Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

You Never Arrive: Yogic Agency as Writing Pedagogy

Abigail Orenstein Ash

Abstract: This essay proposes a pedagogical approach to writing instruction in universities facing familiar institutional goals and barriers alongside the heightened emotional complexities of students post-pandemic. Students at these universities often pursue vocational paths, yet since spring 2020, their interpersonal and cultural challenges have deepened, alongside a broader societal awareness. Amidst these changes, students’ desire for meaningful relationships persists. In response, I’ve developed a pedagogical framework called “yogic agency,” which integrates inward experiences with external events. Its principles include writing as an offering, embracing uncertainty, acknowledging the fragility of narratives, and viewing purposeful work as strategic. These principles facilitate critical engagement with inner experiences, bridging the gap between personal feelings and the writing classroom, extending to the broader university context. In essence, yogic agency leverages inward experiences within the writing classroom to influence the world beyond.

Grief, hatred, bitterness, anger, rage, terror, and apathy as well as emotions of self-assessment such as pride, guilt and shame—these form the core of the hidden curriculum for the vast majority of people living and learning in a highly stratified capitalist society.

— Lynn Worsham, “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion”

Responsible rhetorical agency entails being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion. Agency… is based in individuals lived knowledge that their action is their own.

— Marilyn Cooper, “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted”

Why Yogic Agency in 2024: Introduction/Exigence

In their 2021 essay What Does a Good Teacher Do Now? Crafting Communities of Care, Jathan Day, Sarah Hughes, Crystal Zanders, Kathryn Van Zanen and Andrew Moos instruct that in and since the “era of COVID-19” as well as the “public reconsideration” of the purpose of higher education, “it is essential to understand that… the multi-billion dollar corporations [that] instructors work for will not properly value… the human beings doing said labor” and we need “collective efforts that address the gaps left by rules, policies, or ‘reasonable’ labor norms that were created for a time that seems in many ways incompatible with our current situation” (399). Day et al. argue that instructors now must foreground what is “essential to education,” by generating “communities of care,” which is a classroom that “privileges people over institutions” and “access and empathy over rigid constructions of rigor” (390).

What these authors urge is an emotional pedagogy for writing, which can feel antithetical to the duties of writing instruction in a university that commodifies knowledge and research. This call for community invites resistance toward the capitalist motives that run the university and instead values inner experiences in the college classroom. This essay responds by challenging “rigid constructions of rigor” and introducing a pedagogical approach based on feeling.

Yogic+Agency=Yogic Agency for the Writing Classroom

Now the exposition [struggle, inquiry] of yoga is being made.

— Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

My pedagogical approach invokes a dialogic relation with students in which I ask them to choose to return repeatedly to the personal struggles they face and the internal/inward work they might do within themselves. Within institutional limitations and requirements, yogic agency surfaces as pedagogical approach in which instructors lay the groundwork for continuous presence with students’ internal struggles. This repetitious return to students’ struggles catalyzes choice in the ways in which students’ think about themselves in their inward story. Yogic agency does not arrive as a novel intervention but as an always-and-already-available approach, ready for mobilization.

Yogic agency teaches students practices with which they may go about choosing their own story of self that they take to other domains of their lives, asking instructors to present the inward work in the classroom as significant within a social context: When we change the way we write our own stories about ourselves, we change how we interact with others in the world. Ultimately, yogic agency teaches students that there is no ultimate resolution, truth, or triumph at the end of our own life story as we compose it: we are always in a state of struggle, inquiry, discovery, and practice.

Much scholarship of writing and emotion presupposes that the classroom acts as yet another space imploring students to leave personal stuff at the door. Yogic agency adds dimension to the scholarship on emotional labor the writing administrator must face (see Adams, et al.) and other work that examines emotion and persuasion. (see Micciche and Worsham’s calls, for example). The 2016 Composition Forum special issue on emotion in writing studies addresses “Pedagogies of Empathy,” and “Healing Classrooms” among other topics that respond to Laura Micciche’s call to “stay with emotion.” Repositioning the relationship between the writing classroom and students’ inward stories while entangled in the current societal and personal crises outside the writing classroom feels, in the day to day, immediate and relevant.

Yogic+Agency: Breakdown

The perspective offered here is yogic; yet the economic, societal and personal crises we all have been living through makes the notion of living a yogic life, perhaps, come across as a luxury, ancillary, unimportant and impractical. Truly, to live a “yogic” life in the West is to always feel contradiction and inner conflict. Work to survive in a capitalist society prioritizes money, achievement, status and ownership. By contrast, the yogic system teaches non-possessiveness (aparigraha) contentment (santosha) and the relegation of the ego to a nondominant part of consciousness. The rest of everyday life, which requires “living and learning in a highly stratified capitalist society,” as Worsham writes, catalyzes, for individuals, a sense of striving and one-upmanship. Our capitalist society presumes the “primacy of the individual” as Robert Yagelski articulates, as well as a focus on individuals’ gains and losses, the fluctuations of the ego, and self-image as dictated by vacillating external sources of praise and blame (216) (15). It makes sense that to take on a yoga practice is to experience multiple inward truths at once while living in a capitalist society.

As a consequence a yogic life exists as a question, a process of redefinition, not a stable location. In my personal experience of considering a definition of “yogic”: it cannot be stabilized by words. As I have experienced it, yoga is an art, a science, a method, a practice, a theory, a feeling. In his book Inner Tantric Yoga—Working with the Universal Shakti: Secrets of Mantras, Deities and Meditation, David Frawley suggests that for yoga to be “inwardly transformative,” one must ask how we can “learn to practically work with the universal forces within us” (3). In order to define yogic agency as a pedagogical approach, I pose questions alongside Frawley’s assertions that the work must be practical (practices) that shift inner perspectives:

1. How might we “learn to practically work with the universal forces within us” so as to embody a critical perspective as agents when it comes to our inward stories?

2. How can a yogic approach to teaching writing work within the prescribed aims of a capitalist institution?

Now, I break down meanings further.

Yogic: In Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness, Erich Schiffman identifies “yoga as a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are” (4). To define “yogic,” I add to this definition, perceiving yoga as continuous struggle with one’s own inner chaos in order to revise and re-revise the story of who you are. The “yogic” perspective is deployed, here, in order for students to become agents of their stories about themselves.

Agency: To enact agency, to *be* an agent, means to choose the articulation of stories that one tells themselves about themselves and inscribes for others to read, learn, hear and know. Nuanced and unique stories circulate inside of all individuals—stories of tragedy and oppression and privilege and triumph—that solidify or open a sense of capability and potential. Demonstrating with students they may choose how those stories manifest in daily life is central to building agency. Marilyn Cooper illuminates agency as an inward power students possess of the “lived knowledge that their action is their own.” This “lived knowledge” is the story students select for themselves about themselves. Agency, or here, the choice of self-story, works to quiet the stories students unconsciously or consciously abide that are designated to them by individual or institutional others (421).

Pursuing inward work involves daily practices to which instructors repeatedly return with students. Thus yogic agency generates four mantras/principles, defined by theory and practice. These principles involve: 1) defining writing as offering; 2) committing to a mantra of “knowing you don’t know” when confronting alternate experiences and contexts; 3) sustaining an attitude of tenderness toward groundlessness of students’ inward stories; and 4) exerting a pedagogy of aimlessness that executes Paula Mathieu’s concept of “tactical action.”

Writing as Offering

The writings of Aisha, a student in my writing 101-Studio class in fall 2021 display yogic agency through “writing as offering” practice. “ In an end-of-semester course reflection she observes, “I have not grown as a writer.” As evidence, she notes her first and last formal essay contain the same mistakes. In high school, she continues, Aisha recalled the concept “writing” to be tasks believed to “inform, entertain, explain, or to persuade,” or, as Yagelski characterizes it, schools teach writing as a way to dominate or take “control over meaning” and phenomena rather than a practice of “writing… [that] shapes and reflects our sense of who we are in relation to the world around us” (80, 3). Aisha’s accepts that her growth as a writer does not align with outcomes such as informing or entertaining others when she says, “I have a lot more work to learn and achieve in….” In Aisha’s perspective, her writing growth has not improved in the sense of its usefulness.

What stands out in Aisha’s writing is the “writing as offering” prompt “A Struggle I know….” Aisha quotes her journal: “a struggle I know is living in the area I come from… Walking down the street seeing individuals… overdosed… sleeping… Living through a struggle while having the biggest support system makes you realize struggle is not what you want.” This passage shows writing as a means for Aisha to complicate her experience growing up in Philadelphia. Writing thus lands her in a conceptual location in which she reimagines the meaning of her struggle as both something to express and transform. Writing as offering becomes a location by which struggle can take new shape. As her writing shows, “writing as offering,” delivers the writer to complexity and to layered inward states with which Aisha both struggles, is supported, and desires change. Aisha offers writing to her struggle and thus she takes charge of her own experience and story in a university setting.

“Writing as offering,” is conceived of as continuous practice without aim for specified outcomes. Instead of positioning writing as aiming for a prescribed outcome, such as a skill students take to their profession, writing as offering teaches one should write continually without a concrete goal. Yagelski identifies this concept as “to write…[as] to continually confront the impossibility of control… we humans can exert over the world around us” (81). For the purposes of “writing as offering,” students write by surrendering control over the end goal. This means to conceive of “writing as offering” is to teach writing as resistance against the concrete aims of a capitalist institution. “Writing as offering” counters the tendency toward “box-checking,” in the classroom: getting through a task to complete the next thing. Conceptualizing “writing as offering” reframes writing as a response to shifting problems students carry and does not aim for a future consequence.

“Writing as offering” can be writing to oneself, one’s challenges or one’s discomfort or joy. While offering writing might seem gratuitous in a university environment prioritizing tangible achievements, “writing as offering” values inward awareness as a goal. Pervasively, external reinforcement is used to measure accomplishment. Instead, students are invited to go inside as the “reward.”

The practice of “writing as offering,” does not focus on institutional outcomes but instead on inner clarification as well as continuous expressions of one’s own experiences. The practice itself, but even more the returning to the practice regardless of outcome, is priority. This mobilization of practice, of “writing as offering,” shows there is nothing new to be taught. We already and always embody yogic agency as we write for and with our struggle, for and with “writing as offering.”

Knowing You Don’t Know

Maggie, another fall 2021 first year writing student, writes in her semester reflection: “walking into this class, I… demanded perfection [but] I found that true beauty and growth… in life as a whole, comes from mistakes and imperfections.… There is no perfect equation to writing… it is a fluid and ever evolving conversation.” Maggie demonstrates the second principle of yogic agency, which is the willingness of “knowing you don’t know” as she moves from a tight concept—“a perfect equation,” to a permeable experience of writing, which she translates to her life, as “fluid and ever evolving.” “Mistakes and imperfections,” illuminate the focus with which Maggie chooses to return to in the “ever-evolving conversation” of life and writing. After some practice, Maggie values not knowing the answer to the struggles of writing, and concurrently, she writes, to “life as a whole.”

“Knowing you don’t know” originates in the words of Erich Schiffman, which unfolds as a component of his idea of “yogic listening” that requires “squeegeeing the mind.” While “squeegeeing” one will “mentally listen inwardly… waiting to hear a message,” and assert the mantra of “knowing you don’t know” (330-32). One practices clearing the mind for what Schiffman calls “big mind,” or the messages beyond ego, thus relinquishing the belief that ego ultimately knows more than anyone/anything else.

In the writing classroom, the principle of “knowing you don’t know,” is accessed by making room for new perspectives to coexist with our own without trying to change or fit them into, as Maggie represents it, a “perfect equation.” Alternate perspectives may be an individual in the room, an experience, or perspectives from texts. “Knowing you don’t know” catalyzes understanding difference of values or contexts. To “know you don’t know” is to quiet ego while integrating openness to alternate positions of experience and belief structures as well as, broadly, to change the relationship to inward experience.

In a parallel way, in her work that points to “rhetorical listening” as a way to “stand under” the discourses of others, Krista Ratcliffe argues listening with the goal of understanding can be a practice of individuals “consciously acknowledging all… particular and fluid standpoints,” while letting them “wash over” perspectives without forcing commonality (205). Much like a mantra to “know you don’t know,” this practice of witnessing alternate perspectives without trying to establish identification with others is necessary to students undergoing a variety of experiences in the same classroom.

When committing to “knowing you don’t know,” first by squeegee-ing the mind and quieting “small mind” (ego) in order to hear “big mind,” (the universe) students accept the inevitability of other perspectives and experiences they may not viscerally understand. Likewise, students witness some knowledge as something they may not intellectually or emotionally “know.” By practicing with students to “know you don’t know,” instructors create an alternate way of knowing that is not knowing.

Tenderness Toward Groundlessness of Our Own Stories

Abandon all hope of fruition.

— Lojong Slogan, from Chögyam Trungpa, Training the Mind

Another student in my first year writing course in fall 2022, Hyunjee, identifies writing, like life, as something she can choose how to do, redo, and then “write something new.” In her final reflection, she points to writing as “… not something I have to do, it is something I get to do… it is always available for me.” For Hyunjee, writing exists as a task she can return to and tap into. She continues “…So I deleted the first half of my narrative, it isn’t that deep, the story lives with me. I intend to write something new.” Hyunjee locates choice in how she tells the story of herself within the course, within the university, and life. By expressing it as something she “gets” to do, she reveals writing as a vehicle with which she elects to struggle, rewrite her narrative, and reinscribe who she is in the story. By the assertion “it isn’t that deep,” Hyunjee unlocks the “core truth” within her story and adds potential. Writing is “available for [her],” to choose, as a tool with which she can re-struggle, and re-articulate. Hyunjee’s engagement with her story demonstrates the third principle of yogic agency, or a “tenderness toward groundlessness of our own stories.” This principle’s teaching emanates a willingness to be vulnerable to the ever-changing story we hold within about ourselves.

A personal example: as an undergraduate Theatre major, I took a class called Senior Seminar with Boston stage actress Marya Lowry. Marya shared personal stories with us. One stands out. Her first big job took her to Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. As she described it, Marya reached a peak in her career by landing this job, an achievement she hadn’t imagined. By contrast, Marya was most moved by an inward revelation that arose as she sat in the house before a performance. She told us she recognized she had her ‘dream job,’ but she felt she had not, nor would she ever, “arrive.” I interpreted this as the groundlessness Marya unearthed as the shape life takes: the attainment of a goal, or the accomplishing of what once seemed impossible, was not the end of her story. Marya still struggled and wanted more.

Tenderness toward groundlessness of our own stories emphasizes that checking off boxes in life (e.g. completing a major, graduating from college, establishing a career, starting a family, buying a house) are not solid places to land: we are always vulnerable to desiring more and struggling further: we are continuously building our story. This is a life instruction and a writing instruction.

This concept materializes as one to return to inwardly and specifically with young adults who operate with their tangible goals in front of them. It works as a fluid truth that can be lived moment-to-moment in work and relationship, working against fruitless struggles for resolution. And when I remember I will never really “arrive” where I think I should be, within the feeling of this “not arriving,” an inward power I have to write my own story at any time again returns.

The truthfulness of the feeling Marya describes of never “arriving” is an awareness of fluidity of experience and vulnerability in response to absence of resolve. This form of vulnerability, what I call tenderness, unfolds while students remain steeped in cultural influences (T.V., media, social media, the voices of others) and internalized notions that life trajectories need to progress a certain way.

An attitude of Tenderness toward groundlessness of our stories asks students in the writing classroom to write their stories without relying on the core beliefs they may have about themselves (e.g. I was never a good ________… I need to be this by this age…I am a ________ person, etc.) —and without prioritizing resolution as ending the story. Together, students and instructors keep writing stories while going through inward struggles that result from failure and disappointment. Together students and instructors reframe inward and outward stories in the writing classroom as continuous, “groundless,” endlessly full of potential. Instructors direct students to capitalize on the writing course as a way to form consistency and continuity toward writing that, most significant, makes it attractive to keep writing after the course ends. Because writing becomes, as Hyunjee says, something they “get to do,” a site at which, with tenderness, students destabilize the ground of who they are and what they think they can do, and thus feel energized to “write something new.”

Aimless Work is Tactical Action

For the urge to make money when it mattered least, I forgive you. At the time it didn’t feel wrong, and there was no one around saying otherwise except Mom… I didn’t listen… the idea of learning [this] through writing but not applying it fully is something that comes with understanding audience… this was simply an essay between my professor and I.

— Mikael Green, FYW student, fall 2021, final reflection (my emphasis)

In the Call for Papers for this Special Issue of Composition Forum, editors Paula Mathieu and Angela Muir ask: “What do contemplative pedagogies aim for? What do they accomplish?” This question prompts scholars to explore how to quantify the end result in the classroom. Contemplative pedagogues intend to teach writing as a “tool for living,” not a skillset that ends with a planned outcome. While these intentions shift classroom perspectives, they are difficult to measure. In Tactics of Hope, Paula Mathieu identifies the aims of a conventional writing course as locking in “bestow[ed] skills that prepare students for the next class… or institutional accreditation they will cash in,” in order to move on to the stepping stone (25). Thinking broadly, Yagelski remarks that an aims-driven society “endeavor[s] for a common good” by focusing on accruing abundance for the “lots of individuals,” rather than pursuing the inward growth for individuals and consequent strength of the collective. Thus, the notion of “aims” responds indirectly to a concept of “the primacy of the individual” which situates individuals in competition who look to commodify, or “cash in” their learnings from the classroom (15).

The word “aims” is analyzed as the third principle of yogic agency calls for aim-less work. By practicing aimless work, writing instructors face students within institutions and respond to their moment-to-moment suffering rather than a fixed location of syllabi outcomes or teaching philosophies. Aimless work enacts Paula Mathieu’s concept of tactical action, which she defines in Tactics as one “seek[ing] not stability but clever uses of time… requir[ing] a critical spirit of inquiry based not on certainty but on hope” (17). Aimless work unfolds with the instructor facing the student, their struggles and their aspirations, rather than the university—its mission, name, reputation and brand—how the institution presents itself to the community. Mathieu quotes Certeau and writes “the place of a tactic belongs to the other,” and thus aimless work of tactical action centers on responsiveness with students’ needs (16). Within aimless work of tactical action, instructors engender potentiality toward students’ time and lives rather than striving toward a pre-planned philosophy. In the above quote, Mikael recognizes his work is “aimless” in the sense that he is not “applying [writing] fully.” Yet his sense of his instructors’ response to his story, emergent as tactical action, is evidenced by Mikael’s awareness that his essay is “simply… between my professor and I.” Mikael does not demonstrate a useful application of the assignment in a traditional way, yet he envisions, in writing, his self-understanding and vulnerability.

In her work, Mathieu re-envisions the relationship between the university’s service-learning projects and its surrounding neighborhood. She urges for university projects to be inspired by neighborhood members, not the motives of the university. The macrocosm of tactical action of the university serves as a microcosm of the aimless work within the writing classroom. Although not stated explicitly by Mathieu, her work expresses an inward, yogic approach when she proposes, a “tactical orientation operates situationally,” and suggests “letting go of comfortable claims of certainty and accepting the contingent and vexed nature of our actions,” which does not rely on a planned vision of the outcome (xv, my emphasis). Tactical actions are in flux, problematic, imperfect, responsive, in the present moment, vulnerable to circumstance, and yogic—they work within the struggle.

By contrast, college students are encouraged by all stakeholders to work from strategy as they come up, now, in an economy and society that demonstrates tenuousness. Mathieu defines strategy as “discourses [that demonstrate] power [as] spatial and relatively stable” (32). Such discourses dominate students’ perspective through tangible representations of aims such as college transcripts, acquisition of internships and jobs, and, eventually, signals of wealth. As a consequence of these dominant discourses that evince a strategic focus, students target lucrative career paths, which will land them with a sense of stability, status and financial strength. Eli Goldblatt calls this focus on the shifting endgame the “throughput model,” in which students “move… along a path marked by diplomas and certificates [and] determine their achievements with tests or papers” (276). For students and instructors, the aims of schooling surface as commodifiable and quantifiable with locations to culminate somewhere solid in an unpredictable world. Tactical discourses, on the other hand, Mathieu describes, “emanate from unofficial places that lack a propertied locus,” such as practices unfolding from an inward focus (32, my emphasis).

“Aimless” work challenges the “throughput model” and the individuals’ “primacy” as the core of education founded upon economic stability and emotional fulfillment presumed to accompany it. Aimless work is tactical action demands instructors look inwardly as a means to reach for presence and vulnerability, together, with students. Teachers and students face one another and privilege inward searching mediated by writing practices conceived as dominant, though not concretized, forces within the daily life of the classroom and beyond. This aim-less task is also paradoxical: it does reveal aims. It aims for responsive, careful practices and attention to the very moment with students. Aimless work attends to students’ emotional and intellectual vulnerabilities rather than the outcomes conveyed by the brand of the institution.

The tensions of aimless work within the domain of institutional requirements, formal assignments, and grades, in a course like writing, which is required, not elected by students, is ever-present. The next section addresses question 2): How can a yogic approach teaching writing work within the prescribed aims of a capitalist institution? Or, in other words: how to engage with the principles of yogic agency when life is so hard for everyone? Contingently employed instructors work for “multi-billion-dollar corporations… [who] will not properly value… the human beings doing said labor,” college lands students in debt, and some students walk down their street, daily, and see people, as Aisha writes, “overdosed… sleeping on the floor”?

Assignments as Key

For instructors applying a yogic perspective amidst institutional goals, the key task is how assignments are introduced. Instructors can mobilize yogic agency within every assignment. Each writing project can surface as an opening to struggle with the choice of our own story.

For instance, when our class discusses Deborah Brandt’s concept of “literacy sponsorship” and students write literacy narratives by examination of the socioeconomic, racial, and gendered forces within their educational history—I conceive of this writing act as an opening of choice of self-story for students. Writing the literacy narrative transforms into choice of articulation of students’ roles as individuals within challenges or privileges of systems and relationships on their educational path. This conception and composition of self alters the way students position themselves among the constellation of systems and events in their lives.

In a rhetorical analysis project in which students analyze a piece of their writing from the past, I teach rhetoric as appropriated from Aristotle as the “faculty of observing the available means of persuasion in any given case,” in which students learn the “available means” are tools with which they choose what they want in life (181). The faculty, or the mental ability students hold within as a means to perceive, responds to the impulse to wake each day and pursue what they want, whether it is breakfast, a degree, a love interest, or whatever propelled their writing. Students reconceive of rhetoric not only as a space for persuasion of and identification with others but as a location for choosing, again, what one wants, how this changes, and the specific articulation of the desire itself, as well as the story of the self who capitalizes on the “means of persuasion.”

When teaching the “theory of writing” project, which asks students to develop a theory of writing as it relates to their discipline, I ask students to point to a location within their profession where they may choose theory for communication. For example, students analyze whether Vershawn Ashanti Young’s concept of code meshing can be deployed as they enter the operating room as surgeons, or if the discursive space demands another communicative mode. Or, my design students evaluate whether their “primary discourse,” after they read James Gee, will play a role when they write a pitch to a client. My marketing students perceive how their work encompasses rhetoric and what this means for the agency or manipulation of audiences. Students’ central task unravels as a struggle to merge pedagogical concepts with each discipline. But what rises to significance are students’ choice of how course concepts shape their communicative work within the profession.

Above are a few examples of how to navigate institutional requirements at the level of the project. The most ambiguous obstacle is that instructors submit grades and those grades represent to students permanent evidence of their undergraduate work. Obviously, grades are a power relation between instructor and students. As a teacher who attempts to “squeegee” my mind when ego (my own or a students’) becomes dominant in the classroom, grades do not fit into my practice: they challenge me in an insurmountable way.

Yoga teaches to observe students’ presence and engagement with the course as a form of assessment. Yet my academic training teaches me, this too, seems un-assessable. Yogic agency shifts students’ perspective away from grades and to engagement with self, but grades still form the end goal in most places instructors are hired to teach and sustain a livelihood. Susan Blum edits the volume Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning in 2020, which contains arguments for eradication or revision of grading, including the essay How to Ungrade, in which Jesse Stommel argues “grades are currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction.” This one-off transaction precludes student agency over how they learn as well as “self-actualization,” or a space for students to understand their own potential (28). Although he does not grade them, Stommel offers thorough feedback to his students, both in writing and in person, and at the end of the semester, students use metacognitive reflection to make their own grades for transcripts.

As I struggle with these questions and attempt to gather wisdom, in developing this pedagogy, I return to the notion that presence and engagement with the course signify a (moving) target to assess and grade. How to implement a points system (students like those) regarding such affective qualities and passing moments remains to be seen. Yet I continue to observe my students with the hope that with more of my own practice and teaching experience comes understanding.

A Conclusion Will Never Arrive

Framing pedagogy using yogic agency prompts students to continuously struggle with understanding their own potential as young adults. Students are asked to write in daily increments by framing writing as offering to everyday struggle. They are instructed to surrender to “knowing [they] don’t know” as a means to dismantle dominance of ego and stay present with other perspectives. And they are led to leave inward-facing stories open-ended and “groundless” in order accept that they will never “arrive” anywhere solid in their inner and outer experiences. Instructors are asked to conceive of the classroom as space for aimless work, as work that pushes back against the “throughout model” of education, as tactical action responds to students rather than the institution, and positions potentiality rather than concrete outcome at the fore of each moment in class together.

Marya’s decision to teach us about her revelation that her career would never “arrive” anywhere stationary demonstrates yogic agency or a skillfulness in making fluid her struggles within as it connects to her outer experience with her students. But it was also a way for her to show her presence with us during senior year in college. Taking our personal strength outward to others is beginning, as Adler Kassner says, to write “personally grounded stories that [give] witness to a larger one…[that is] relatively unexplored” (4). Yogic agency invokes stories that reach into ourselves by working with egos first and then to students in our classroom and beyond. We then reconceptualize what writing can do for us at the institutional and eventually, societal level.

Ultimately a concept of yogic agency changes the story of our discipline to include the inward, the offering, the openness to not knowing, the groundless, and the tenderness and aimlessness for teachers and students together during a painful time in collective life. Only by mobilizing these inward qualities will we start to see the outward consequences as they unfold in students’ lives beyond the writing course, as well as the meditation in action and the institutional goals actualized in the “real world.” Only by starting inside first will we understand how it is possible for the writing classroom to matter outside the writing classroom.

Problems Lurking

In his recent article for The New Yorker in which Nathan Heller profiles the decline of the English major, he meets students who characterize the humanities as an afterthought or hobby compared to more (eventually) profitable STEM majors. One student, Tiffany, tells Heller “A lot of it has to do with us seeing—they call them ‘influencers’ online,” who show college students what it means, now, to have a dominant voice on social media, which to many students, represents “making it” and thus achieving upward mobility in society. Tiffany believes her generation is “more progressive in their thinking,” and likewise, other students, Heller shows, “recognize… less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had.” Because of the pace, frequency of use, and centrality of social media and “influencers” in students’ lives, coupled with the explosion of ChatGPT and the conversation regarding whether composition teachers or writers will be necessary at all in the future, teaching writing can feel, at times, antiquated, reiterative and redundant in 2023. A side effect, I find, is that in recent experience, when I push students to write, they sometimes report they don’t have anything to say. They are tired in a different way. I do it anyway. And sometimes they do write furiously, and sometimes they say thank you, and sometimes, they scroll on phones.

Applying a yogic perspective to a Western institution is attached to this reiterative feeling. It recapitulates and reworks, for another context, a culture, religion, belief structure and practice that is not mine. As a white cis gender person who frames a Western writing pedagogy with ideas borrowed and appropriated from Eastern perspectives, this sense and fear of being redundant, unnecessary, unoriginal, reiterative and misrepresentative emerges concurrently, inwardly, as I express my ideas. Particularly central as I write is the lens of the discipline of “Critical Yoga Studies,” which analyzes the commodification of yoga and its roots in white privilege. In a 2014 article (Dis)owning Bikram: Decolonizing vernacular and dewesternizing restructuring in the yoga wars, Anjali Vats remarks that yoga’s “connection to racial politics… makes [it] an important… site for understanding both (neo)colonial appropriation and anticolonial maneuvering,” and unearths the Indian resistance to Bikram Choudhry’s commodification of a posture sequence (328). To show how yoga is a trend tailored for white women, Vats cites Raka Shome’s analysis of “white femininity” in Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (2014): “Yoga… has also ended up as a modality through which privileged, affluent white women express their seeming self-worth… while… violence increasingly function[s] to destroy life or the ability to sustain life” in non-Western countries (328).

I cannot structure a “clean” lesson that evades this privilege and appropriation, especially a lesson about mobilizing personal agency that is taught in a predominantly white classroom. All the same, I work to interrogate the deployment of tone and affect with which I engage and disseminate yogic ideas. As instructors we must keep trying to ask the right questions of ourselves, and at times, explicitly, ask questions of ourselves in the presence of students. Two questions that signal this work are: how do I approach this? and what is my intention?

Studies like Vats, Mintz, Jennifer Musial, and Joseph Alter within the sub-discipline of “critical yoga studies” integrate perspectives such as race and class, and critique the commodification of Western yoga. With a desire to reach solid ground in response to my own discomfort on how to teach with yogic agency without misrepresenting a culture that does not match my ancestry, I depend on groundlessness in perspective and position problems as questions. I worry that, in an attempt to pin down answers, I will never arrive in a revelatory conceptual location I feel comfortable staying. With a concern underlying this worry that I, like many instructors in Western contexts, distill and dilute Eastern teachings into something they are not and thus erase the voices/minds behind the theories and practices.

While I may never truly “know” how to resolve these tensions in a fruitful way, I understand that those of us who teach writing and desire the depth and fulfillment of a yogic perspective must undertake practice inside and outside the classroom each day. The key lies in committing to practice while returning to a notion of possibility and potential. And perhaps the return to practice will keep writers writing, working toward saying something new amongst the influencers, the artificial intelligence, the pressures of “adulting,” and the fraught promise of upward mobility. After all, with whom other than writing teachers will students etch their aims in their aimlessness; articulate their knowing amongst their confusion; touch ground in their groundlessness: and sense their own magic and power, practiced only by writing their own story?

Works Cited

Adler-Kassner, Linda. The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers. Utah State UP, 2008.

Ahmed, Dilruba. Phase One. Poetry Unbound, narrated by Pádraig Ó Tuama, 30 Nov. 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/dilruba-ahmed-phase-one/.

Alter, Joseph. Yoga and Fetishism: Reflections on Marxist Social Theory. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 12, no. 4, 2006, pp. 763–783.

Aristotle. Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 169–241.

Batzer, Benjamin. Healing Classrooms: Therapeutic Possibilities in Academic Writing. Composition Forum, vol. 34, Summer 2016, https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/34/healing-classrooms.php. Accessed 3 Feb. 2023.

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy In American Lives. Cambridge UP, 2001.

Burgess, Maggie. Final Portfolio Reflection. Student Project, Writing Seminar 1: Written Communication Studio, TJU-East Falls, 11 Dec. 2021.

Cooper, Marilyn. Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted. College Composition and Communication, vol. 62, no. 3, 2011, pp. 420–449.

Costello, Kristi Murray and Jacob Babb. Emotional Labor, Writing Studies and Writing Program Administration. The Things We Carry, edited by Courtney Adams Wooten et al., Utah State UP, 2020.

Day, Jathan, et al. What Does A Good Teacher Do Now? Pedagogy, vol. 21, no. 3, 2021, pp. 389–40.

Frawley, David. Inner Tantric Yoga. Lotus P, 2008.

———. Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness. Lotus P, 1996.

Gee, James. Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics. The Journal of Education, vol. 171, no. 1, 1989, pp. 5–176.

Green, Mikael. Final Portfolio. Student Project, Writing Seminar 1: Written Communication Studio, TJU-East Falls, 8 Dec. 2021.

Heller, Nathan. The End of the English Major. The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2023, pp. 63–71.

Leake, Eric. Writing Pedagogies of Empathy: As Rhetoric and Disposition. Composition Forum, vol. 34, Summer 2016, https://www.compositionforum.com/issue/34/empathy.php. Accessed 3 Feb 2023.

Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Boynton/Cook, 2005.

Micciche, Laura. Doing Emotion. Boynton/Cook, 2007.

Mintz, Judith. About Judith Mintz, Ph.D. Yoga Cultures, https://yogacultures.wordpress.com/aboutjudithmintz/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2017.

Morales, Aisha. Final Portfolio. Student Project, Writing Seminar 1: Written Communication Studio, TJU-East Falls, 21 Dec. 2021.

Musial, Jennifer. Engaged Pedagogy in the Feminist Classroom and Yoga Studio. Feminist Teacher, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 2011, pp. 212–228.

Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. 4th edition, translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda, Integral Yoga Publications, 2014.

Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and Cross-Cultural Conduct. College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 195–224.

Schiffmann, Erich. Yoga the Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness. Pocket Books, 1996.

Stommel, Jesse. How to Ungrade. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What To Do Instead), edited by Susan Blum, West Virginia UP, 2020, pp. 25–41.

Sung, Hyunjee. Final Portfolio. Student Project, Writing Seminar 1: Written Communication Studio, TJU-East Falls, 8 Dec. 2022.

Trungpa, Chögyam. Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness. Shambhala, 1993.

Vats, Anjali. (Dis)Owning Bikram: Decolonizing Vernacular and Dewesternizing Restructuring in the Yoga Wars. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 2016, pp. 325–345.

Worsham, Lynn. Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion. JAC, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 213–245.

Yagelski, Robert. Writing as a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability. Hampton P, 2011.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. ‘Nah, We Straight’: An Argument Against Code Switching. JAC, vol. 29, nos. 1/2, 2009, pp. 46–76.