The body doesn’t lie: yoga and embodiment in the higher education classroom

Abstract

Awareness of and response to embodiment as a foundational element of teaching and learning is increasingly lost in the higher education classroom. The widespread shift to online learning prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic only brought this reality into high relief. However, in this conceptual article, we reflect on teaching and learning as inherently embodied processes and link this reality to the teaching skills of presence and observation. As yoga teachers and university professors, our physical practices of teaching yoga and our own scholarly disciplines led us to consider embodiment awareness in higher education. Our experiences teaching through the COVID-19 pandemic, years after we started to consider this question, led us to consider embodiment in new ways. Here, we draw from cross-disciplinary scholarship and our experiences as yoga teachers to illustrate the importance and potential of recognizing the embodied nature of individuals engaged in the teaching and learning process.