My favourite podcasts about ballet and contemplation

Now for a more practical blog: what podcasts would I recommend? I have started to listen to quite a few podcasts that inspire me a lot! Many of them are about ballet, kind of obviously ;-) But I think also the ballet ones teach me quite a bit about life in general. Let me walk through my current facvourites, sorted by topic:

Picture  by Michel Le Photography 
at Morlaix Ballet camp

Contemplation

- Mind & Life podcast (I was super-honoured to be featured on this one myself!) in which people are interviewed that work on the intersection of research and contemplative practice. I find these always such fascinating conversations!

- Open Question by Elisabeth Mattis-Namgyel, an amazing Buddhist teacher who presents a no-nonsense approach to asking deep questions in life

- The kind heartfulness podcast by Gomde Austria, an interesting series of conversations with Buddhist teachers and practitioners.

Ballet

- A dancer's mindset by Isabella McGuire, who talks about the mindset that is required to be successful at anything, but especially from the perspective of ballet. Lots of good advice, although I don't always agree with everything. I think she forgets that not everything can be controlled

- Athletistry by Shane Wuerthner, another ballet mindset podcast, which is also useful to anyone engaged in a difficult pursuit, such as academia

- Ballet Rising by Casey Herd: fascinating stories about people trying to bring ballet to the communities that not always get access to it, e.g., ballet in India and Africa

- Hard Corps podcast by Romee Adair, who talks with guests about the general dance industry and especially challenges within it. It's fascinating to learn more about how the dance industry works.

- The adult ballet studio by Elisabeth Blosfield, a series of conversations with people trying to make a space for amateur adult ballet dancers. So inspiring!

- The balanced ballerinas podcast by Georgia Dostal, a series of interviews with so many amazing people in the dance world. Again, so many interesting things to learn!

- Artists Becoming, another series of conversations with dance professionals, but this one is specifically focused on bringing out the artists, and challenges to that

- Moving Moments by Alicia Graf Mack: more conversations with dance arists. I just love hearing the person behind the dance artist!

- The turning: Room of Mirrors: a really interesting deep dive into the ballet choreographer Georges Balanchine. Very interesting although this one is a bit on the sensationalist side

- Broche banter by Julie Gill/Leung: all things adult ballet, including interviews with adult amateur ballet dancers. Lots of insightful stuff about how adults learn ballet

Academia

- Degrees of freedom by  Tassos Sarampalis and Marcello Seri: lots of philosophy and practical tips about teaching in academia.

I hope some of these are inspiring to you, and maybe you find some new ones to listen to!

My productivity routine

 As I always find I have too little time, I am also continually experimenting with my productivity routine. In case it is useful for others, let me share what I have currently converged on. The main trick with productivity is that you need to keep an overview of tasks on different time scales--years/months, weeks and days. For each of these time scales, I tend to use a different tool. Before diving into that, let me also mention that sometimes I cringe a bit by the term "productivity" because it has this strong capitalist focus that everything has to be completely efficient, forgetting the human dimension of things. Nevertheless, if you want to do good, productivity is important as well, because it helps you accomplish the goals you have and make the most use of your talents for the benefit of all. So productivity is also quite compatible with altruistic values.

The obligatory ballet picture ;-)

My weekly overview of tasks

Until this year, I felt quite happy with my data-to-day management, but I felt like I was losing an overview of the biggest tasks, so this is why I started creating a gantt chart (see picture) to keep track of large projects and events across the whole year. This also allows me to keep track of conference and grant deadlines. Then every week, I am using this "Eenvoudig leven agenda" (Simple Living Calendar) that I mentioned before. At the beginning of the week I check my gantt chart for the big picture tasks, and copy those in my weekly tasks section. I have subdivided those into 5 sections: organization, grants, supervision, teaching and papers, in line with the main requirements of my job. I enter tasks according to these subdivisions (see picture). For example, for organization I have every week "make planning". For teaching, it may include "prepare lecture" or "grade assignment 2". At the beginning of the week, I then try to plan those tasks in my calendar at times that I don't have other responsibilities. This allows me to have a reasonable idea of what I can accomplish. I also try to ensure that I have some "free time" every day in which email can be dealt with and unexpected tasks. One trick I really like is to reduce the volume of such unexpected tasks by asking students ahead of time when they expect to complete things, which would require my feedback. In then book slots in my calendar to give them feedback at those times. This benefits the student, because they have a more strict deadline, and it benefits me, because I won't be able to book that slot in my calendar with more meetings (and in my career stage, meetings are the things that tend to completely overcrowd my calendar--sometimes I feel like I am in a continuous fight against meetings, even though I also enjoy talking to my lovely students and colleagues. It's just that this makes it hard to get anything done). Then finally, at the beginning of every day I check what's in my calendar, what things did not get done previously, and I make a todo list for that day. The most satisfactory bit is crossing off things of my todo list!

Extract from my gantt chart, which is still work in progress. Different colors reflect different kinds of things: teaching courses, grants, PhD students. Every column in this Excel document is a week of the year. I so far have only done it for this year, but when I find some time I want to add more years so I can already write in commitments for upcoming years.

People who know me may wonder where ballet fits in all of this. So far I talked about work. This is very simple: ballet classes have been booked already in my calendar with the "repeat weekly" feature, so they are automatically scheduled as appointments with myself, which I pretty much never skip.

A related tip on time management is that I really like touse the toggl app. This is an app that runs on your desktop, and which you can use to track how much time you spend on tasks. This is very insightful to get an idea of how much time you spend on tasks (right now I am using it as well to see how long the blog writing takes). This allows me to improve the realism of my time estimates for tasks over time. I also use that at the beginning of every week to review the preceding week, together with the review pages of the calendar (see picture). In the review pages you write down how much you achieved your goals, what challenges you faced, and how that relates to your habitual tendencies, as well as how you feel about the preceding week. Last but not least, it reminds you every week to "take a moment to love yourself. So important!" This is especially important as it remains a continuous struggle to avoid overloading myself because I am just too interested in things, and also really enjoy being helpful. So it is important to keep a sense of humor and not give up.

The weekly review section in which you can reflect on the past week. Initially I would never do that because I felt I did not have time, but actually  it can be done in a few minutes. And taking a moment to reflect is really helpful so you can learn from your mistakes  but also appreciate what you managed to do.

Can you turn criticism into a prompt for exploration?

As a scientist, I like Lojong slogan 55 quite a bit, since it says "Gain freedom through discernment and analysis." Trying to analyze and discern is what I do on a daily basis. Having said that, of course most of my analysis is on the external level of phenomena outside myself, like a pattern of data, rather than my own thoughts and emotions, as this slogan is talking about. In a way, you could say the slogan encourages us to engage in analytical meditation. For example, rather than simply going with a feeling of stress, we can also investigate why we feel stressed, and try to look at it from many different angles and perspectives. What do we feel is making our life stressful? What would be the perspective of those people around us; our co-workers, our boss, our family and friends? Actually one of the things I often find when I switch perspectives is that the things that seem very dramatic to me are probably not even noticed by someone else, and besides, they're probably way too involved with their own drama! 

Lots of emotions in this image from Morlaix
Ballet camp by Michel Le

In general going in analysis mode is very helpful to go out of wallowing in self-pity, especially when you get negative feedback. A common occurrence for this is when, as happened to one of my PhD students today, you get reviews from a journal where you've submitted an article. Sometimes these can be quite negative and your first reaction is want to curse the reviewers and feel very sorry for yourself that they are so stupid they don't understand your brilliant work. Of course that is not going to make anything better, so another approach would be to explore whether you can see it in any other way. For the reviews that's actually quite easy because after being an academic for so many years my standard response is: congratulations, you have not been rejected, that is amazing! But for other rejections, such as grants, it can be a lot more difficult. Instead of focusing on the emotions themselves and all your justified reasons for feeling this way, you can also try to explore with curiosity what is really going on: how are you feeling? And what can you actually do about the rejection? Even if the reviewer does not understand your paper, other future readers may similarly misunderstand, so it's good to think about how to rewrite the paper to deal with that. Such an action-oriented attitude tends to feel much more powerful and is also more productive, although obviously it's important not to neglect your feelings. 

I also try to experiment with this approach in ballet class where every correction is a chance to explore how to tell my body how to get the movements right. It very much helps when my teacher Julie Gill from Broche Ballet phrases corrections in terms of questions: can you make your leg longer? Can you turn out more? In this way it does not feel like you are an impossible ballet student (it's easy to feel that way as an adult dancer with a body that is not always cooperating) but rather as a starting point for exploration and mindfulness of my body's sensations and possibilities. In short, this slogan is a great reminder to focus on learning and exploration rather than drama.

How to be lazy while being busy

One of the most challenging things for me is the concept of "active laziness". This is the idea that you do many things to avoid doing the main thing, which usually is also the most challenging thing. I think Lojong slogan 51 is also exactly about that. It says "this time, practice the main points." In the Buddhist realm, practising the main point would refer to making sure you don't forget to practise, and when you practise, to ensure the practice is about reducing your self-importance rather than for example showing off what a good Buddhist you are.

Picture of being busy with lots of mostly 
meaningless stuff in the ballet Napoli
at Morlaix Ballet Camp. Picture by Michel Le

But of course this idea also applies to academia, where it is extremely easy to spend all your time doing things that are helpful, such as reviewing papers or reading other people's papers or improving your lectures, but do not move your career ahead and do not move your research forward. I think it is really challenging to decide what the most important contribution is that I can make in a given day to science. Because even if reviewing a paper on the short term helps science, getting my own ideas into the world also helps science.

Also in ballet it is important to think about those things, because it is really easy to just follow ballet classes and hope you will improve. Because as Julie Gill says in this episode of her podcast, it is important to analyze what are the most important things for us to work on, and then target those more specifically. Sadly those things, which include posture and foot strength, are much less exciting than twirling around a big bright studio or a stage in a tutu.

Finally, I don't think main points are always the same. The trick for improving in any area of your life is to regularly ask yourself what your main gaps are and what small goals you can set to move closer to these goals. For example, in the Buddhist context rather than abstractly going for "enlightenment" and doing an indiscriminate amount of practices, you can instead analyze your main problems, e.g., being too busy, and then focus on regular short meditation practices to calm your mind, and commit to ending interactions with other people by wishing them well. And once you have made progress in those, you can move on to another goal that addresses the main point. 

Little drops fill buckets--in work, ballet and the spiritual path alike

Have you had the experience of saying that you would totally do something, if only you weren't so busy? I am totally guilty of that (including with writing this blog: I have been busy with this #lojongchallenge for quite a few years now (I don't even remember how many...). So the next slogan, slogan 50 of Lojong is perfect for that, since it says "don't be dependent on external circumstances". Of course it refers mostly to being dependent on external circumstances for working on yourself and engaging in your spiritual practice, but it applies equally to many other things in life.

Picture by Michel Le at Morlaix Ballet camp.
For me this is an example of little things (in this
case people) making up a much larger whole.

In the domain of ballet, I figured out this past year that I can do ballet even while travelling: there is no need to be dependent on external circumstances for that. When I am on a train station or in an airport, I can do a quick barre, for example in an empty gate or a quiet spot (especially Broche Ballet's technique deep dive barres are great for that, because they mostly involve standing and scanning your body, and not really making large movements). I can also do a quick prepointe workout (also from Broche Ballet) while standing or while sitting on a chair. I have also attended many an online ballet class from the hotel gym of the various places I visited this past year!

The same is true for my job. One of the most challenging things to do when you're an academic is getting into writing mode. But in reality, you don't really need much--if you can just find 15 minutes, writing is possible. For next year, I aspire getting into the 15-minutes-a-day writing mode, because so much can be written in that time.

Now most importantly, the spiritual journey of reducing self-importance. It is so easy to think you have no time for meditation and therefore no time for the spiritual path. But literally every moment is an opportunity. Even in the midst of a busy day (maybe especially in a busy day) you can pay attention to how you react, and check whether you react from self-importance or from a broader perspective that takes others into account as well. And even a few seconds waiting for a traffic light, you can practise meditation. I think nowadays this is so much more difficult because we have our entertainment of our phones with information to be processed always in our pockets. This means that making the choice to simply observing the moment is more challenging. However, the benefits of simply being present should not be underestimated--for one thing because it may allow you to be reminded of things you otherwise forgot. I had that experience many a time while I was practising the three-minute breathing space (from the MBCT intervention) at the beginning of my lecture, and this was so helpful (note: this Fall I started to begin my lectures with the three-minute breathing space, and so far I am liking it). So here we go: 2023, the year of being less dependent on external circumstances and not forgetting to turn my mind inwards as much as I can! 

Inter-subjectively exploring intersubjectivity in the French Alps

 In the last week, I had the good fortune to be part of Mind & Life Europe's ENCECON meeting. In this meeting, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, meditators and more get together to discuss how we can study first-person experience and bring this full experience together with objective, third-person methods. This year's theme was "inter-subjectivity", which we explored through a series of meditation exercises, interviews and discussions. The interviews were not any interviews, but ==microphenomenological interviews, which is a method to explore experience in a very detailed way, trying to focus on the experience itself, leaving out our habitual theorizing. Another important characteristic of microphenomenological interviews is that they invite us to slow down, and repeatedly relive our past experience, so we become more aware of the details of these experiences, using more of our senses than we typically report on. What i found really interesting as a scientist was to observe the so-called evocation state, in which people show signs of being disengaged from the current context, something which we in the mind-wandering literature term "perceptual decoupling". The interviewees at this point slow down their speech, may close their eyes and sometimes repeat gestures from their past experience. What is challenging about this method, is that to explore a few minutes, or even less, of experience, you typically have an interview that lasts 30-60 minutes. At the same time, this is a state of pure contemplation--engaging in a reliving without judgment. Yet, this makes it very difficult to combine with other methods of research such as neuroimaging, because for most of these experiments, we need many repetitions of the same instance of experience. So, we had a lot of discussions about this.

What amazed me during this meeting is the profundity of the experiences that could be evoked by very simple meditations. On the first day, we were asked to simply bring to mind a person whom we felt grateful to. I kind of missed this instruction because I was so tired that I fell asleep during the meditation! On the second day, we sat next to one other person, and were asked to open ourselves up to the presence of the other person. It was fascinating to see how many people reported sensations of profound connection or even merging with the other person, as if they had a single body. On the third day, we were sitting together with the full group, and first we were asked to open ourselves up to the presence of the others, and then to hold each other's hands. In this moment, many people felt completely connected to the others, and lost a bit of their sense of self.

Many of our discussions revolved around the topics of how these practices helped to melt down the boundary between self and other. This was profoundly effected by the meditation practices we did, and of course by the fact we were staying together in a beautiful place in the French Alps. What this reminded me of is how helpful these simple practices could also be for reducing our destructive emotions, something that the next Lojong slogan talks about, which says "Train in the 3 difficulties". What this refers to is first the difficulty of becoming aware of your negative emotions, then secondly the difficulty of applying antidites to these negative emotions, and thirdly the difficulty of making the first two a habit so they change the way you are. Now when you are as profoundly connected as we were during the practices, the interesting thing is that negative emotions such as anger, jealousy and craving do not have even a chance to arise--they simply dissolve in the void. How wonderful would it be to do these practices together more often!

We also reflected on the role of the body in all this, because we found that touching each other's hands during the meditation practice had a profound effect. It dramatically amplified the feeling of having a single body with each other. Interestingly, this mirrors my findings from a dance experiment that I hope to write up soon, in which we found through working with dancers that the most powerful ways we can connect through movement is not by synchronizing our movement with another, but rather by moving as if we have a single body, or by engaging in a movement dialogue. So, it may be quite interesting to study more about how moving together can affect our thinking, and how such simple instructions ask bringing to mind the presence of others can do so. I am also curious whether we can use the perceptual decoupling state to better determine when microphenomenological interview information is reliable, and when it is less reliable (because people are not actually reliving their past experience, but rather theorizing about it). Finally, I am curious whether we can apply the experience of microphenomenology in zooming in on lived experience, and staying away from our theories about what's going on, to improve our societal discourses, which are so often stranded in these theories and stories, rather than simply being present with the facts. And the stories are what we know results in so many destructive emotions...

Explorations of mind-wandering in Ljubljana

 Last week, I taught at the TECT (Training Embodied Critical Thinking) summer school, which this year took place in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Just like last year's summer school in Iceland, it was a treat to be there. What is cool about this summer school is that it is a very interdisciplinary place where students with backgrounds ranging from architecture and design to philosophy to neuroscience to artificial intelligence get together to investigate the mind and experience. This investigation is very much grounded in the body and uses techniques such as microphenomenology, thinking at the edge, and exploring the mind through meditation.

During the summer school, I was co-teaching the track on meditation with colleagues Urban Kordes and Toma Strle, and we alternated periods of meditation with a sharing of experience during this meditation to reach a better understanding of mind-wandering. During this track, we started by practising meditation, before everyone introduced themselves, with the reasoning that by practising meditation together, you get to know each other much better than by just sharing your biography. This was proven to be indeed the case, because at the end of the week, the group naturally started to feel very connected to each other during the meditation practices, wanting to hold hands in their imagination.

Probably quite critical in this process was a mid-week excursion to explore some of the beautiful nature of Slovenia, where we wandered around in a park with beautiful caves, springs and forest. We practiced among other things a "depth walk", in which we walked around in the environment with a companion, and traced a path driven by paying attention to subtle internal cues, while at the same time we verbalized what we noticed. It is amazing how much more you notice when you walk like this! Suddenly becoming aware of angular shapes in the natural environment, the springy nature of the ground, or the play of the light. It was also very interesting to notice how this natural environment shifted our thinking patterns.

Now back to our meditation course, exploring mind-wandering in the environment of the city, we ended up with very deep discussions about what is mind-wandering, with probably the most fascinating moment being a "mind-wandering meditation", where we asked people to mind-wander, instead of meditating, and suddenly all the thoughts were gone! We also deeply went into questions of why we mind-wander, whether there is agency in mind-wandering, and how mind-wandering compares to daydreaming and other mental processes. One interesting insight that came was of the parallels between wandering the city, and wandering in our own mind in meditation, and how good that feels when we can simply wander in a non-sticky way, which is the true definition of mind-wandering according to Kalina Christoff and Zach Irving. Yet, it is not so easy to get there, but I think the practices we did during the summer school helped us to tune into that.

This brings me to the point of other practices we did during the summer school: apart from my teaching about mind-wandering and meditation, I also taught movement practices, in which we explored the body through different kinds of dance movement, to tune better into our bodies. Not only was that a great way to start a long day of discussions and thinking, but it also was so cool to bring my dance experience into work at an academic context.

In a way, the summer school was like a retreat, where I got to connect back to my embodied experience, ask big questions about my research and life in general. This is quite in line with the next #lojongchallenge slogan, number 43, which says "observe the two, even at the risk of your life". Basically the two refer here to commitments of the Buddhist teachings in general and the Lojong teachings in particular. In this case, for me the most important lesson is to not forget about the importance of and the power of meditation and tuning into experience, rather than being occupied with things that are visible from the outside, but do not lead to transformation. I myself find it particularly difficult to spend more time on meditation when I have an endless todo list (so this makes it great to have a summer school where you meditate for your job!). And yet, when I practise, I notice just how much sanity it yields, and what better way to study mind-wandering than to observe your own mind... 

Some highlights and low-lights of 2021

With the busy life I have, I often forget to think abo

Picture by Anna van der Meijden

ut what happened in the past year. So this time I thought it would be good to spend a bit of time reflecting. For me, the year was a year in which I spent many more days at home, like most people in the world, but also in my case this meant I spent a good deal of time dancing in my living room "dance studio". I must say that this dancing in my living room has been one of the pillars of my life that kept me happy and healthy when everything around my was uncertain and changing--a ballet class always has the same structure that never changes. More profoundly, in a way I am living the dream of my 11-year-old self, who wanted to become a ballerina. Evidently I am not a ballerina, but yet at the same time I am dancing almost every day, performing every now and then, I own a tutu and many pretty dresses, and I have the good fortune to know many dancers from across the world. Life's ways are mysterious...

Screenshot from the PhD defense of Oscar Portoles

Apart from this continuous undercurrent of the year, some more specific highlights are:

• two of my PhD students--Christina Jin and Oscar Portoles--got their PhD! This was very exciting, both for me and for the students. It's been so great to see their hard work come to fruition! There is something magical about seeing people develop from being students to being independent academics who can confidently (even if very nervous) defend their work, and move on to new projects. And I have another PhD defense lined up for January!
• 
  since I could not travel to India due to the pandemic, I had bi-weekly calls with my Tibetan monk collaborators. I was so excited the moment we got to the point where they started to do their own statistical analyses on the data we collected together. It's been quite amazing to see them grow this much!
• I did my first foreign travel again since the beginning of the pandemic. I made a trip to Iceland to teach at the summer school on Embodied Critical Thinking. Not only was Iceland an amazing place to discover, but it was also very gratifying to share my dance in an academic context. 
• I subsequently made a few more work trips before Europe locked down again: to Paris, to Berlin, and to Lisbon, followed by Aix-en-Provence. There is something so profound in being together with colleagues (even if you have to wear masks), and to explore new places. This is certainly the part of pre-pandemic life I miss most! 

• 

  Watching a volcano in Iceland (picture by Dorothe Bach)

  During the conference in Aix-en-Province, I had the chance to bring my dancing life and my professional life together once again by doing an improvisational ballet performance while a cellist (who was also a neuroscientist) was also improvising, and we were both wearing EEG headsets (which did not work...). It was an incredibly exciting performance!
• I chaired the European Mind & Life Summer Research Institute, which was a wonderful event, despite the fact that it was held online. I also got elected to the Mind & Life Europe Board. Mind and Life Europe is a beautiful organization that connects all the different parts of me: academic, spiritually and artistically.
• I got to meet some of my colleagues in real life again and was back in the office for a bit, until the Netherlands locked down again in December.
• throughout all the lockdowns I kept dancing in my living room and going on weekly runs with my running buddy. I also connected with many amazing fellow dancers through the internet, which is one of the main gifts of this pandemic. Thanks so much for my wonderful support group! We also had an online ballet intensive in June, which was such a gift: being taught by international ballet teachers was so much fun (even though I could only partly participate because of my ankle injury...). And in the last few months I have been able to really gain some confidence and skill in pointe dancing due to some focused practice with the online ballet studio Broche Ballet.
• With the Young Academy of Groningen, I helped to give birth to a report on harassment and bullying at our university. A very sad report, but important stuff nevertheless. I hope it forms the basis for change towards a more socially safe university. The whole process in itself was very time-consuming but also taught me a lot about university politics.
• In my faculty, the Young Science and Engineering Network that I helped to found acquired a more established position, and is now being incorporated in the decision making processes, which I think is a wonderful thing!

• 

  Iceland!

  I lived through an ankle injury which took about 5 months to recover. I was quite challenging to not be able to dance properly, and not jump, run and do all those things I love. Yet, also this taught me a lot about how my body works (and the importance of rest, which will surely be an aspiration for the next year!). One of the things that kept me engaged during that time was the 21-day ZhemFit abs challenge. I highly recommend it for anyone, with an injury or without.

So, with this year under my belt, let me dedicate to the well-being of all sentient beings, in the spirit of Lojong slogan 41, which says "Two activities: one at the beginning, one at the end." The idea is that we start the day by reviewing our intention and motivation. Of course this is an even better idea to do right now at the end of the year. You can focus on specific goals you would like to accomplish, but also on mental qualities you would like to cultivate, such as maintaining a more altruistic motivation. The advantage is that a motivation depends only on you, not on other circumstances, unlike many other kinds of goals. And then at the end of the day (or of the year in this case), you can review how it went,. what you accomplished and how you would like to improve. You can then take this with you in the next day, and in the next year. My aspiration is taking more time to review on a weekly basis in the coming year. 

Example of a meeting with colleagues in real life, where we went for a walk together

I am curious what the next year will bring. Thank you so much for being in my life, and happy new year!

The beginning of the academic year: thoughts on how to become more intentional

 This past week, the academic year started again. It's very interesting to suddenly see so many students from all over the world again in Groningen, which is usually very quiet in Summer. I even taught my first in-person lecture since the Fall of last year! It was so wonderful to see how motivated the students were to be at an in-person lecture again, and in contrast to last year, this year they automatically engaged in social distancing even when it was not formally required (last year it was formally required and yet students had a lot of trouble with the distancing).

Directing my life by being more intentional. Picture by Anna van der Meijden (https://www.instagram.com/annamaypinephotography/)

At the beginning of the year, I was reflecting a lot on my intention, prompted in part by the #Lojongchallenge slogan 39 "Do everything with a single intention," but also prompted by several podcasts. First the Lojong slogan: this refers to constantly checking your intention for whether it is altruistic, or whether on the other hand you are doing or saying something to strengthen your ego. According to the Buddhist teachings, you should try to emphasize the benefit of others over strengthening your own ego, because only focus on others will make you sustainably happy. There is also some scientific evidence for that. For example, I found that when you think about whether a personality word describes you, this distracts you much more from remembering things than when you are thinking about something more neutral such as objects. I think the reason for this is that such thoughts about yourself tap into your hopes and fears, and may even lead to quite "sticky" rumination processes. For this reason I find it very helpful to check my intention regularly, especially at the beginning and end of the working day. Rather than focusing on worrying about my own success, I set my intention to be of benefit for others, and just do my best, and this gives me a lot of peace. 

Now back to the podcasts! In one podcast, Houston Ballet's Harper Watters talked about the importance of not just taking a ballet class "mechanically", following the teacher's instructions, but rather, to take charge by setting a focus on what you want to work on. Then take the teacher's corrections that are helpful and leave the other ones. Kathryn Morgan had another useful video in which she suggested actively reviewing corrections and then deciding on the most important ones, and making a schedule for when to focus on fixing what issue. Finally, Julie Gill has a fascinating podcast in which she decomposes ballet into different skills and suggests that it is very difficult to learn all these skills in a general ballet class. To progress, you have to decide to focus on specific subtopics, and where necessary seek specific training for that. This inspired me to seek out specific pointe classes at Julie's online studio Broche ballet to focus on those specific skills as an add-on to the regular ballet classes, where we understandably don't have the time to engage in focused practice of specific parts of pointe technique.

Reflecting on my intentions. Picture by Anna van der Meijden (https://www.instagram.com/annamaypinephotography/)

The final step is to bring this back to my working life. The Spring semester was ridiculously busy, and not fun. So at the beginning of this academic year, I am trying to figure out a way to be more intentional with how I spend my time. One part of this is that I schedule half an hour once a week to reflect on what my priorities are, and to review my time logs, and whether those are in line with my priorities. Another part of this is that to ensure that I spend enough time on what is important, I already block off time to work on these important tasks so they cannot be taken over by meetings (with an apology to all the people who want to meet with me, which now has become more difficult...). It is hard work to maintain your intention so that your work and life can be of actual benefit, but I think also so important...

How Iceland made me lose my computer but find a way to think through movement and dance

In the past week I attended a summer school on embodied critical thinking, which is part of an Erasmus project in which I am a member. It was a remarkable experience, in which I found new ways to connect the part of myself that is a dancer with the part of myself that is an academic. Moreover, it was my first travel outside the country since Covid-19 hit. The summer school took place in the beautiful country of Iceland, a place where I had never been before. The nature and culture of Iceland were awe-inspiring, which very much complemented the power of the summer school. So what is embodied critical thinking? 

This is a method used--Thinking at the Edge--was developed by a philosopher by the name of Eugene Gendlin, who felt that thinking should not just be in the head but also make use of the wisdom of the body. This is probably something we all use to some extent--when we have a "gut feeling"--but we are never too conscious of it. In thinking at the Edge, you bring your attention to it, and you take the time and space to explore what your body has to say. By doing this, you can often find surprising things. I think the reason it's called "critical thinking" is that it does not take the meaning of concepts as a given, but instead invites you to further explore what concepts may have as hidden meanings, and to inform them with your life experiences to find new connections. An important question that is often being asked is "is there more?", and this is particularly asked when you observe a bodily reaction. As such, the practice demands a lot of tuning into the body. Thinking at the edge consists of a series of 12 steps-exercises if you will, that allow you to investigate the topic you want to think about from many different angles and in many different ways. A very important concept is the "felt sense", which is the feeling in your body of you consider the thing you are thinking about. Rather than paying attention to whether the words are intellectually "correct", one asks whether the words evoke the right feeling, or image. Because of the focus on imagery, there is a possibility to explore new meanings of the topic we are thinking about. This is further expanded on by going over your notes again and again to deepen your understanding.

In my case, I chose to focus on the topic of what embodied critical thinking is and how we can understand it from a cognitive perspective. Rather than going straight into conceptual thinking, the process allowed me to investigate the feeling dimension of this question, which was very interesting and surprising (one of the sentences I wrote, for example, is "the fabric of the spiderweb is space"). A lot of work is done with a partner, who listens to you (usually for luxurious amounts of time, such as 30-40 minutes) and helps you clarify your thinking, but also brings your attention to the bodily dimension. For example, they may say that they noticed that you really started to physically connect to and make lots of gestures when you came to a particular point. To facilitate this process, there was lots of time for silence, and an absence of judgment. The week started even with the announcement that we did not need to feel like we needed to produce something in this time. To further facilitate this, we were also encouraged to do a lot of writing on paper, journalling and carefully writing down what our partner said, and to let go of our computer (more about that in a little bit). I helped out a bit by guiding some movement exercises to help people connect their body and literally dance with their ideas. It was such a gift to be in this caring and spacious environment for a week!

watching the view at the Blue Lagoon site (the blue comes from the silica in the water). Picture by Dorothe Bach)

On top of the exercises from the twelve-step process we went through, we also had various excursions in which we connected to the magnificent nature of Iceland. During my bicycle tour on the first day, I learnt that Iceland is called the land of fire and ice, and its landscapes are largely shaped by volcanic activity. This roughness and wildness yields a very dramatic and awe-inspiring landscape, which helped me to drop the self-focus a bit and instead just be. Moreover, the rocks and volcanoes just have so much space! A further daily connection to nature was provided by the hot springs--just like the Icelandic people I went to the hot pools every day (water comes up right from the ground and is then captured in pools that are spread all across the city of Reykjavik where we stayed). I feel that as you go in the water at the various temperatures (switching between hot and cold baths) it is such a good way to connect to your body and feel what it needs.

being in awe with the volcano behind me (picture by Dorothe Bach)

Now the disconnection from my usual "heady" state in which I am on my computer all the time was further facilitated by an event on the first day, when I was guiding a movement exercise on the beach. We found a beautiful place with lots of rocks to stand on and some grassy patches, and move to the sounds of the wind and the water. I had found a lovely grassy patch to put my laptop bag on while I was guiding the exercise. At the end of the exercise I returned to my back, only to find it standing in a puddle of water, as the tide had been rising while I was--happily unaware--guiding the exercise, standing on a nearby rock. Obviously there was no way I could have any chance at using my computer, since i had to let it dry for at least two days (as I found out from a computer store where I went the next day). And I am writing this on a new computer since sadly my computer never woke up again. The whole episode was a beautiful lesson though, because it made me realize I could actually function without a computer for a little while (especially since a colleague kindly allowed me to use hers for some meetings I needed to do). I was also stunned at my own reaction, which never was one of fear or panic, but simply just ready to go with whatever was. The environment was that spacious! (especially after a few days of vacation that I took in Iceland before the summer school, and especially realizing that an injury is so mch worse).

the place on the coast where I held my movement exercise and my laptop drowned

The last, and very important, lesson from the summer school was that there is a way to bring movement more explicitly into my academic life, and that I have something to offer there. As we went through the twelve-step Thinking at the Edge process, my partner made me realize that expressing through movement and dance, and at the same time being in the academy, is a unique gift I have, which may be of benefit to enrich people's thinking but also strengthen their resilience. So while I started with a project on the cognitive effect of thinking at the edge, I ended up with important realizations about my life and ideas for how to redirect it to bring my dancing and my academic work closer together--a process I started many years ago with Edan Gorlicki in his Unblocked Project.

What are you longing for?

This was the main question that pervaded this past weekend, while I attended the Mind and Life Europe retreat, led by Martijn van Beek and Hanneli Agotsdatter. It was quite an amazing experience. The retreat was a contemplative way of reflecting on how we lead our lives as academics and practitioners. It was one of the most wonderful things I have done in a long time. There is nothing as joyful as pursuing something meaningful, even when it is hard. Let me share some aspects of the experience.

We started on Friday night with gentle meditation and yoga exercises, after which Martijn gave a short lecture on the idea of a "vita contemplativa", a contemplative life. This idea is about how we can bring a spiritual dimension into everything we do, not just a few minutes of meditation or mindfulness on the cushion. We ended the evening with a beautiful meditation practice in which we virtually connected our hearts to the middle of the earth and to each other.

The next morning, we continued with the meditation and yoga practices, but then deepened the contemplation into a question that was quite a bombshell: what am I really longing for? And in addition to that, what are my talents and on the other hand the things that I would like to cultivate. I realized that I had neglected this question about longing--being in a stable job for the last ten years. But also in my spiritual life, it is so easy to just get stuck with the practices you are doing, instead of thinking about why you are doing those. It is so easy to get caught up in the doing mode, rather than being aware of why you are doing those things and focus a bit more on the being mode. During the retreat we did quite a few journalling exercises to ponder these questions, and then we shared with each other in breakout rooms.

I was blown away by the wisdom in the group. I had many insights driven by these conversations. One of the things I was thinking about was that while I love ballet practice dearly, the physical feats achieved by this will never last. The only thing that is a meaningful product out of this pursuit is the mental work. But that in itself is not to be underestimated. Metaphorically, it allows me to connect with the wisdom in my body, and to dance with the open questions in my life.

In the afternoon of the second day, we had a good conversation about how to put these things into practice in our everyday work life. Stefano Poletti and myself got the precious opportunity to share our paths. It was amazing to reflect on what I have done over the years, and to realize the wealth of experiences I have had the chance to accumulate.

On the last day, we then brought back this richness of experience into the daily life. How can we continue this? For myself, I would like to really bring a few minutes of meditation practice in the middle of my day so I get the space to see what is going on, and tune in with any gaps that may be occurring (that is my personal biggest gap). I also hope I will be able to remind myself of loving kindness in the many meetings I have during the day, to make these contemplative values more of a continuum. Finally, I think I need to do this practice more often, and especially to do a short retreat to reflect on what projects I need to let go of, because I tend to overcommit myself. As Gabor Karsai wisely said: we tend to focus on the things we produce, but fail to notice the side effects of these productions--the effects on our health, the effects on our family that is ignored and so on. I ended with the reflection that when you are running too fast, you may miss the goal or the point of it all. Hopefully writing this down will help me to remember this a bit better.

Saying goodbye to 2020

I am writing this on January 1st, 2021. Who would have thought how our lives have changed over the past year! In the beginning of 2020, I still had a whole lot of travel lined up, going back to India to work with my Tibetan monk colleagues from Sera Jey monastic university, giving a ballet performance in India, and more. And here we are: I have never been as long home as in the past year. I am giving talks, lessons and even ballet performances from my living room, attending conferences and summer schools virtually, and also organizing quite a few of them.

Picture by Anna van der Meijden (https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en) 

The year started with a wonderful trip to Vienna, to attend a Mind & Life Europe vision meeting, at which time the first news about a virus from China started to emerge, which was also starting to wreak havoc in Italy. Now my brother lived in Italy at the time, not far from Milan, and I had planned to visit him at the beginning of March. Until the last moment I was debating whether I should visit him, because I was afraid they would close of the area and I would get stuck. In a leap of faith, I ended up still going, and it was the weirdest journey in my life. I have never seen airports that quiet. I have never been as careful about hygiene as then, wearing gloves in public places and washing my hands properly for the first time in my life. I made it out successfully, and then entered a very stressful phase of my life, because I suddenly was shunned by people for being a virus risk. I was surprised at how much this affected me--I think maybe because it brought back painful childhood memories in which I used to be shunned by my classmaters and always be an outsider.

By the time my possibly infectioous time had finished, the country entered lockdown and life changed again. Everything suddenly was online, and because I live alone, this meant that most of the time my only contact with "real people" would be my grocery shopping and my weekly runs with Stefani Nellen (who is the best storyteller ever!). Yet, at the same time, this also brought me a lot: I realized how interconnected we all are by the internet. Because now all the ballet classes were online, I started to reconnect with dear teachers in India and the USA. This was incredibly inspiring. Also, seeing the amount of creativity in the arts sector, which immediately started to offer ballet classes online on instagram and youtube, was stunning. I have also watched live-streamed performances, which were surprisingly wonderful. I even watched while live-commenting on it through WhatsApp conversations with a friend.

I also felt very much connected to my friends and family in other countries (despite the fact that for the first time in my life borders became a thing). I never really felt alone, maybe because I was talking to my computer all day ;-) For the first time in years I started calling my parents regularly, and that renewed connection has been gratifying. On top of that, the covid situation has made my awareness of impermanence much more embodied. Never yet has life changed so quickly. One day you can be giving a ballet performance, the next day you can enter a lockdown. I am grateful for how daily reflections on impermanence in the context of my Buddhist practice have already prepared me for that a little, but still, the understanding has significantly deepened in the past year.

Another treasure given to me by 2020 is learning many new skills. I love learning things (which is why I enjoy being an academic). Pivoting teaching online means that you have to completely reorganize your teaching, which is at once exciting and time-consuming. On top of that, student supervision has become more time-consuming, because understandably each of them was struggling with a whole life placed upside-down, so I felt like a counsellor at times. Nevertheless, this was also rewarding, because I felt like I could actually do something. 

I felt tremendously grateful for my Buddhist practice, which had already prepared me for dealing with change, and encouraged me to look for meaning within, rather than outside. As my Tibetan monk colleagues said at the beginning of the pandemic: now is not the time to travel outside, now is the time to travel inside. Wise words indeed. Now of course this is easy for me to say, because I still have a job, and I am already fairly introverted, so staying at home was not too difficult. This is a nice moment to bring to mind the next slogan in the #lojongchallenge: slogan 37 says "don't make gods into demons." It is really important to ensure that your Buddhist practice does not make you more proud. So, I am not writing this to show off. Just like everyone else, I am muddling around, but i do find that reconnecting with the fundamental goodness of my buddha nature, and the buddha nature of all beings helps me to maintain meaning in the midst of the change and chaos that 2020 created.

So, I would like to end this blog by remembering that while 2020 brought many challenges and completely changed everyone's life, it also brought new opportunities: I learnt a lot, I developed a solid ballet practice at home, I connected with people across the globe in my work, Buddhist practice and ballet, and went back to the essence of life. I hope that in the new year, I will be able to continue learning, remember to take moments to remember gratitude, and continue to connect to people across the globe, online and hopefully also in-person. All my best wishes for the new year!

Step-by-step tips on how to transform your course for online teaching

Like the rest of the world, I am teaching online these days. While my first online teaching back in April was mostly just a repeat of the normal courses in an online format, I decided to completely restructure my course Data Analytics & Communication for the current quarter, to make it more amenable to online teaching. Thanks to a wonderful course by our Education Support and Innovation (shoutout to Tracy Poelzer!), it was actually much less intimidating than expected.

The first thing I did to transform the course to an online format was to divide it up into online folders corresponding to the course weeks, and within every week a series of steps. To make this insightful, I plotted all the steps into a jamboard. This allowed me to quickly keep track of the different components of my course. Every week starts with a short welcome video in which I explain the students what the week is about. I make these videos in loom, a very easy to use video recording program.

Sample screen shot from my course environment with the folders belonging to the weeks on the left bottom and some of the first steps in the centre.

Because this covid time is very hard for everyone, I decided to provide my students with maximal flexibility by only having a single lecture every week. All the other lecture material consists of pre-recorded mini-lectures on loom. So every week I go through my original course lectures, extract the main topics, and make a 5-10 minute video on each topic (see for example this video on reproducibility versus replicability). I can reuse most of my slides because loom allows you to present the slides while you talk. I then link all these videos to Blackboard, which hosts the course. The added benefit of this is that loom records the number of views of each video, so I get a sense of how many students are following the lectures.

I have transformed the live lecture substantially to centre around student interaction. Again, I use the topics I identified from my original lectures to come up with classroom activities. These activities can include a poll. Typically I start the class off with a fun icebreaker poll, for example asking the students to pin a needle on a map indicating where they are listening in from. Another popular activity is putting students into breakout rooms of 4 or 5 and discussing a question or having a debate. I then ask about the outcomes of this debate using a fun website called Wheel of Names, in which I insert the group numbers to randomly choose a group to report. Another popular tool is to ask students to brainstorm together on a jamboard, for example, "what is your advice for producing good graphics?", which requires the students to mobilise all their knowledge from the lectures, the course readings and their own experience. A final fun lecture activity is to invite an expert on a topic (e.g., who has written a paper the students have read) and hold a kind of talkshow in which I as a lecturer moderate the discussion (in this case a good source of questions were the comments made by the students on the social reading platform Perusall that I use in my course).

A final change I made to the online course is to make the tutorials more explicitly social. Rather than them being just an education activity, I also invite students to come to the tutorials to have a chat with each other or with the teaching assistants. Rather than having the tutorials within the Blackboard environment, we moved them to gather.town, a fun online environment that kind of looks like an old computer game. In this environment, you only see and hear individuals when you are sufficiently close to them, kind of like in the real world. This would allow students to naturally work together on assignments, and walk up to the teaching assistant if they have questions. There are even some games to play in this environment created by my awesome colleague Martijn Wieling!

Screenshot from the gather.town environment

Of course a big challenge is the final exam. When students do final exams online you have to assume that they have all information available and communicate with each other through the class WhatsApp. Consequently, I decided to make my exam, which usually involves knowledge questions about the material and interpretation of data analyses, to be about the actual analysis of real-life datasets. Different students get assigned different datasets and answer different questions about these datasets. Hopefully this will make the exam fair and also a good reflection of the students' knowledge and skills. And most importantly, prepare them well to do data analysis and interpretation in the real world. 

Why is it so difficult to turn off? Investigating competitiveness

Logan slogan 35 is "don't be so competitive" (the next iteration in the #lojongchallenge). There is hardly a slogan that is more apt in today's competitive world. In the academic world I am part of, competition is part and parcel, because we constantly have to compete with colleagues to win grants and get our research published in the top journals. Of course there is also a lot of collaboration within science, especially in my department, in the end the evaluation and reward system is highly skewed towards recognising only individuals. A particularly powerful example of this are the Nobel prizes, which were awarded last week. These almost assume that science is done by individuals, rather than by a team, as it is in reality. Pretty much all universities require you to be in the top-whatever to survive as an academic (which obviously is impossible, because by definition not everyone can be the top). This is slightly problematic because science really thrives when you combine many different viewpoints and ideas.

Somehow I internalized the competition to such an extent that I find it difficult to turn off: there is always something more to do, and I find it very hard to give myself permission to rest. Of course it's easy to blame that only on the external world. Probably I myself am at fault at least just as much. But nevertheless, the external world really facilitates that. I think taking the time to be still and rest is almost a revolutionary act.

For me, working against this innate and external competitiveness is a constant struggle that requires a lot of vigilance to recognize these patterns creeping up, and to drop them. I found two things really helpful here: first, practising joy when someone else gets ahead or does something good. When you look at it, seeing someone else succeed and seeing them happy is actually really nice and pleasant, and it improves your relationship with them as well. In one of the ballet schools I take class at the students tend to applaud for each other when they do something well. A very nice gesture, I think. I also try to remember to tell other people what I like about them, and especially to appreciate my students. A little positivity goes a long way!

The other trick I use is to investigate again and again the effects of suspending competitiveness for a moment and just letting be. When I take a few minutes to just rest, I find that actually my performance improves, because I often recognize things that I had overlooked until that moment, and thereby make fewer mistakes. Moreover, it also really feels good. But somehow it's still so hard to do--to overcome the ingrained 'doing' habit. With this blog, I try to commit again to taking more moments of silence and being. Just another reminder...

How are you doing? Do you notice these kinds of tendencies as well? How do you work with competitiveness?

Some tips and tricks for hybrid teaching

As most people, I have been engaging in hybrid teaching in the last months. This is surely challenging, but thankfully our university has quite some support from education professionals to help us rethink our courses. Teaching online is not simply a matter of delivering your lectures through the internet, but rather requires you to rethink the way you teach. And this doesn't have to be bad, and I must say I really enjoy learning new teaching tricks. I am currently participating in a course on Teaching Online taught by Tracy Poeltzer, which is a lot of fun. In this blog I share some of the things I have learnt in the course and in webinars.

Image from the days of giving in-person talks

One of the most important things to think about in teaching online is building connections with the students, because successful learning does not only depend on transferring information successfully, but also requires a human connection. A very simple way to start building connections is before class: being present in the chat about 5-10 minutes before the class starts and welcoming students and asking how they are doing or chatting about the weather is a good start. You can then gauge how students are feeling in the class itself by asking them to respond with an emoji or respond to a question using polling software such as mentimeter or polleverywhere. Another fun icebreaker is to ask students to pin themselves on a map in one of these polling software tools. This is especially useful now students may not be following your course from the same continent as where you are. Then during the class, it's always nice to tell stories. A powerful way ti tell a story is using the word "imagine...". Also analogies can be very powerful, for example teaching during the pandemic is like building a plane while it's flying in the air. This evokes a vivid imagine in the student's mind. Another way of humanizing the course is to use video introductions to get to know each other. A perfect and easy tool for this is flipgrid, in which you can easily make videos and comment on other's videos. Also video or spoken comments can be a nice way to humanize things. Googledocs for example allows you to record comments with google voice, but you can also record video comments with screencastify and loom. These comments have the added advantage that you can share more of your thinking process with the students, which can sometimes be a hekpful learning tool. A final nice tool to humanize the course is to hold an informal coffee shop in which students can drop by to ask questions but also to simply chat or wave to each other. Teaching online also requires you to be much clearer for the students about what is expected of them, and ideally the course has many asynchronous components that students can do at a time that works for them. One model that students seem to like is to make folders for every week of the course, and in those folders to make a series of steps. In that way, students find it easy to keep track of where they are and what they need to do when (someone should build calendar plugins for those!). Then when you get to the lecture, it's good to minimize the amount of frontal talking. You can actually pre-record your lectures in short chunks (or use existing lectures from e.g., TED, coursera etc), and then use class time to discuss these in breakout groups. Breakout groups are great because students really get to know each other. One nice model for breakout groups is to ask students to discuss about questions they want to ask the lecturer in the next plenary session. In that way, students practise asking questions. A very practical tip for the lecture time is to insert a slide that reminds you to press the record button (if you're anything like me and tend to forget to record). As regards discussion, it is helpful to explicitly discuss group norms for interaction, that mention things like kindness, respect etc. The same can also be useful to put in discussion fora, which are very helpful to get students to interact on an asynchronous basis. Finally, it's really important to remember that we are all working from covid brains, so be gentle with yourself as well as with the students. How are you doing with covid teaching? Any tips or tricks?