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!

Some tricks for managing strong emotions

 I think the next Lojong slogan, number 58, is the reason that the stereotype of a Buddhist is a very peaceful person. This slogan namely says "don't be temperamental." An important Buddhist value is being relatively equanimous, which means you don't easily get angry or display other strong emotions. Just like the previous slogan, I think it is important to avoid suppressing emotions, because in the long run, that is not going to fly. Nevertheless, it is beneficial to try to avoid getting too much caught up in the emotions.

The dancers of Morlaix Ballet Camp putting on 
a chuckle at the end of the first act of Napoli
Picture by Michel Le

In my previous blog I mentioned how Khandro Rinpoche talked about keeping it short when emotional reactions come up. For me there are two strategies I use to shorten when emotions come up. First of all, I literally dance with it, if I am in a place where that's possible. Secondly, I will use the Buddhist teachings on emptiness: examining the nature of circumstances you see how these emotions are just ever-changing manifestations in a continuous dance of things rising and ceasing. Whatever evokes the emotion is usually conveniently put in our mind as the only cause of our anger, but if you think about it, they are also at the mercy of all these circumstances, so it is actually quite unfair to point at them for being the only cause for these emotions. Probably somewhere in there we too are to blame as well. Somehow changing perspective this way really helps me create some mental space, and frequently a chuckle as well.

It is worthwhile to think about how to manage your strong emotions, because they can create a lot of trouble. For example, for me, when people get angry I get quite stressed, and cannot think so well anymore. There is interestingly also some research on this, showing for example how more angry managers in companies were associated with reduced ability to learn from failure. This is quite consistent with my experience, where an environment where a teacher explicitly says it is OK to fail helps a lot (thanks Julie Gill for mentioning it is OK, and even good to wobble and fall over in balancing class because this is how our body learns). In short, managing strong emotions takes quite some effort, but in the end it makes our life a lot easier.

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.

Viewing monastic debate through the lens of Western psychology and neuroscience: what can we learn?

I recently submitted a paper co-authored with probably more Tibetan monks than any paper in history (you can read a preprint here). The main point of the paper is to explain that while meditation research in the West has mostly focused on a narrow range of meditation practices such as mindfulness, there are many more practices out there, one of which is analytical meditation and debate. Why are analytical meditation and debate so interesting? As the Dalai Lama pointed out a few weeks ago in his talk in the Netherlands, reasoning and study, of which analytical meditation is the method, may be the best way for Westerners to engage with the Buddhist teachings. Even for a secular ethics that would be available for people from all religions, such analytical meditation could be useful.

So what is analytical meditation and what is debate? Analytical meditation is a practice of studying a text and contemplating it, asking questions such as "do I really understand what it means? How does that relate to other things I know? What follows from this statement? What is it consistent with? What is it inconsistent with?". In debate, you ask these questions to another person. In the tradition, such debates have a very distinct physical manifestation. You can find some videos and pictures from monastic debates a the website of the project.

In our paper, we describe what cognitive mechanisms we think are involved in the practice of debating. First you need to keep track of all the things that have been discussed so far, and this requires working memory. As the debate goes on, cognitive load increases. This may reflect in increasing engagement of a neural network called the fronto-parietal attention network, and this may also be associated with increasing inwardly-turned attention. In EEG measurements, such inwardly-turned attention is likely to be reflected in increasing brain waves in mid-frontal areas. Debating may also increase your speed of processing information, because if debaters do not respond quickly enough, then they are made fun of by their opponents. Furthermore, debate may promote mental flexibility, since winning a debate requires you to look at things from many different angles, and try to find an angle that your opponent has not yet found. Experienced debaters also say this is the most satisfying aspect of debating: it is a kind of research that may give you more insight into the topic when you consider the implications of looking at it in a particular way. This suggests to me as a neuroscientist that debate may require strong engagement of areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex. Debating also is a strong motivator for memory training, since you can not go back to your textbook in the debate courtyard. Indeed we found that during a type of debate called "counting debate", in which the debaters review the texts and definitions, it happened more often that one of the debaters had "difficulty remembering" than during the logic debates, but even there difficulty-remembering could occur. Since debate uses logical reasoning as a foundation, it may also train this cognitive skill. We are now measuring that with reasoning tasks (stay tuned for results!). But debating is not just a cognitive practice: it also requires resilience to strong emotions such as anger, anxiety and more. Once you lose your cool, you are likely to lose the debate. Especially during logic debates, the debaters face many self-reported difficulties. Nevertheless, in some preliminary data from a questionnaire, we found that more experienced monks reported fewer difficulties in regulating their emotions (also stay tuned for this). Finally, debate is a highly social form of meditation, and in another paper we report how inter-brain synchrony, thought to reflect mentally tuning into each other, changes over the different phases of the debate.

So why is all of this interesting? Maybe some of the techniques that the debaters use can also be helpful in our education system. For example, the movement aspect could be used to make the students more physically active. The technique of continually questioning everything that is being put forward and carefully examining its logical consequences could help to cultivate critical thinking. However, a significant challenge in this is that our education system in the West relies on covering a large amount of material cursorily and learning skills for managing information rather than really knowing a detailed area by heart. This makes it much more difficult to apply the techniques learnt in debate. But I continue to think about this idea. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

Happier classrooms - some ideas from the Dalai Lama (and others)

Today His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited the Netherlands to give some talks and lectures. I was fortunate enough to attend one of these, a Buddhist teaching on the Eight Verses for Training the Mind, which is actually a Lojong text as well! In conjunction with this event, Mind and Life Europe also organized a workshop entitled Education of the Heart. In this blog I share some of what I learnt at these meetings.

First the Dalai Lama gave a good tip relevant to those following the #lojongchallenge: if you have a flight delay, read the Eight Verses of Training the Mind text to yourself. Presumably another Lojong text would also do, but the main thing is to use the time for something useful, instead of getting frustrated about the delayed flights. The Dalai Lama also mentioned that you can also acquire a glimpse of the understanding of how phenomena are empty by looking at present-day quantum physics. However, in quantum physics they then go on to state that there is no objective reality at all, which is not in accord with Buddhism, which does assert an objective reality--things do appear--but just not in the way we usually perceive it. He ended by mentioning that the teachings on emptiness can really help to free the mind, because they reduce the self-centredness that causes anxiety and anger and ruin our health.

So how can we train in these skills? For this we need education. Sander Tideman mentioned that in a previous Education of the Heart meeting, one important point was that compassion is not just empathy but involves critical thinking as well. Just like His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he mentioned how compassion and warm-heartedness can overcome stress and anxiety. Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi from Emory University talked about the Social Emotional and Ethical Learning program they have developed at Emory University tries to implement the vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama from his books on secular ethics (e.g., Ethics for the New Millenium) into a curriculum, which so far focuses on K-12. The curriculum includes attention training, compassion and care, systems awareness (becoming aware of the larger context of which you are a part), and ethical engagement. Crucial in this is that teachers embody these skills themselves. The program includes a lot of scientific perspectives as well as reflective practices such as journaling. Early findings suggest the program results in more self-compassion, a calmer classroom and better prosocial skills.

Also in higher education there are some initiatives. Rob van Tulder described his work in bringing the heart into the business school of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He shared an inspiring quote of how rare it is to find people with a cool head, even rarer those with a warm heart, and the rarest of all are those who use the warmth of their heart to keep their head cool. Quite an inspiring quote! He mentioned how more of these ideas are worked out in his book Skill sheets which I have not had the chance to check out. Nevertheless, one important challenge they are facing is distraction by too much information, social media, etc. I agree that this is a challenge. I think this is where structural teaching of mindfulness practices could be useful, because they could help people to acquire a sense of meta-awareness of where their attention is.

Finally, Katherine Weare presented the new initiative of the Contemplative Education hub of Mind & Life Europe, because there are many initiatives on contemplative education, but little coordination. Such coordination could allow the different initiatives to learn from each other, but also in advocacy on a societal level, and to deal with challenges such as "how to incorporate the wisdom traditions in an authentic way, yet remain open to people of all religious and non-religious backgrounds?" She ended on a happy note, reminding us that true mindfulness is not only a path to happiness, but happiness is this moment. Maybe contemplative education can help us to build happier schools, and universities. Wouldn't that be marvellous?

How to activate students? Ideas for juicing up your teaching

me teaching during the Artificial Intelligence teacher of the year award ceremony. Picture by Niels Taatgen.

I recently attended a workshop at my university about innovations in teaching. There were several ideas that I thought were useful, so I decided to blog about them. Firstly, I attended a workshop on MOOCs by Tom Spits. There are more and more MOOCs. You can actually use those MOOCs to complement your classroom teaching. For example, you can use them in the flipped classroom: students watch the MOOC at home and then you spend the time in the classroom doing assignments and discussing difficult points. I think this makes a lot of sense, because sometimes lectures on MOOCs are excellent, and why would you waste your own time and effort on that? For example, I found this MOOC on methods and statistics excellent. I may actually refer students to that for some components of my Research Methods class. This could be also helpful for students who need a bit more explanation or background information. The only thing you have to watch out for is MOOCs taking place asynchronously with your class, so that students are not able to sign up and watch the lectures.

MOOCs can also be a helpful source of assignments. Of course you should check this with the MOOC teacher, but reusing some of these assignments can save you a lot of time (given that creating assignments takes *a lot* of time...). Moreover, many of these assignments even give automatic feedback, which can help students to practise the material well. Another potential use of MOOCs could be to remedy deficiencies. For example, in a multidisciplinary field like Artificial Intelligence, some students are weak on programming, others on psychology or machine learning. There are plenty of MOOCs in all these areas that students can do to remedy these deficiencies. Advantage of MOOCs over regular university courses is that they can be done at your own pace, and in your own time.

A significant challenge with MOOCs is finding the right one. One place to start is a MOOC search engine: moocse. There are also websites with reviews of MOOCs, e.g., class central. And of course you can follow your favorite academics on twitter and find out when they are teaching a MOOC.

Another teaching innovation are learning communities. mentimeter in the lecture to keep students engaged. And finally, a very simple thing you can do to have students take charge of their learning is to provide lecture slides before the lecture so that students can click links and explore during the lecture (of course this is also tricky, since it may be very distracting for the students...).

In summary, I got quite a few new ideas for enhancing active learning in my classroom. I am planning to check some of these ideas out in the next few weeks, when I am starting to teach again.

How can we get students actively engaged in learning? (report from a workshop I attended)

A few days ago I attended a symposium about promoting active learning organized by my university. Here are some of the things I learnt. There is a lot of interest currently in "flipping the classroom". We learnt that a new tool that is available to make flipping the classroom a little easier is Perusall. When you add your PDF to this system, students can annotate it collaboratively and ask questions. You will then be provided with a report, so you can adjust your teaching to the student's questions. With some magical algorithm, the system is also able to grade the quality of the students' comments, although I am a little suspicious of that, I must say.

Luckily there are also quite a few non-electronic ideas to "wake up" your students, which I picked up in a workshop by Jasmijn Bloemert. A good start of a lesson is to ask students what they hope to get out of it, and to write it down. Asking the student to think about their objective directs their attention away from the preceding events and towards the learning that will take place in the classroom. Moreover, it creates a sort of contract that they can go back to, to check whether they are getting out of the class what they want to. Writing things down is helpful because it makes the intentions more real than just holding them in your mind.

Lectures often consist of a lot of dense material. To help the student navigate that, it is often useful to give them a question that they need to find the answer to. In that way, they have a target to keep track of. You can alternatively ask them to come up with question about what they just heard, or simply to compare notes with a fellow classmate.

here I am attending a different workshop on teaching, a few years ago, at the UOGC (University of Groningen Teachers Education Centre)

Frequently students don't speak up for fear of making mistakes. To get them to speak up, you can ask them questions that do not have right or wrong answers, such as "how do you feel about this? Is it positive or negative for you? Another good trick to draw out people's interest is to show them a puzzling picture (or quote, or other type of material) and ask them to guess what it is or what it means. In a similar vein, you could show two "things" (e.g., pictures) on the screen and ask students to find the differences.I guess this will be hard for the course Research Methods that I will soon be teaching, but it may work well for courses that involve more concrete "things."

Teaching the reading of difficult material can also be made more social by asking students to underline the most important sentences of a passage, and then asking them to compare notes on what was underlined, and finally to come up with a summary of the text in one sentence. Doing this really helps you to find the essence of a text. I may try this out with research papers in one class where I read the primary literature with students. It is often difficult for them to draw out the essence of a paper, and this exercise may help them to develop this "helicopter view" of the material.

Finally, there was an interesting method used often in America called "teachers teach." At some random moment in the lecture, the lecturer claps their hands three times, and students have to immediately teach each other what they just heard. It is a very high energy method, but kind of fun, and encourages students to think on their feet (if they are willing to do it, of course). Altogether, I acquired some fun ideas in this workshop. I will definitely try out some of these in my upcoming classes.