class session by checking in with each student. In foreign language pedagogy, a standard best practice is to begin each lesson with a “warm-up” activity. Typically, this is understood to mean an activity that reviews material covered in the previous session, to provide learners an anchor of familiarity, as it were, and a sense of confidence before embarking onto unfamiliar territory. I do this, too, but what I consider my true warm-up is the practice I adopted from Andrea. She began every yoga session, everyone seated on the floor, by going around and checking in with each student, making eye contact and asking, “Wie geht’s?” (How are you?). We would then do ten sun salutes, our literal warm-up—afterward Andrea would always ask “Seid ihr warm?” (Are y’all warm?)—before launching into the sequence of poses for that session.
So when I began teaching German as a graduate student and learned in my pedagogical training about the value of a warm-up activity, I intuitively adopted Andrea’s practice. I try to learn students’ names on the first day of class, using an activity I call das Namenkettenspiel (the name-chain-game), and then I initiate every session, after greeting the class as a whole, by going around and checking in with each individual, making eye contact, calling their name, and asking, “Wie geht’s?” At first, in beginning courses, I have to elicit a response to convey the meaning of the question, asking, “Gut?” while gesturing with two thumbs up. Most students gesture back with a thumb or two up and simply answer, “Gut,” to which I reply with a confirmation: “[Student’s name] geht’s gut, ich freue mich” ([Student’s name] is good, I’m glad). Students quickly learn to expect the warm-up, and there are always a few who begin to answer in more detail. A frequent response is “tired,” for which I provide the German translation, which the frequently tired students learn to use. Sometimes students answer, “Sehr gut!”(very well!) or “nicht so gut” (not so good), to which I respond, “Warum?” (Why?). They typically elaborate a bit in English, for example, “I passed my physics exam!” or “My sister is sick,” to which I respond by reformulating their speech in German in the second person and commenting, for example, “Ich freue mich für Sie!” (I’m happy for you!) or “Ich wünsche Ihrer Schwester eine gute Besserung” (I hope your sister gets well soon).
As I describe this practice, I realize it may strike some colleagues as tangential to the proper objectives of a foreign language course or even a waste of precious classroom time. But I believe it is essential to my teaching effectiveness and to the success of my courses. It instantiates my professional and personal conviction that education is not about “content transfer”—as I once read the then-president of the University of Phoenix claim. It’s about relationships. Teachers’ minds are not USB sticks that can be inserted into students’ brains and copied and pasted. The nominally “same” course taught by different professors will be different courses, and some students will relate better to and learn better with the one professor, while others will learn better with the other. The nominally “same” courses I teach every semester are different courses because every class is different, and because education is about relationships. The warm-up ritual I adopted from Andrea is one of the ways I make this conviction real in my daily professional practice, and it is key, I believe, to my success as a teacher. I recommend it.
Andrea has also had a profound influence on my daily life experience. Though I did not keep up with formal yoga practice after those three semesters with her, in recent years I have had to incorporate stretching into my daily routine—for exercise recovery, physical therapy, and general pain management—and I credit my yoga courses with Andrea as the foundation for my relatively good flexibility and hence overall wellness to this day. But the reason I say her influence on my daily life experience has been outsized is on account of one particular class session. One time, and one time only, in my third semester I believe, during the final, resting pose, savasana (literally “corpse pose”), she led us into a state of deep relaxation that was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Typically, once we were in the pose, she wouldn’t speak much, except perhaps to remind us just to let our breath come back to a normal resting rate. She would walk around among us, and whenever she came to me, she would always take her palm and, without speaking, flatten out my wrinkled forehead (which I now realize she recognized as a sign I was absorbed in thought and not in the body with my awareness).
But this one time, while we were in savasana, she said, “In den Fußgelenken loslassen” (In the ankles, let loose). Then, after a few moments, she said, “In den Knien loslassen” (In the knees, let loose). And she continued that way slowly through the hips, the wrists, the elbows, the shoulders, the spine, and the neck. Afterward in the locker room, a classmate remarked, “Ich war so tief drinnen!” (I was so deep inside!), to which I responded, “Ich auch!” (Me too!). Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this state exquisitely in his chapter “Lying-Down Meditation” in Wherever You Go, There You Are (2023). Andrea’s sequence of suggestions was an example of what Kabat-Zinn calls “body scanning,” which can be done in a variety of directions and involve a variety of different body parts, but to this day, Andrea’s specific sequence has remained an effective, go-to deep relaxation/body awareness exercise for me. And I always do it in German, of course.
But even if it’s not Andrea’s full sequence, or another body awareness practice I have learned, such as autogenic training, I have found that every moment I can consciously take throughout my day to reconnect the mind with the body and “go inside” improves my overall life experience. And it really only takes a moment. As Thich Nhat Hanh says in Einfach Sitzen (2016), “Sobald wir unserem Atem Aufmerksamkeit schenken, kommen Körper, Atem und Geist wieder zusammen. Das ist schon in einer oder zwei Sekunden möglich” (As soon as we give attention to our breath, body, breath, and mind come together again. This is possible in just one or two seconds) (12), and further, “Sie müssen nicht Stunden Zeit haben, um zu sitzen. Bereits einige Augenblicke des Sitzens und bewussten Atmens können Sie sehr glücklich machen” (You don’t have to have hours to sit. Even just a few moments of sitting and conscious breathing can make you very happy) (51). I recommend it.
But why does this matter for the humanities? The Cartesian model of the human with its disembodied mind that we have inherited from the Enlightenment is not just false, it has become an existential threat. The disembodied mind, for all its wondrous achievements (splitting the atom, rovers on Mars, etc.), is currently on the verge of killing all life on the planet, including its host, the human species. As a matter of urgency in the Anthropocene, the humanities must reunite the mind with the body and teach a scientifically valid view of the human in which the mind is ineradicably embodied. John Green puts it bluntly in The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021), discussing the phenomenon known as “the yips”: “This complicated interplay between the so-called physical and the so-called psychological reminds us that the mind/body dichotomy isn’t overly simplistic; it’s complete bullshit” (142). The human mind and body are one continuous dynamic process and ought, therefore, to be called the mindbody.
An inevitable correlate, of course, of such a scientifically realistic understanding of the human is that the mindbody and its environment—physical, social, and epistemic—are likewise one continuous dynamic process. Every atom that makes up every molecule that makes up every cell that makes up your body, which you perceive as separate from everything else, comes from everything else. You inhale the atmosphere every few seconds, you imbibe the hydrosphere and consume the biosphere (and also the lithosphere, in trace amounts) multiple times per day, and it becomes you. Exhalation, perspiration, urination, and defecation are the flipside of this ongoing dynamic process. Likewise, the various social roles you play, your actions, and the emotions and thoughts you have, which you think of as you and yours, are in reality ongoing dynamic processes with your social and epistemic environment. Recognition of the mindbody is essential to overcome the insanity of the disembodied mind, and mindbody practices such as yoga and meditation can deepen such awareness.
I do not mean to suggest that colleagues include meditation or sun salutes in their philosophy lectures or literature seminars—that would be ridiculous. But there are countless ways in which scholar-teachers of the humanities might incorporate a scientifically valid view of the human mindbody into their teaching, which will differ according to discipline, as well as for each teacher, according to their areas of interest and expertise. One way I do so in my first-semester German courses is to introduce frame metonymy and cognitive metaphor, basic concepts in cognitive linguistics that illustrate the embodied mind. Subsequently, over the course of the four-semester sequence, frequent opportunities arise from the nature of the enterprise to draw students’ attention to these pervasive structures of the human conceptual system, which, it is my hope, will help deepen their appreciation of the mindbody. In my second-semester course, when modal verbs are introduced (must, should, may, can, want, would like), I draw graphs on the board of the force dynamics that underlie their senses and elicit from the class which graphs represent which verbs. I then elaborate on how this structure exemplifies the mindbody particularly well: the way we understand abstract concepts from the social realm, such as obligation or permission, as well as subjective emotional states, such as desire, based on our embodied experience of forces in our physical environment. These practices engage embodied experience as points of beginning to create new knowledge.
I hope these perspectives impart a fuller understanding of what it means to be human as a complementary and valuable part of my students’ humanities education. As I describe these specific ways that I endeavor to teach the mindbody, though, it strikes me all as rather cerebral. In the 1970s, following the demise of the audiolingual method and before the rise and eventual dominance of the communicative approach, a great deal of experimentation occurred in foreign language pedagogy, in tune with the radical Zeitgeist of the times. Some approaches, such as Total Physical Response or Suggestopedia, entailed at least an implicit acknowledgement of the mindbody. Perhaps our times call for similar radical experiments? Despite what I said above about not meaning to advocate body awareness practices such as meditation or yoga in humanities classrooms, composing this essay has led me to consider a new kind of warm-up for my lessons. With my fourth-semester class, since they learned the vocabulary for body parts last semester, I could devote the first five minutes of each lesson to autogenic training, which I learned in a course at the USI in Vienna, and which has since, like Andrea’s body-scan sequence, been a go-to mindbody awareness and deep relaxation practice for me. And then I’ll do my traditional warm-up adopted from Andrea, checking in with each student asking, “Wie geht’s?”
Vamos a ver qué pasa.
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Editor’s Afterword
While humanities and science disciplines routinely operate with specific notions of “intelligence” and “practice,” inserting exercises like Andrea’s into the learning process for technologists, medical students, engineers, and across applied fields calls for merging learning itself with a system of thought in which the human experience participates from the start in the construction and evaluation of knowledge. “Seid ihr warm?” can open a more holistic sense of learning and thought.
