Yoga, Brain Plasticity and Creativity

"Every act of perception is an act of creativity." Octavio Paz

By cultivating perception we are cultivating our creativity. Creativity comes from seeing or feeling or recognizing patterns—sometimes very simple patterns, sometimes very complex or abstract patterns—in both the world around us and in our selves. All life is composed of patterns, structures, or forms, as Plato and Greek philosophy understood over two thousand years ago. All the branches and practices of the many schools of yoga are disciplines that understand that the human brain needs to be observed and studied in order for it to be healthy and to work at it’s most efficient level. Yoga never disconnected the brain from the rest of the body as Western thought did for so many centuries. Consequently Hatha yoga is a discipline that cultivates the health of the body precisely through both self-study and training of all aspects of human intelligence: physical/kinesthetic, emotional/energetic, mental and cognitive, intellectual/creative, and spiritual. All forms of intelligence work in harmony in the mature yogi. But the life long study or practice begins in the physical body and progresses from the outside in. Breath is a key component in this process of self-education and awareness as the breath helps us literally feel the presence of the quality of energy that comes with focused, concentrated awareness of our mind and our body working together. Our organs of perception are highly evolved parts of our physical body, affecting and regulating our survival in the world. Understanding how they work and using them efficiently and effectively is critical to our survival and our health.
Our creativity comes from our use of our body and understanding how our organs of perception work and feed us—stimulate and orient us. The clearer we see the world, the better we are able to live in harmony with it. Responding to life requires an attuned, sensitive and integrated mind and body. This is obvious but it takes work and discipline. This discipline can come in a variety of practices, skills, activities, and pleasures, as we all know. The key is deepening and exploring these skills over a long period of time.
Every act of perception is essentially an act of creativity as our body/mind records and interprets the patterns around and inside us. How we interpret these patterns—how clearly we see them outside of our prejudices, needs, and selfishness—is our creativity at work. Our lives are in themselves creative responses to the body and the world we live in.
If we study the history of art or literature, one can see that these traditions are rooted in the creative expression of people participating in sacred rituals and devotional acts of every culture in every corner of the earth. It seems that the most profound work of artists in the modern era, be they musicians, painters, dancers, or writers, are all works that not only reveal innovative ways to see or perceive the world, but also are in some way investigations into the very nature of how creativity works. Their art often can be seen as devotional altars to their exploration of how perception and creativity feed one another.
Neuroscience is discovering every day that the more conscious we are of how our body and mind function, the better equipped we are to find ways to maintain body and mind health. Oliver Sacks, a preeminent scientist and writer, describes the fascinating adaptive strategies of four people in his essay “The Mind’s Eye.” He speaks of “deep perception” or how blinded people use practical applications of their imagination to negotiate their everyday lives without the use of “normal” eyesight. In one case study in his essay, an engineer tells of how he felt completely confident on top of his house in the middle of the night patching his roof to the terror of his sighted neighbors. Scientists are discovering that damaged brains heal themselves in divergent ways, using what neuroscientist call brain plasticity or the brain’s inherent ability to adapt and evolve. This ability to adapt and heal is our creativity at work. Brain plasticity, according to neuroscientists, occurs both at the unconscious and conscious levels. But it most certainly comes from our ability to apply our imaginations. Once our creativity begins to atrophy our brain, too, loses its natural ability to make new neurons and rewire itself. In other words, we can shape the way our brains are wired. Or, as so many philosophers have told us from the Chinese to the African to the European: We are what we think. Or let me add: we are what we feel and what we create.

Shooting Our Children with Ignorance and Irresponsibility

Education, Emotional Health and Our Responsibility to Young People


After a year of soul-searching, suicide workshops, adding extra counselors for students, and of course the millions of dollars spent on new college security systems, many of us who teach on colleges across the country are still wondering: Can we really protect our students from the epidemic in gun violence that not only besets college campuses but our society in general? Or, should we do what we are essentially trained to do: respond to social needs, examine the causes and issues, and give our students the skills and practical knowledge to recognize the crucial role health plays in every aspect of their future?
With yet another horrendous act of violence on our campus, here in my own state of Illinois, when are we going to wake up and realize that the health of the body and mind is not only critical to a student’s ability to learn but to our society’s ability to function as well.
Off the top of my head, here is a tally of some of the subjects students wrote about in my creative writing classes last semester: suicide attempts (6 different students); sexual abuse (4); domestic abuse (3); rape (3); alcohol and drug addiction (too many to remember); self-mutilation (3); panic or anxiety disorder (6); anorexia (4); gun violence (3). I wish I could say that these pieces of writing were fiction, but I teach what is commonly referred to these days as creative nonfiction.
Students in my classes are wrestling with emotional, psychological and physical problems that are affecting not only their health but their ability to learn and contribute to society. Putting aside the troubling reality that many students have limited access to comprehensive health care, why is it that those who consider themselves in the vanguard of social change and progressive thought (university officials and professors) are not actively finding ways to help our students? Why aren’t we using this crisis as a means to educate students and teachers alike in the conditions that are producing such emotional ill health? How many more shootings do we need?
For the last ten years in all of my classes I have made it a central assignment to give students an opportunity to read, research, reflect and write about their relationships with their own bodies as well as the many social conditions that affect the health of young people. As a part of this assignment, I incorporate body/mind awareness techniques such as meditation, breath and yoga poses. (I’m a trained yoga teacher and have taught workshops for people with HIV as well as health care workers in many different countries.) I’m not a therapist nor sociologist, but I’m stunned by the essays I read every term. The essays are full of anger, confusion, isolation, misinformation, fear, and pain. They break my heart. But the real horror that I feel each time I learn of yet another shooting on campus is the collective attitude of educational institutions, government and business leaders who believe that they bear little responsibility for the epidemic raging in the bodies and minds of our young people. We speak about “change”; we are entertained by movies about the health industry; we write academic essays about injustices; we pride ourselves on the newest advances in technology. And yet, we continue to sell goods, foods, and services as well as seats in college classrooms believig someone else will take up the cause, pay the bills, do the work it will take to protect and teach our children. But each time these shootings occur the gunman reflects not only an individual’s loss of sanity and conscience but a society that has lost its sense of what holds it together: civic responsibility and social compassion. The only collective action we seem able to share in these events is that of our rage and sadness.
Over the past 20 years neuroscience has given us more and more evidence of just how dependent brain function is on the health of not only the body but on the family and the community as well, which, in itself, is nothing we didn’t already know. But the evidence is overwhelming. Yet, we continue to ignore the obvious, dragging our feet on health care, making money off of people’s fear and ignorance, and worst of all spending billions of tax dollars for schools and universities that remain teaching as if we were living in the 1950s. Why is it that educators boast of classrooms where students can access knowledge from any corner of the globe but yet ignore their responsibility to inspire students to discover the wisdom stored within their own bodies?

Sun Salute Project For US Soldiers of Iraq War

Sun Salute Project For Iraqi War Dead

A week ago around Memorial Weekend this idea came to me to do a sun salutation for each US soldier killed in Iraq. It was a crazy idea. Three thousand five hundred and some men and women have been killed. (That’s just in Iraq. It would be more with Afghanistan.) My idea is to do them all in one day. I want to speak each name and the hometown of the man or woman. So instead of doing my usual yoga practice, I did 108 sun salutations. This a sacred number that both yogis and Buddhists use in devotional rituals to honor deities and teachers. And this is not easy, as I’ve experienced in classes and in Buddhist sanghas in which I have practiced. Nevertheless, I did 108 and then a few days I did 150. It felt invigorating and empowering. But 3500? It became clearer to me that I couldn’t do this alone and of course it should be an ceremony open to anyone. I thought of inviting my friends, students, colleagues, yoga teachers, neighbors, family, people walking by, anyone and everyone could do 1 or 5 or 10 or 50 bows or salutations for the soldiers whose name I would read off. I would do some and others would do the rest and then I would do some more. Much more practical. Yet I still harbor, selfishly perhaps, the idea of doing them all myself.

I’ve gone back and forth, debating with myself as to whether to do this, considering the physically risks of training to do 11 hours of sun salutations, wondering if emotionally I could really organize this and carry it out, thinking how doing something like this would affect my already chaotic professional life as a writer, professor, and yoga teacher. I mean 3500 sun salutations! This is like doing a marathon, an iron man. This would be impossible, foolish, vain., embarrassing. In my fear-obsessed mind, I could see a hand full of my loyal friends stopping by for a while, doing a few sun salutations and then looking around at each other and trying to convince me that I’d better let this go before I hurt myself or made a fool out of myself. I don’t need to explain to anyone who knows me—really knows me—that I’ve struggled with a kind of imbalanced emotional life. My friends and family have watched with concern over the last several years as I’ve risked my sanity, my career, my financial life to travel, research, write and now promote the cause of my book: to seek a spiritual foundation and strength to counter HIV and AIDS and the fears associated with it.


I’ve practiced a few times. I’m still a little nervous about telling people and asking them to join me. Each time I practice, though, I realize this must be done. It must be done because the act—is both a devotional ritual for healing and remembrance for those who have lost their lives and it is a ceremony, an act of creating a space and time in which to expand oneself out of the daily patterns of the mind and body to consider how we actively experience the suffering or our world and the grace and unfolding energy of the universe. It’s almost as if these fallen soldiers are asking us to live more completely, more truthfully with more awareness of all the suffering that we live with in this world.


But, one of the remarkable things I learned while writing researching and writing my book was that once I began to tell people I was going to do something, I gained a kind of strength from them. Telling people what you believe and what you want to do is often the first step in taking some action. You have to walk your talk, as they say. And this has been the case with this sun salutation project or idea. As I have told my friends and colleagues, I’ve not received rolled eyes, on the contrary I’ve received enthusiastic support: “I’ll be there. I’ll help. I’ll do some sun salutations with you. I’ll tell people.”

This is what is so remarkable about activism; it’s not a solitary act. It’s a communal act. By telling people my idea, it becomes their idea. It becomes a project with a future that isn’t dependent on me, but on all those I ask to join with me. And after all, this is the point: to ask everyone to consider why this war goes on and on killing young people from these little towns and neighborhoods of our cities as well as the scores of Iraqis. Why are we letting this go on? Why are we waiting for the 2008 election, if that is what many of us are doing? Why are we not demanding an urgent change in diplomacy and troop reductions? Why? Well I have begun to try to train and to organize for this event. Stay tuned.

Health, Creativity and Free Speech

Creativity and Health


The events of two weeks ago on the campus of Virginia Tech still sicken and send shudders through us each time we hear the word, “Virginia” or “troubled college student.” The loss of those innocent students and professors who were gunned down trying to learn and teach will no doubt haunt us for the rest of our lives. But for many of us who teach in universities, particularly those who work with students in creative pursuits like creative writing as I do, there is a sense of sympathy with those in the English Department of Virginia Tech who saw a manuscript of rage and pain turn into a real life canvas of blood and terror.
If only someone would have realized . . . if only someone would have recognized the signs . . . The uproar of popular opinion has been understandably emotional as we search publicly for ways to prevent such a massacre from ever happening again. But limiting the self-expression of students is certainly the worst thing we can do.
I applaud the Virginia Tech faculty, as it appears they made a specific and compassionate effort to work with this sick-souled young man. Could they have done more? Yes. Did they have the resources? The support? The training? The time? Probably not. As college creative writing teachers, we are trained to teach writing not work as therapists or counselors. And yet, as educators and artists ourselves, we must encourage students to examine their lives and the world around them, no matter how troubling, as the subjects from which they can learn the art of self-expression and its power to enlighten and heal the human spirit. Thus, we are the first to read the raw, heart-wrenching accounts of our student’s painful emotional struggles.
I’ve heard it all in my 15 years of teaching, including the humiliating sagas of immigrants and the irrational tragedies of war, famine, and brutal acts of torture. I know many teachers have fled from teaching writing just because they can’t face another essay on anorexia or fictionalized account of some traumatic adolescent episode of abuse. I understand why. But because creative writing enabled me to pull myself out my own struggles with depression and self-destruction and the shame and illness that they produced, I feel somewhat of a spiritual calling to provide students with the support and the aesthetic training to craft their way through what they may have witnessed and suffered.
But never in my years of teaching have I seen such emotional and physical suffering as I’ve seen in the last year. From the top of my head here is a list of recent student essay topics: six suicide attempts; four episodes of sexual abuse, including incest; three depictions of domestic abuse; 1 rape story; too many essays about alcohol and drug addiction; four accounts of self-mutilation; five essays on panic or anxiety disorder; five more on anorexia; and another account of a campus shooting at a dorm. I wish I could say that these pieces of writing were fiction, but I teach what is commonly termed creative nonfiction, in other words, the personal essay. These essays didn’t come from students who’ve made it out of the so-called “inner city,” where we have apparently given up on hundreds of thousands of children who chronically suffer from psychological and physical abuse due to violence, addiction, and poverty. No, these writings came from students who by and large are white, middle to upper class, and from not only suburbia but all over middle America.
What is going on? I’m not a sociologist or psychologist, but it’s not difficult to see that these young people are under an enormous amount of stress from the sheer volume of information our society is asking them to digest into bodies they barely inhabit. For a society that prides itself on technological advancement and medical science, it’s appalling how little attention we pay to educating young people on how their bodies function and how they must care for it. Consequently, one of my main topics I ask students to explore is their relationship with their bodies. You might think, this is why I’m receiving such essays. But then, what if I hadn’t asked them to write about their bodies?
In my creative writing classes I don’t teach confession, I teach craft and composition. I teach students to develop self-confidence through confronting difficult issues with language and ideas. Every term, I ask them to read the bible of the personal narrative, James Baldwin’s Notes To A Native Son, who preaches in every paragraph that artistry and compassion triumphs over bitterness and blame.
To take away the rights of students to express themselves would not only be a violation of the most enduring symbol of America—free speech, but it would also take away the valuable skill that we want to cultivate in them: that what they say and how they say it matters to their health and to the health of our society and democracy.
The tragedy of Virginia Tech should wake us up to the realities of the serious emotional and mental health problems that our young people face in a society pushing and shoving them to consume, succeed and look beautiful at the cost of their uniquely sacred bodies. It is critical that students in all our schools have the right and access to not only heath care designed for their age but also a commitment to a curriculum on how to maintain it as well.

A History of World AIDS Day

My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC when I heard the news from America about a “mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men.” I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.
My second World AIDS day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I’d snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, “you weren’t expecting this, were you?”
For the next few years I didn’t celebrate any World AIDS days. I went on no walks. I went to no fundraisers. I wore no red ribbons. When I heard that word--that word that lived inside my body on television, I turned it off. Every day was for me World AIDS day. I’d joined a worldwide tribe growing larger by some 3,000 every day. I didn’t need to be reminded.
But then in 2000, I traveled to South Africa to attend the International AIDS Conference to teach yoga to people living with HIV. Yoga had given me back my body, and in South Africa activists from around the world had given me back my spirit. And for the next two years with my credit cards and notebooks, I traveled to the far corners of Asia and Africa and into the forgotten neighborhoods of Chicago to listen to the stories of those who live every day inside this virus; I wrote down the stories of activists and doctors, social workers and sex workers, Buddhist monks and Baptist ministers, orphaned children and incarcerated men.
Last year, on World AIDS day, I found myself on the snowy campus of Indiana University. My alma mater had asked me to come to speak on the AIDS pandemic. I told them the stories of the activists I met in South Africa; I told them about the AIDS doctor in India who started the first organization for people living with HIV as he does; and I told them about the Senegalese sex workers who cried out to Allah to protect me from death when I told them my status. But the story that those students from Kokomo and Terra Haute probably remember most, is the one that came from their classmate at the end of my talk. She raised her shaking hand, and in a voice choking back tears, she told her classmates something she’d never admitted publicly before: “For ten years my parents forbade me or my sister from speaking with my brother because he had AIDS.
This day is a day of tragedy and triumph, but most importantly it’s a day to listen to the stories that must be retold and retold for this disease to finally come to an end.

Writing, Yoga, and the Voice of the Body

It seems obvious to say that it is through the body that we find our way in this world. Yoga teaches the adherent that the body is a place where the earth and the divine come into being. Even if you don’t believe in the theological language used by all of the world religions and spiritual teachings and poets, you know biologically this is the case. We breathe and billions of cells are being fed and activated. We are a walking ball of energy interacting with everything and everyone we come into contact with. We change others and they change us. Massive flows of energy sweep and flood across the globe as people live and die and act and create and destroy.

And yet, it’s stupefying how little awareness we have of this. Intellectually, I’ve just explained this to you but physically we have little awareness of how our bodies are adapting and changing. We pride ourselves on knowing so much about the body because of medical science, physics and the advances of technology, but how little we know of the intelligence and the science of our own bodies. Our bodies have a language that only we can understand fully. We can use the ideas and experiences of others, but ultimately we must learn who we are by studying our own bodies. This is the great teaching of many spiritual disciplines. For me, it’s been in yoga and in swimming. For others, it takes many forms, athletics, singing, dance, climbing, or any ritualized act performed with the body.

I’ve come to believe now too this is the case with the writing of prose, poetry, and playwriting. I didn’t always believe this because I didn’t really know or trust that emotion and sensation were tuning forks for my voice. I always believed some idea drove what I wanted to say as well as how I would say it.

Now, I’m learning from both my students and from my work that my voice resonates with the clearest tones when it’s referring to a physical experience. It seems that when my body speaks via an emotion or some sensation or action, there is a basic chord that I hear that tells me this is what I should say. My friend Rob Nixon, a writer and professor of writing, once used the expression that he felt something in his bones. Rob is someone who hikes and bikes and swims and he thinks of his childhood boy’s body all the time and writes from it as well. And I realized that this was exactly what a writer has to do, not metaphorically but physiologically: feel and see the world from within our bones. It also has struck me that the voice gets truer and truer when the body leads it to the places and people it needs to be around. I often try to help students listen to their bodies so that they can let it tell them the subjects that they need to write about as well. It seems that every writer must start first with writing about his or her body. He should really know it to be able to write with authority about the human condition and the landscape that gives us life. When I got lost writing my book, the After-Death Room, I began to learn to go back to my body and ask it what I should write. And it would usually give me hints—sensations, reminding me of what something felt like: the heat of the sun on my neck in India, the pollution in my lungs, the feeling of claustrophobia on a street in Asia, the hunger for intimacy brought on by smell or human touch. And by recording these sensations, I would somehow have a clearer idea of what to say or what to write about. I attribute this to my yoga practice—and to the other ways I’ve learned to listen to my body. The body has not only a language but a story that we must tell every time we write.

SEX ED FOR AMERICA

The Mark Foley case continues to smolder in the press, inspiring office jokes, sermons, distrust with Congress, confusion and outrage. Recently, from inside his self-imposed cloister at a drug and alcohol treatment facility, Mr. Foley announced that he knew the priest who had abused him 40 years ago. His behavior and the response it provokes in society is symptomatic of just how little we have progressed in understanding, educating and reporting about sexuality. In a time of remarkable advances in scientific knowledge and technological wizardry, where we have come to know the make-up of our own DNA and can transplant organs, send toy robots to Mars and telescopes into space so that we can understand the universe, its mysterious and troubling that in a country that prides itself on the use of reason, advanced education, scientific inquiry that we choose to remain in ignorance about human sexuality and how to educate people about it.

Many conservatives would say that it’s not about education; it’s about morality and personal responsibility. And they are right, but how do we attempt to blend educating young people—or, for that matter, adults--on how the mind and the body function in the arena of desire and sexual function? We don’t. We believe beleaguered parents or ill-prepared teachers should be doing this job, even while we know our own parents and teachers were terrified and uneducated about this and did little to nothing to prepare us. Or, we think our clergy should do this, when they themselves, too, are uneducated or simply operating in some kind of time warp where biology and psychology are apparently not necessary components of seminary study. Or, we just think Oprah can take care of us all with a few of her expert guests sandwiched between celebrities who are bred and groomed to perpetuate various myths and messages about our bodies and their sexual inner lives.

From left to right, from republican to democrat, from male to female, from gay and straight, from religious to secular, across every race and ethnicity, this country needs “the talk about the birds and the bees” about the relationship between health and human sexuality. It needs it on an on-going basis, in elementary school, junior high, high school, and persistently throughout adult life. Why would we possibly believe that children only need a smattering of watered down texts about human sexuality here and there throughout their education while they are drilled for 13 years on math, science, English and history? We have children who have no concept that diet makes a difference, or have any understanding of how their emotional life depends on their diet and the world around them, they are completely at a loss—as most adults are as well—to explain how their bodies function or how sexuality works. They are innocent and ill-prepared for the onslaught of the millions of messages they will receive via the media and the materialism that drives much of popular culture.

What is truly irresponsible to me is that everyday we let the disaster and abuse continue, perpetuating deep psychological wounds that are never understood or healed and invariably come back to haunt people, families and communities later in life. The tragedy in the Amish community is just one example in a daily assault on children that stems from such deep denial by our society that sexual health is a shared responsibility for our entire society just as public health is. But all we get is moralizing, task forces, prayers for the wounded, a little counseling, threats of punishment, vilification by the press to sell TV ads and papers, and elaborate and expensive schemes to punish and control those we demonize in hopes that they will go away, as if sent here from Mars or created by some other God than our own.

The human body is sacred and it’s time we learn to spend the time, the money, and the will re-educating ourselves so that our children don’t have to live in a world of such ignorance and suffering.