Downward facing dog
Lift your right leg up
Move your right leg forward
Land your right foot next to your right thumb
Move your right arm forward…Warrior II
Bend your right knee, move your left arm up, and right arm down…extended side angle

The voice of my yoga instructor whistled by my ears as I followed the flow of movement. My mind drifted. What should I write for my blog?

There are number of things I could write about. The “next” syndrome for web training module design would be an interesting topic, but the presenter at the distance learning conference didn’t really offer anything concrete to overcome it. If you don’t give people a “next” button to click, what would you do to make them go forward?

“Okay…” The instructor interrupted my thoughts. “You can now start on your own. Follow your own rhythm and remember to breathe.”

All of a sudden, I found myself lost in the middle of a yoga studio, surrounded by yogis in various poses and not knowing what to do. I finally found someone to follow, and as I moved with her—one pose after another—I started to run these movements in my mind in the form of a summary: two warrior stands facing front, one transition with two twists, and three balancing stands facing the back. I then caught up with the class and started to flow through the moves just like the others.

It dawned on me that it only took one round of intentional memorization to retain a series of movements that the instructor had tried to teach us four times. What a difference between having my mind “there” and “not there”! Isn’t this what psychologists call the contrastive results of mindfulness and mindlessness? And how about making it a topic of my blog!

Mindfulness is defined by Ellen Langer as a flexible stage of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context. She pointed out that when we are in a state of mindlessness, we act like automatons that have been programmed to act according to the sense our behavior made in the past, rather than the present. So if my years of yoga practice lead me to repeat moves without thinking, why do I see students “checked out” in a class when all of the information is new?

Ellen Langer classifies the mindless reception of new information as the second way that mindlessness comes about. It occurs when we accept the information during our initial encounter with it. We take whatever is presented to us as is without seeking alternative ways to understand it. It is interesting to realize that if I hadn’t flipped on my cognitive processor to mentally jot down a list of movements (and also categorized them into groups), I wouldn’t have been able to carry on the yoga sequence by myself. On the other hand, if I hadn’t been asked to do it on my own, I would have never noticed that I had “lost my mind” during this class.

From a teacher’s perspective, giving students the chance of doing it on their own may be a good way of encouraging mindful learning, especially when it requires presenting the information in alternative ways, like my new experiment of teaching Chinese by rapping.

When I asked my students to find a rapping beat on YouTube and rap a song about their family in Chinese, their first reaction was “Oh, no! Can we just sit here and listen to you?” But when I really forced them to get up on their own feet to sing and dance in class, I encouraged action that combined both their body and mind. At least at that moment, their minds were present and the learning that was taking place in class stimulated their creativity to reach a high level:

Another way I can get students’ minds back into class is to host a synchronous online session over a web conferencing tool called Zoom. Instead of giving them an online lecture, I assigned questions on the screen and randomly asked students to present their answers. After a trial run of the Zoom meeting, I asked the students whether we should do it again. I heard a very affirming answer. “No!” they said, “it is too stressful!”

Feeling the stress signals a presence of mind that might otherwise be traveling elsewhere. It indicates I have done something to engage these young minds during this moment of learning. Mission accomplished!