Transcendent Practices Program Description                                                 F03/W04

Designed as a year long, interdisciplinary and experiential coordinated studies program, Transcendent Practices asks both theoretical and practical questions regarding the value and characteristics of transcendent practices.  Many of us remember transcendent moments in our lives, when we lost our sense of time and felt creatively connected with our environment, our bodies or our actions. Transcendent moments often favor the prepared.  The preparation is often a practice or craft, an individual way of being in the world that involves intentional commitment to some activity and a regular physical and mental recentering on it.  This program actively involved students in three creative studio practices that can prepare or open one to transcendent experiences: poetry, sculpture, and yoga. 

Fall  
The fall term program theme was “grounding.”  How is one “grounded,” physically, psychologically and spiritually?  Is grounding a precondition for transcendent experience? How is grounding related to one’s sense of place in the world?

In the sculpture studio, students gained basic experience with clay and plaster by making a series of press molds and cast plaster reliefs.  They worked with found objects and materials to create three sculptural works. They identified at least three personal themes and did at least ten drawings to explore each theme, presenting the drawings to the studio.  Each student worked with a partner to research the work of two sculptors, one of whom was addressed in our studio text, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt by Thomas McEvilley.  They made a poster presentation of their findings.  They documented their work in journals, sketchbooks and work logs.  Themes addressed in the studio included, material and process as drivers of sculptural form, the relationship of sculpture to grounding and gravity, figure/ground relationships in sculptural reliefs, frontality, scale and proportion relative to the human form, structure and anatomy, and controlling the context and presentation of one’s work.
 
In the poetry workshop students wrote poems each week with feedback from both the faculty and student peers.  The class began with the idea of criticism, and established guidelines for peer review.  Subsequent topics included the nature of metaphor, the grounding of poems with concrete details, and transcendence in poetry in a variety of historical and cultural contexts.  Students studied Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook for critical insights and vocabulary, and read David Kirby's The House of Blue Light, which provided insight into a singular style of contemporary American poetry. Students were given an option of performing their poetry in a large group setting at the end of the quarter.

The yoga studio component introduced students to the classical tradition of Patanjali’s  8-limbed yoga practice, focussing specifically on yoga nidra.  As a part of yoga’s 5000 year old history as a wholistic practice for harmonious engagement with self and world, yoga nidra cultivates an enlivened physical body, deep relaxation, breath awareness, concentration, guided visualization, and focussed absorption in sensation itself. The serious practitioner of yoga nidra experiences so-called altered or transcendent states of consciousness through a systematic rotation of awareness through the koshas or sheaths of the body-mind continuum.  Students were encouraged to compare and contrast this understanding of the multiple intelligences of our energetic anatomy with this country’s more dominant rationalist educational practices.  Our learning objective was to practice yoga, particularly yoga nidra, and reading and writing about yoga nidra in order to know the knower of one’s self.  Students were required to maintain a home practice as well as a classroom practice.  They were required to develop a writing practice that made the sensations experienced during yoga nidra real to the reader:a personal journal and three papers on nidra practice were required.  Students also were required to engage in an asana practice of physical postures.  Working in small groups, they were required during the final week to guide peers through an asana practice designed to open the practitioner to sensation within the physical body.  Required readings included:Infinite Awakening: The Principles and  Practice of Yoga Nidra (audio tape series; Richard Miller), Beyond Power Yoga (Beryl Bender Birch), "The Heart of the Yogi" in The Heart of the Yogi (Doug Passionate Keller), "Against School" (John Taylor Gatto), "Embodiment" in Passionate Presence (Catherine Ingram), "Desire:  Intoxication/Plant: Marijuana" in The Botany of Desire (Michael Pollan).

In addition to studio work, all-program activities included weekly seminar reading, writing with peer review and revision; and discussion; work with Andrea Olsen’s Body and Earth; field trips, portfolios, and participation in evaluation week, program fair activities.  Seminar texts included: The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy (Robert Bly), A Natural History of the Senses (Diane Ackerman), Natural Mind:  A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness (Andrew Weil), The Practice of the Wild (Gary Snyder), Why God Won’t Go Away (Andrew  Newberg, et al), The  Shape of Content (Ben Shahn), The Reenchantment of Art (Suzy Gablik).  The material and practices included in weekly chapters of Body and Earth provided the foundation for our Monday morning yoga asana practice with Joanna Cashman, RYT, RN, MFA, as well as our Monday afternoon workshops.  Working in small groups, students were required to create an additional chapter of Body and Earth.  In addition to library research skills and InSight desktop publishing software skill development, students were required to participate in a peer review process in response to their group’s work and that of their peers.  Field trips included guided tours and response writing regarding the Henry Gallery and the Burke Museum.  Students were asked to maintain a comprehensive portfolio of their written work and to display this portfolio along with studio work during evaluation.  Finally, students were required to craft mid-quarter and final integrative and evaluative pieces of writing; to participate in peer and faculty reviews of this writing; and to revise this writing into the form an official student self-evaluation.

Suggested Credit Equivalencies:
						                      	Fall		Winter		
Somatic Studies (All Program Yoga)				2		2
Cooperative Writing & Text Layout Software			2
Portfolio and Self Assessment				2		2
Seminar & Seminar Response Writing			2		2
Sculpture Studio						4		2
Yoga Nidra Studio						4		2
Poetry Workshop						2		2
Integrative Projects								4