How's Your Bodymind?

Hi, Professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics.  You are listening to “The Good Enough Professor,” the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors.  Let's create a more supportive, more humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.

How is your bodymind feeling these days? 

Recently I’ve noticed a rising conversation among higher ed folks about the impact of prolonged stress on our bodies.   

At the AAC&U conference last month—the American Association of Colleges & Universities conference—many women bravely and publicly shared stories of their bodies breaking down in response to the unrealistic demands of higher education, especially for women of color, whose experience of the higher ed workplace in recent months (and years) has been particularly fraught. 

This is a conversation we need to have in higher education.  We need to talk about how academic labor maps itself onto our bodies.  And we need to center the research and voices of critical disability studies scholars and disability justice advocates, who have been reckoning with these issues for a long time. 

Bodymind is a term used in disability studies to challenge the deeply-rooted assumption from Descartes that we experience our bodies separately from our minds; the notion of bodymind insists instead that they are integrated, influence one another.

When I’m teaching art history and museum studies, I remind students we’re not just transparent eyeballs!   how we feel in our bodyminds as we are seeing shapes the meaning of what we see.  The next time you visit a museum:  think about how the lighting, the temperature of the room, how hungry you are, whether you are preoccupied with something contributes to what you look at and how you understand it!

In higher ed the default is that we are often treated (and treat each other) as though our value comes from our brains alone, and that our communities are kind of a collection of brains floating in jars, like in Futurama at the Head Museum.

Disability studies scholar Margaret Price and others use the term bodymind to talk about the self as an intertwined being.  My dear colleague Susan Hrach, my co-editor for our Transformative Coaching volume, plays with this idea as well, in her book Minding Bodies, which considers the role of physical space, sensation and movement in teaching and learning.     

In her introduction to Minding Bodies, she writes, “Bringing an awareness of our physical bodies into academic endeavors makes education more humane.”

In the past few years, I have had the privilege of really diving into Deaf studies and disability studies and disability justice with the support of a Mellon grant, and I want to share a few disability justice concepts that have shifted how I am as a bodymind in the context of higher education, and how as a coach I invite our full humanity in higher education.  I think these ideas can be transformative for all of us in higher ed, as we navigate the pressures of this life that we have chosen.

The first is variable capacity.  We often expect to be able to do a similar amount of work, or perform similar activities, every day.  But our bodies aren’t machines, and they don’t function the same way every day.  Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory visualizes our energy as a variable number of spoons. As we go about our day, our activities take away our spoons.  Try checking in with yourself in the morning:  how many spoons do I have today?  How many spoons will the day’s activities take away?  What do I want to be left at the end of the day?

This is particularly resonant for those of us experiencing chronic illness, but it is simply a reality for all bodyminds:  we just don’t feel the same every day, we don’t have exactly the same potential every day.   

Planning for variable capacity is one way to acknowledge the beautiful complexity of our daily lives and to create some breathing room.  How do you do that?  By releasing the ableist myth of consistency, by assuming that your capacity will shift day to day, season to season, and by regarding that fact as morally neutral. In practice this means scheduling open time and connecting to a birds-eye view of what matters. 

One way to assume variable capacity is to keep unscheduled time in your days.  If you are a planner, schedule open time, put it on your calendar, enter into your planner, block it off however you manage of your time.   

What can this look like?  In your teaching:  you can include at least one open day in your syllabus so you don’t have to completely reshuffle in the event of illness, snow day, or a day when you are out. In my classes I leave at least one day of open content each month in a syllabus.  If that open day is not needed, I offer a student’s choice day, or discuss something they are interested in.  These have turned out to be some of the most memorable days for students and or me.  I have been really pleasantly surprised at how leaving unscheduled days in the syllabus has made space for engaging students in new ways.  Or you can teach something from a previous iteration of the class.

I know one senior administrator who insists that her team in the provost’s office build one full day for themselves into their schedule every month.  How they use that day is up to them.  It might be a mental health day, it might be errands or domestic tasks, or it may be catching up on a long-term vision project that is hard to find time for—she doesn’t ask.  Of course, she also admits that she has a much harder time scheduling that open time for herself.

This of course, leads us the real challenge – how do you commit to reserving open time for yourself within the ridiculous pace of the semester? Returning to the concept of bodymind can really help remind us that we are not just floating brains.  As fully integrated body-and-mind humans, we can expect that we will have days when we are sick, that we will need rest, that some weeks are just harder than others.  This is countercultural because we live in a capitalist, white supremacist society that values what we are doing more than who we are being. 

So committing to open time, honoring your variable capacity, turns out to be a fairly radical act of resistance.  And to sustain that counter-cultural stance, we need to be intentional about our values.  Why are we doing this?  When you think about the bird’s eye view of your academic year, your semester, your week, what would it be like to know you have unscheduled time?  With some additional margin, what would be possible for your being?  What is important about recognizing your own variable capacity right now? 

Disability justice advocate Patty Berne of the art collective Sins Invalid invites us to contemplate how we would be in the world if we truly believed this simple yet radical truth: “every human being is beautiful and powerful.”   How would recognizing and creating space for your own variable capacity support you in seeing yourself and every other person you encounter as beautiful and powerful?  It isn’t easy to act without judgement on the assumption that your capacity is variable.  So these are ideas and questions to practice and to get more comfortable with over time. 

Asking for and giving real help, interdependence, is a tenet of disability justice that could be transformative for our ways of being in higher education.  Patty Berne wrote in 10 Principles of Disability Justice: “We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation.” Disability justice circles are built on this foundation of collective care.  And this is something we have a really hard time with in higher education.  Many—most—folks in academia want to be supported.  In my work as a coach, I see people longing for informal connection, camaraderie, companionship, friendship—craving more child care or time for rest, or seeking guidance as they do new things (like chairing, or exploring new research methods).

But in higher ed, many—most—of us find it difficult to actually reach out for support.  We are embarrassed that we don’t know something or that we need help at all.  We are concerned about appearing to people within higher ed like we are behind or not fully experts.  We assume people outside of higher ed just won’t understand.  We think we should already know how to do something new.  I think it’s so important to observe this deep self-reliance and boot-strapping attitude creates a contradiction.  It creates a profound tension with values that many of us share around learning and exploration.

In disability justice circles, collective care is all about an attitude of learning, exploration, experimentation, not only toward supporting and caring for one another but also toward knowing and being known as humans in this world.  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a disability justice advocate, and she talks in her book The Future is Disabled about acts of interdependence not as a “big public thing” but as low-key endeavors.

I’ll give you an example of a low-key act of care that my family and I witnessed and then participated in when I lived near my dear sister-in-law.  Her roommate and long-time best friend has low vision, and whenever we went out to eat—you know at those crab shacks places where you order from a menu on a board above your head?  My sister-in-law would without even giving it any thought, immediately grab a printed menu and hand it over to her friend, who would read it close up.  This is a low key, but super meaningful habit that responded to her deep, intimate knowledge of her friend’s reality.  Over time, everyone in my family got into this habit, if my little kid was closest to the menu, he would swipe it and hand it over to his auntie.  In disability justice communities, these small ways of knowing each other, these habits of asking for, receiving, and giving help over time create something called “access intimacy.” 

To bring this into your everyday experience, think about something you are currently working on, something in progress: an article manuscript, a bathroom renovation, grocery shopping— whatever is occupying you right now.  Maybe it’s going well or maybe it’s feeling heavy.  How have you already sought support in this project?  The truth is that we are often already seeking help, but maybe not in ways that we notice or are necessarily being intentional about.  So take a moment to think:  What low-key ask would make this project feel lighter?  what small thing might make it easier, or more fun?  Who could you reach out to with a simple request? 

Remember how good it felt the last time a friend asked for help—for real help—and you were able to support them?  That’s the opportunity we give each other when we have the courage to share our needs.  And we create the potential for being known. 

What would it be like if we embraced interdependence as a core value in higher education?  If suddenly tomorrow, your college decided that collective care is now a guiding principle, an institutional value, what kind of help would you seek?  What kind of support would you want to offer?  How could we relate differently to our colleagues, our students, and our communities if interdependence was on the menu?

Paying attention to your bodymind in higher education can be liberatory--and also kind of fun.  Disability justice advocates and critical disability studies scholars know that fun is an important part of the work of honoring difference and sustaining diverse ways of being, and resisting oppression.

At the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition Disability and Design last year, I got to see a really wonderful and playful artwork by Finnegan Shannon.  It’s a bright blue bench and scrawled across it are the words “I need more time. Rest here if you agree.”  I love this intervention in public space!  This bench invites us to check in with our capacity by proclaiming a need.  By naming a need—I need more time—we are prompted to recognize our own needs.  And then the bench offers an actual low-key moment of care: “Rest here if you agree.”

So I want to invite you to tune in to your capacity and build up your networks of support so you can ask for and give low-key care, so that we can know and be known more deeply.  And this is how we set the conditions for fun, for flourishing, for joyful encounters. 

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