Learning the Body, Clearing the Mind

Abstract

Our body and senses provide vital information for our lives and failing to engage them leaves us bereft of the living tone, the precise felt sense, of our experience. We become, in a very real sense, strangers to ourselves. This is a topic essential to learning in the Humanities, and especially relevant art, literature, psychology, and, most centrally in my case, the study of religion. Here, I draw on Buddhist contemplative traditions and the emerging art of the micro-phenomenological interview, a carefully wrought process of non-leading questions brought to life through the careful research and informative writings of Claire Petitmengin and others. Micro-phenomenology is a scientifically precise way of eliciting affective and bodily memory. Buddhist epistemology and practices are aimed at transforming the lived experience of the practitioner. Micro-phenomenology is a contemporary western discipline, while Buddhism arose in ancient Asia. However, these differences make even more compelling their clear convergence on principles key to valorizing and experiencing bodily learning. Both explore and train awareness of embodied experience in ways that can be brought directly into the classroom.