Andrea Olsen became interested in the potential role of yoga in higher education when she received a Contemplative Practice Fellowship in l999 from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The year-long grant encouraged fellowship holders to explore ways to introduce contemplative techniques into the curriculum, and she chose to incorporate a yoga lab in two of her courses—Anatomy and Kinesiology, and Body and Earth. In addition to college teaching, Olsen is on the faculty of a yoga teacher training program and offers workshops and performances in international venues and annual training programs to the general public.
Olsen explains that the word “Hatha” is a compound of the words Ha and Tha (Sanskrit for the words sun and moon). Physical yoga classes are intended to assist the practitioner in achieving balance between action and rest, doing and being. Hatha Yoga is a system of thought believed to have been developed by Yogi Swatmarama, the compiler of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Muktibodhananda, 1993); this classical text on the physical practices of yoga, integrates shatkriyas, or internal cleansing practices, along with the practice of physical postures (asanas) and breathing practices (pranayama) as a way to prepare the mind for the deeper cognitive work of meditation. Contemporary hatha yoga practices (often referred to as “modern postural yoga” by scholars) are believed to be as influenced by the disciplines of dance and gymnastics as they are East Indian philosophy (Singelton, 2010).
Olsen was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in New Zealand in 2003, teaching and conducting research for a semester at Whitirea Community Polytechnic, an arts program (Whitirea Performing Arts) that served Maori, Cook Island, and Samoan dancers. Many of Olsen’s students had felt challenged in traditional academic settings, and she found the integration of yoga into her dance classes was particularly useful to help students concentrate--and also to rest after hours of physical training. She states, “Some students need to move--to embody their knowledge—particularly in inner city and junior high school settings, where there is pent up energy. Getting young people to sustain focus these days is potent, and yoga calms the mind and channels energy in a productive way. It’s an awareness practice, and awareness is the first step in changing behavior.”
As a professor of dance and environmental studies, Olsen has taught “Anatomy and Kinesiology” for three decades. The semester-long course meets twice a week for an hour-and-a-half of experiential learning and was the basis for her first book, Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy, written in collaboration with colleague Caryn McHose. Olsen added a “yoga lab” to her course, a concept that parallels that found in chemistry labs across the country: to provide an opportunity to further investigate what is being studied in the core component of the course.
Olsen explains the structure of the class, “There is a significant memorization component for exams, with a focus on the skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems. In the yoga labs we deepened the experience.” The yoga lab allowed Olsen, and her students to use the anatomical terms within the context yoga postures, encourage applied learning. For example, she would say, “Feel your calcaneus on the ground, rather than feel your heel. Movement through the yoga postures also pumps the fluids through the body, which helps to balance the endocrine system. Hormones traveling through the blood can get trapped or pooled in areas of the body through tension and stress. Depending on what asanas or postures you are doing in yoga, certain glands and tissues of the endocrine system are stimulated.” Olsen’s anatomy course usually enrolls thirty to forty students, and fills with college juniors and seniors from a variety of disciplines with dance and premed students given priority. She explains, “Pre-med students learn techniques that may help them assist future patients. If someone comes into their medical practice with hypertension, they might suggest yoga or breathing techniques. They know in their own bodies the effectiveness of the process they are recommending.”
Each of Olsen’s yoga labs starts with an exploration of one of the ten yamas and niyamas in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Patanjali postulated that ethics was the basis of the eight step path necessary for seeing beyond the conditioned mind (known as asthanga yoga). The first stage on this path towards freedom is the practice of ethical principles, known as yamas (non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence/non-addictiveness, and non-greed) and the second is the niyamas (personal practices): (purity/cleanliness, contentment, austerity/ , self-study, and self-surrender). These principles apply both to physical and mental aspects of the practice; for example, non-harming includes both restraining from hurting others or yourself in the physical practice and from hurting with your thoughts—through self criticism or a judgmental attitude.” During the ten-week course, Olsen “introduces one yama or niyama in each class, while students are focusing on breath in a basic seated posture. “I connect the principles both to yoga practice and to life, so they understand that there is philosophic underpinning to the science of the postures—it’s not just a physical practice or an exercise regime. In an hour-long class, I can’t go in depth into yoga philosophy, but I might read a passage from Iyengar so students know there is a literary heritage for further research.”
Olsen also uses a weekly yoga lab in her “Body and Earth” course. This is an undergraduate interdisciplinary course that combines the science of body with the science of place--the intersection of the “body systems with earth systems.” She has taught this material in the Environmental Studies program for a decade, resulting in her second book, Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide, which includes yoga images as part of the artwork. She sometimes finds the yoga lab less effective for this course, as students want experiential work and field trips outside the studio. She explains, “From the beginning of the course students explore how evolutionary concepts are present within their own bodies. For example, life began in the ocean with the first single cells three billion years ago. The human body is still mostly water (sixty-seventy percent) and this fluid responsiveness underlies the health of our other body systems. Body is Earth: our bones, breath and blood are the minerals, air, and water inside us, not separate but same. Whatever we put in the air or soil goes into the water and eventually into us.” Olsen sees the interdisciplinary nature of her course as one of its strengths, as interdisciplinary studies “support the understanding of interconnected systems.” Olsen sees the unity of body, mind, and spirit as fundamental to yoga, and sees interdisciplinary environmental studies programs as offering a compatible model.
Using yoga in her classes has specific challenges. Students view yoga as yet another method to control their bodies, rather than learning to listen to the deep, inherent intelligence of their bodies and earth. She explains, “My goal is to teach a deep respect for the body—body listening. Your conscious mind can only be aware of a tiny amount of what is going on around you at any moment, or you’d be overwhelmed. The body, however, registers more information below the conscious level. We know more than we think we know. We have to learn to listen to this deeper knowing. But if you ask students why they take yoga, many would say it’s to gain control. One of the things I say right away is that we are experiencing yoga to create a dialogue with our intrinsic intelligence—the extraordinary knowledge that we have, but tend to ignore.”
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