The blog post is pretending to be about yoga but is secretly me working out some thoughts for my Kalamazoo paper

On my previous post about the word “awareness,” my friend Kate commented on my Facebook link that “I think in yoga-speak awareness is like mindfulness, not just knowing that something exists but paying attention to that thing, in this case, the sensations that yoga is producing in you, which seems ridiculous at the beginning but gets easier with time.”

Which made concrete (concretized?) something that I had a sense I should be doing but of course didn't really grasp and was not terribly good at. Yoga, once I didn’t have to dedicate all my effort to the plain old “what is this and how do I do it and is this really a good idea?” thinking, has ended up being the place where all my writing thoughts happen. Of course, even after this reminder I still think about writing while doing yoga because I haven’t really had the necessary time to practice yet. Also, I rationalize it by telling myself I’m thinking about writing about my body and yoga, so there’s that.

But pursuing this line of thought also sent me down some other bunny trails. I have a sense that paying attention to how my body feels when I stretch and push it isn’t entirely distinct from paying attention to and loving on the people and places that surround me. After all, paying that kind of attention to my body tends to lead to me loving it ("Oh, what a nice patient body you are! Thanks for trying to cooperate with me when you would rather not! Also, while we’re on the subject, you’ve done an awesome job with the whole carrying-babies, thing, not only on the inside but also in my arms and on my back. That’s hard work! I love you, body. High five."). I recently stumbled across a collection of essays that discusses that in a lot more detail (Yoga and Body Image ed. Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelly, Llewellyn Publications, 2014), because everything I know I read in books. I’m a veritable Twilight Sparkle.

At any rate, my research tends to consider the ways in which our bodies themselves are not entirely distinct from our environment. Some people call that “posthumanism”—the idea that our bodies include/overlap/intersect with our transportation, our technology (David refers to his smartphone as his “brain extension device”) and so on. See Donna Harroway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for example. But the delightfully controversial Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued in Medieval Identity Machines that this was actually a very common perspective for medieval authors as well. 

Take a look at the Zodiac Man, for example (go ahead and check Google Images for examples—I’ll wait. Cohen’s is from Biblioteque Nationale MS lat. 11229 fol. 45r, but there are many others). There’s a human body, but with arrows and lines shooting out of it connecting him to the stars. Medieval medicine (yes, that was a thing—also, they bathed. Let’s not have any of what C.S. Lewis termed chronological snobbery around these parts ;-) ) was very concerned with how the movements of the stars and planets affected the movement of the humors in the body. As Cohen takes readers through his examples in art and literature, medieval bodies reveal themselves as not just organs and skin and bones and muscles, but also stars and planets and continents and weapons and tools and (in the case of knights) horses and armor.

Which makes me wonder. If medieval monks had invented yoga, what would it look like? What if Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich had been yoginis?