The Mindful Academic Writer

Getting What You Need: Help from Friends

1/26/2015

Meditation is a bit like flossing for the brain. Something you know you should do, and yet...

The good news is that there are many wonderful tools available to help with meditation. For example, this website reviews different meditation apps to help with focus and tracking time ( http://www.techhive.com/article/2461423/five-timers-just-for-meditation.html), many of which are free.

One of the tools that's available is less high tech: friends!

My wonderful friend Jenn (she teaches at Rishi Yoga in Reno http://rishiyogareno.com/room/jenn-olsen/) recently sent out a message via facebook asking who wanted help recommitting (or committing for the first time) to a meditation practice. She's formed a little facebook group in which we can post our successes and failures, ask questions, and share advice.

The beauty of Jenn's suggestion is its simplicity. She wanted to do something, she assumed her like minded friends would also want to do this thing, and so she created a solution that brings the friends together to support one another and interact more frequently (an added bonus!) over this goal. A similar group could be created about any topic. Easy peasy.

Now if only she'd start a flossing group!

su

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Out of Sight, Out of Mind--Forgetting the Dry Cleaning

1/21/2015

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Dry cleaning, though a chore I don't actually perform myself, is one I fail at all the time. We're starting the new semester this week, so I dropped a load of overworn, pretty grotty, and much loved work shirts off at the dry cleaners on Saturday.

As I stood at the corner, something yellow and blue caught my eye. So familiar, that pattern. Not entirely surprisingly, this was my spring jacket. I apologized to the woman behind the counter for leaving my coat for almost a year. Oh no, she said, you dropped this off in August 2013.

Oops. No one should ever give me their dry cleaning. The problem is that for me, when chores are out of sight, they quickly become out of mind. In contrast, I hate seeing dirty dishes stacked on the counter and so that's a chore that regularly gets done.

This New Year, I have resolved to strengthen and build some regular habits and to generally be more mindful about how I spend my time. To help strengthen this resolve, I needed to do something to bring these tasks into view.

My solution has been to create a series of little weekly charts (pictured here) to tape onto the wall above my desk. Each day, I put a little checkmark if I have done the task. Because this transforms my daily meditation into visual data, the goal and my progress stay in view. In contrast, you can see that I've done no running at all this week. My hunch is that this means one of two things: I need to find and preserve a specific time for my runs, or, I need to admit that this isn't a goal I care much about and release it. Seeing what I'm doing and not doing makes these realizations clearer.

Now I just hope I can get those shirts back...

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Must it hurt?

1/19/2015

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Yesterday I attended a wonderful workshop titled Fearless Backbends, lead by Ohio-based Ashtanga teacher Taylor Hunt (http://www.taylorhuntyoga.com/)

Taylor taught us many magical adjustments and set straight many confusions about internal and external arm rotations. And for this I (and my students) will be forever grateful.

But there was also a bit of wisdom he imparted that was less specific to backbends and more broadly applicable to any kind of regular work or practice. He said, "it doesn't have to hurt."

This idea, as Taylor presented it was about more than rotating the arms to create room across the shoulders, thus relieving literal pains in the neck. Instead, he was referring to fixed ideas we tell ourselves that then become our reality. If we tell ourselves, "well, backbends just hurt;" or, "well, x is just supposed to be unpleasant," this story rules our experience.

In other words, when we tell stories like this about our work, we stop seeking ways to alleviate the pain. Let alone seeking pleasure in the practice.

It's a simple idea, but one that resonated. "It doesn't have to hurt."

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Making Smart Time Dumb Again

1/16/2015

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A favorite idea that came from my yoga teacher training is also a simple one: take time to let go of what ever you were doing before going in to teach your yoga class. I've heard this described primarily in terms of physical ritual: washing hands and feet, getting to the yoga studio early, etc.

But I've been thinking a bit lately about my walks and my use of my smart phone while walking. I was a late smart phone adopter, so at my last job, when I lived in an apartment near school, I had the opportunity to walk 30 minutes to and from work on the days that I was not lazy and 10 minutes to and from my parking space when I was lazy.

Now, I have to say, I do love my smartphone. When I go on jogs (boring for me when done alone), I revel in the technological wonder that is my phone as I use it to track my mileage and pace, listen to a podcast, and when there is a quail on the path (hooray!), to stop, take a photo, and email the photo to my quailless family living on the other coast.

And yet. On those walks to work pre-smart phone--Let's call them dumb walks--I did a lot of thinking. Often this thinking prepared me for where I was going. If headed to a meeting, I could work out some ideas. If headed to teach, I often fine tuned or generated new material for lesson plans.

Lately, when I walk to campus with my phone in my hand, I'm either listening to a podcast or checking email (as though any that came in before leaving the house and arriving at the office could be so so urgent). What I'm not doing, to return to the ritual before starting yoga teaching, is allowing myself to "come into the space" of wherever I'm going. Instead, the shift is abrupt: phone off lecture begun; stop listening to serial, start writing.

So, while I'm not giving up my smartphone, I do want to start reclaiming a little strategic dumb time for myself. I do love a good podcast, so I'll start small--letting the walk to teach be a time free from other stimulation, bringing my focus to the task at hand.

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Building in Breathing Room

1/13/2015

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It's teaching prep week at my house. Academic classes begin again a week from today, and I am teaching a new yoga class starting at the end of this week.

Prepping for the start of both teaching commitments, I've been thinking a lot about what my experience as an academic teacher might tell me about yoga teaching and vice versa.

One lesson that's been hard-earned has been the importance of not-cramming, not-rushing. Like most teachers, I love my material and have so much I want to share with my students. This can lead to a bad classroom translation of Wallace Stevens's poem "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as I try to exhaustively present 15 ways of looking at feminist theory or 30 ways to consider Chaplin's Modern Times.

When I teach this way, I feel breathless and frustrated, racing to keep up with my content. We end class with a frenzy, never wrapping up. I say things to my students like, "hold that thought!" "No, throw that thought away, there's no time!"

Needless to say, students don't particularly appreciate this teaching style either. In his fabulous book Advice for New Faculty Members, Robert Boice explains that teachers who cram less into their lesson plans receive better student evaluations. Just as too much material can make the instructor feel breathless, so too do the students feel rushed through, unattended to, and confused by such presentations.

This insight, which has been hard won in my academic teaching is something that I both know and don't know in a yoga context. On the one hand, as a new yoga teacher, I have that new teacher fear of silence and a gap in the class ("must fill space with more poses!"). But as a student, I know how much I appreciate those moments when the instructor pulls us out of difficult sequence into child's pose to return our attention to breath and to catch up with our minds, which are perhaps racing about, panicked by the thought of another Warrior III.

The insight that rest and pause and simply taking a breathing break are perhaps the most important moments in a class is one that I continue to have to learn.

But as I plan my syllabi and my yoga classes this week, I'm trying to build out such moments for integration--places to catch our breath, catch-up days to pause in the semester and integrate difficult theoretical concepts, moments for reflection and freewriting.

How else might we incorporate the old adage that less is more into our teaching practices?

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Contentment in the New Year--Santosha

1/4/2015

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I have to admit that I find the yoga Yamas (ethics/morals) more accessible than the Niyamas (self-observation). I think this is because the Yamas can seem more like actions, or a list of bad behaviors to avoid (they include the principles of nonviolence, truthfulness, not stealing, non excess, and non possessiveness).

The Niyamas that constitute the second of yoga's eight limbs always feel to me a bit more theoretical, including principles such as surrender and self-study. But when I admit to myself the NIyama I struggle with most (for now, anyway), I think that these principles challenge me because while the Yamas can seem like achievable resolutions (okay--I can lie less, I can have less wine--hooray, I win at yoga!), the Niyama's suggest shifting one's own perspective rather than one's outer behaviors.

Moving into a new year, feeling perhaps the speck of disappointment in the past year (hm, I didn't achieve this), it can be difficult to balance the desire for self improvement with the Niyama Santosha, which translates roughly into contentment.

In Deborah Adele's beautiful book The Yamas and The Niyamas, she writes, "Rather than experiencing contentment, we can find ourselves busy getting ready for the next thing." She describes this constant seeking of something else as the "if only game."

There's a painful familiarity to what she describes here, and I think it's worth translating slightly for academics, we could translate it to the "once I" game. As in, "once I finish comps," "once I defend my dissertation," "once I publish my book," "once I get tenure," "once I make full professor," "once I get sabbatical." Whether stated or implied, that conditional sentence tends to end in one of three ways... "then I'll be happy," "then I'll get to do what I really want," or, more humbly, "then I can rest."

Of course, the trouble with the "once I game" is that as players, we never arrive. It's like some nightmare video game where there's always a next level. We hear this, frequently, assistant professors like to talk about how much better grad school was and how much better tenured life will be, and associate professors reminisce about the time they were shielded from service commitments as junior faculty and yearn towards their promotion to full.

What's missing is any peace with what is.

And this is the principle of Santosha. How can one find peace and be unshaken in a given moment and in the transition from one moment to the next.

In our modern lives and our professional lives the issue of Santosha can be more complex. How do we continue to grow and achieve while also being content with where we are?

This blog post is asking more questions than it is giving answers, but I just found a little note to myself from last spring, when I was struggling with precisely this issue. It's a purple post it note that says, "things that make me happy." The little list here includes making ginger tea, taking a walk, sitting by the pond without your cell phone.

What's worth pointing out about this list from the perspective of Santosha is that these are all little things that involve savoring a moment and they are also not in any way goal directed. In other words, there's no striving towards change in these little oasis moments.

Not a grand solution, by any means, but a start.

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New Year Goals vs Resolutions

1/2/2015

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Yesterday, like many families, my husband and I had a New Year's talk. We walked the dog as we reflected on what 2014 had been like and we discussed our hopes and dreams for 2015. The dog reflected on urine smells and ground squirrels, mostly.

When we got home, we each wrote up what we discussed. Being people of a certain type, we made charts. On our lists, there are concretely achievable goal-type things: pay off the Bank of America card, submit the public space article by spring break, finish revising the KR manuscript. But there are also some things listed that can't be quantified or checked off quite as easily: spend more time with friends, make meditation a daily practice, blog more (!).

Reflecting on the different natures of the items on my list has had me thinking about the difference between the seemingly trendier term goal vs the almost archaic seeming resolution.

It's easy to find goal setting workshops, and, as any productivity expert is likely to agree, goals are great because they are measureable and "actionable."
And yet....
I spent some time thinking about what's tied up in the word resolution, and there's much loveliness there.
The word comes from the Latin verb resolvere, which means to loosen, to unyoke, to release. This etymology is a bit surprising given that we sometimes see resolving as so forceful, a kind of muscling through the process of change. But considering this origin of the word in the context of a new year, we might imagine a letting go of the accumulated patterns that didn't serve us well.

Additionally, the many definitions of resolution span a surprising number of fields of human inquiry and are beautifully instructive:
In addition to the typical meaning of committing to do something,
from law, it means to bring an end to a dispute
from medicine, it means the dissipation or healing of symptoms,
and in music, it means the transition from discord to concord.

While I think many of us will continue to keep our sexier (and more practical) goals, we might also consider the beauty of this older concept, resolution. In its various meanings as well as its etymology, we hear resolution whispering ideas about a return to balance, a return to sustainability, a bringing back into alignment of our habits and ways of being, something we could all use a little more of in the New Year.

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