Melinda Kiefer
December 5, 2016
Yoga for Creative Expression Report
My class Yoga for Creative Expression at the SUNY Purchase College Wellness
Center was an experimentation of how to hybrid the discipline of visual art with the
discipline of healing art, yoga. This class was not a function of art therapy, but
rather a means to utilize the experience of two different practices in a synthesized
way. I chose to title the class “Yoga for Creative Expression” because it was
technically a yoga class in the Wellness Center that attracted mainly yoga
practitioners but ultimately had the agenda for yoga to be a vehicle for further art
making as a sacred act and body-mind awareness as an essential component for
creativity.
Offered the slot of weekly hour sessions, I tailored my class to be 1 hour 15
minutes with the first 45 minutes being traditional asana and pranayama
(movement and breath work) and the last 30 minutes being a concluding space for
drawing and guided image based meditation such as visually guided body scans. I
began every class with a small personal alter which consisted of my drawing tools:
paper, markers, pens, and sacred objects: shells, stones, lavender oil, and my singing
bowl. I laid these out in a line across the front of my mat. I offered this model to
students, who also brought items they found sacred. I had a few students
throughout the semester who really dedicated themselves to this ritual. I continued
the tone of an expanded class by weaving elements of other healing arts practices
such as aromatherapy with lavender reiki energy balancing and sound therapy with
singing bowl ringing. Since it was an open class, I allowed the syllabus to be flexible
and encouraged experimentation. If there were a small group, I would ask if there
were certain elements or themes students wanted to work on and would modify
accordingly. For example, one class several students requested to work on empathy
and the heart so we focused on movements that opened the chest, the theoretical
center of emotion in the subtle body and ruminated on the color associated with this
area, green.
I found this class most effective when I gave a prompt for participants to reflect
on for the making component. One example of a prompt I suggested was to
illustrate a place of “samskara” in the body. This is a Sanskrit term that describes
emotions that get stored in pockets of the body such as tense memories held in the
muscles of the belly or hips. I instructed the students to visualize this point before
and after the class and try to communicate it in terms of color, shape, and location
on the body. One student drew bright pink blobs in her body map describing this
sensation as sticky bubble gum in her hip. She acknowledged, visualized, and
released the samskara.
Ideally, I would love for this class to grow into a longer workshop model. I
think due to abbreviated time, it was challenging to build upon both disciplines and
as a result shifted more into yoga. This class attracted a significant amount of dance
and psychology majors, in particular one student who wanted to explore dance
therapy. She rearranged her work schedule to be able to attend this class. I can
imagine this course functioning as a studio/lab based style where half of the course
would be for moving and making and the other half, perhaps on a different day of
the week, as a seminar/lecture with history and group discussion. This could
further evolve an exploration of visual art in the yogic healing arts. While this was a
class consisting of mostly active experience, it would be additionally useful to have
time to digest, reflect, and discuss the processes in an academic context.
Yoga for Creative Expression was beneficial for me because I was able to see how
my art making related to other contexts and how my work as a yogini informed my
studio practice. My art deals with passageways in the body and this class increased
my investigation into this subject matter such as making a giant mouth for the
winter MFA show that viewers can walk through. I have practiced visual art for
most of my life and have practiced yoga for about 15 years. I arrived at yoga
consequently to further cultivate the circulating relationship of my mind, body, and
its affect as a maker in the world. I believe that yoga has the potential to maintain
the self for optimum creative functioning alongside health.
Yoga for Creative Expression gave me the chance to build relationships with
Purchase students outside the art community and extend my practice of studio art
outside the particular language of fine art. Several of my regular students even
attended the MFA winter show, Stolen/Missing/Disappeared, reception in the Dolly
Maass Gallery. I am excited to continue to develop this interdisciplinary pedagogical
practice. I plan to curate longer workshops in this field next semester from what
was most successful. I intend to include this class as an element in my MFA Thesis,
perhaps even utilize the gallery space, and hold some of these future workshops
there as well as continuing involvement with the Wellness Center.