There are many ways of doing good and beautiful philosophy, and there are many ways of teaching philosophy that can transform students’ lives and maybe even blow their minds.
Still, in spite of all those different ways of doing and teaching philosophy, much of what gets thought of as “philosophy”—and certainly most of what gets done in academic philosophy settings—involves mainly words and word-like thoughts. There is, it’s fair to say, little in the way of bodily activity for philosophy students, especially philosophy students in a college classroom—other than, of course, the relatively minimal kinds of bodily activity that consist in sitting on a chair while trying to look attentive or the kinds of bodily movement involved in writing something down, turning a page, or manipulating some electronic device or other.
But what if we could do philosophy much more obviously with and through the body?
This particular what-if question has gripped me, both in my scholarship and my teaching, since at least that time about a dozen-and-a-half years ago when I found myself in an introductory yoga class at a local studio and I discovered that, for me, at least, traditional metaphysical mind-body problems can look quite a bit different when one’s ass is located in space above one’s head. I got hooked on doing yoga and a variety of other contemplative body practices, and, in the years since, I’ve been fortunate enough to have colleagues who gave me the freedom to experiment with ways of bringing various forms of yoga and yoga-like contemplative body practice into my teaching.
One result of that experimentation is a course I regularly teach called “Yoga and Philosophy.” This course is an introduction to both philosophy and yoga practice. We read Indian philosophical and religious texts and do many of the sorts of things that normally get done in an intro-level college philosophy courses, but we also do hatha yoga practice together: we learn and practice asana (that is, yoga postures), pranayama (i.e., yoga techniques for working with breath/energy), dhyana (i.e., meditation), mudra (i.e., ritualized positionings of the hands and fingers), and, to a lesser extent, mantra (i.e., vocalizations of various sounds).
Some of my main goals as a teacher of this course are:
- To introduce students to philosophy in general and to a certain kind of comparative philosophy in particular.
- To give students an accessible but rich experience of doing Indian-style yoga.
- To get students familiar with a key set of texts and claims from Indian philosophical, religious, and spiritual traditions.
- To show students how to read texts carefully, critically, and slowly.
- To teach students some of the differences between academic presentations of the material we are studying and presentations by various sorts of “insider” teachers and practitioners—and to encourage students to find value in both.
- To invite students to reflect on the complexities, subtleties, and tensions that are all over the place in the study and practice of this stuff by people living in the here and now that my students and I occupy.
- To be deeply respectful of and yet appropriately playful with the practices we do and the traditions with which we are engaging.
I have changed the course up multiple times since I first taught it in 2015, but, in every iteration, two of the key readings have been the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Since this is an intro-level course and most of the students have no prior background in philosophy or in academic studies of Indian culture, I choose very accessible translations and I try to fill in what can be lost in translation by having students learn the key Sanskrit philosophical terms and discussing what is at stake in various choices the translators make.
In my other courses, I often present myself to students as a tougher teacher than I in fact am. However, when I’m inviting my students to move their bodies into vulnerable positions and to try out contemplative practices that can stir up lots of emotion, I need to create the safest of safe spaces for them in every possible dimension, and in those moments the “tough teacher” persona needs to be set aside in favor of more unambiguous warmth and kindness. I think I get that balance right a lot of the time in this Yoga and Philosophy course, but I am still figuring it out. I have written about some of the pedagogical challenges of teaching this Yoga and Philosophy course and other, similar courses in “Body Practice and Meditation as Philosophy: Teaching Qigong, Taijiquan, and Yoga in College Courses” (Teaching Philosophy 39, no. 2, 115 – 132].
I did not start teaching this course until I had completed an initial 200-hour yoga teacher-training program. There are important considerations about safety and, more generally, about best practices for guiding people through contemplative body practices, and both ethics and prudence probably demand that one not teach yoga without some kind of formal training as a yoga teacher. I was fortunate to have gotten financial support from my university that covered a non-trivial portion of the costs of my initial yoga teacher-training. If you are thinking about incorporating any kind of yoga practice into your courses and you don’t have specialized yoga teacher training, one approach would be to find a trained yoga instructor to come in and guide the practice portions of your class for you.
With this course, I have not infrequently found that the students would go strangely silent on me. At first I couldn’t figure it out. We’d be studying some potentially fascinating claim about the metaphysics of mind or the tragic-beautiful nature of the human condition as described in one of our texts, and I’d be sure I had led the students into the discussion with all the background knowledge they needed to engage with the ideas and to have a high-level and fun intellectual conversation—and yet there would be silence.
It took me a while (and some gentle questioning) to discover that studying these particular philosophical texts in a college setting that includes yoga practice as part of the course would often lead the students into something like stunned wonder. They were not at all disengaged, but they would not know how even to begin to talk about what they were thinking and experiencing without additional guidance and support from me as a teacher. In short, the course really can blow their minds.
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Steve Geisz
Steve Geisz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tampa. His research focuses on the ways that body techniques and contemplative practices such as yoga, qigong, martial arts, and meditation are embodiments of philosophical ideas and methods of doing philosophy. He is a 500-hour registered yoga teacher (RYT 500). He also teaches qigong and practices taijiquan.
