Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Contemplation, Consciousness and Pedagogy,” presented in 2009, belongs to a decisive phase in her intellectual development: the moment when long-standing concerns with embodiment, intercultural transmission, and performer training are drawn explicitly into a critique of higher education. What emerges is not simply an argument for meditation in the classroom, nor a diffuse celebration of mindfulness, but a more searching proposal about what education has historically misconstrued. The paper asks what happens if consciousness is understood not as disembodied cognition but as a bodily, environmental, and trainable process; if stillness is grasped not as passivity but as a disciplined reorganization of perception; and if theatre and dance, rather than occupying the ornamental margins of the university, are recognized as sites where such knowledge has been cultivated for decades.
The essay begins, characteristically, with an artist rather than an abstract thesis. Sellers-Young turns to Merce Cunningham through Alastair Macaulay’s phrase “The Body’s War Within: Stillness vs Motion,” then subtly revises the antagonism implied by “vs.” into a more generative reciprocity. Cunningham’s work, she suggests, investigated “motion in stillness and stillness in motion” in order to uncover “inner qualities—serenity, rigor—that do not change even as their physical outlines are transformed again and again.” The formulation is exacting. Stillness is not the suspension of movement but a quality of organization within movement; motion is not mere kinetic flux but can be grounded in a centered, lucid quiet. Cunningham’s long engagement with Zen meditation thus becomes more than a biographical detail. It provides Sellers-Young with an emblem for “contemplative consciousness in action,” a phrase that captures the essay’s deepest refusal: the refusal of any model in which contemplation belongs to inward retreat while performance belongs to outward display.
That refusal matters because the paper is written against a durable educational inheritance. Sellers-Young’s target is not intellect as such, but the institutional habits through which intellect has been falsely isolated from the sensory and neural life of the body. She names this history through Maria Carozzi’s account of academic discourse as a “selective training of attention,” one that bears the long afterlife of traditions treating spirit or mind as separable from, even superior to, “devil-prone flesh.” The issue, then, is not that universities think too much, but that they train too narrow a mode of thinking. Reading, writing, and silent discourse become technologies of attention that suppress awareness of the “entire self.” Against this truncation, Sellers-Young proposes contemplative and somatic practice as modes capable of widening cognition rather than abandoning rigor.
Stillness as Method
The essay’s historical movement through Zen in the United States is brief but carefully structured. Sellers-Young traces a line from Soyen Shaku’s appearance at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions to the work of D. T. Suzuki and Nyogen Senzaki, then to the mid-century American artists and intellectuals who absorbed Zen into creative and philosophical life. Yet the paper does not treat “Zen influence” as a single stream. It distinguishes between Suzuki’s textual and conceptual mediation of Zen for Western intellectuals and Senzaki’s embodied transmission of formal practice through his Los Angeles zendô. That distinction is crucial to the argument. Suzuki made Zen legible to a modern American imagination by presenting it as “self-realization or conscious transformation,” in a language compatible with psychological self-inquiry. Senzaki, by contrast, exposed Americans to discipline, posture, duration, and the bodily labor of meditation.
Sellers-Young’s larger point is that contemplation enters modern American culture along both routes: as idea and as practice. This duality has consequences for the arts. A merely conceptual appropriation of Zen can remain decorative, a vocabulary of emptiness or intuition detached from disciplined change in attention. But when stillness is practiced, when the mind “can get quiet enough,” a different possibility appears: consciousness itself may become “a vehicle for innovation and creative problem solving.” Here one sees a recurring feature of Sellers-Young’s scholarship on intercultural transmission. Imported forms are not important because they supply exotic content. They matter when they alter the procedures by which bodies perceive, organize time, and act.
The essay repeatedly insists that contemplation is active. Drawing on Tobin Hart, Sellers-Young describes it as “a third way of knowing that compliments the rational and the sensory.” The phrasing is revealing. Contemplative knowing is not cast as anti-rational or anti-empirical. Rather, it supplements the “rational-empirical approach” by shifting “the habitual chatter of the mind” and cultivating “deepened awareness, concentration, and insight.” What Hart names a “distinct nonlinear consciousness” becomes, in Sellers-Young’s hands, especially valuable for domains where emergence, ambiguity, and responsiveness matter. Performance is one such domain, but the argument reaches further. The essay gradually suggests that all education in a volatile world requires this expanded attentional repertoire.
Performance Training as a Knowledge System
If the paper critiques the academy, it does so by elevating performance training as an epistemic model. Theatre and dance are not invoked as therapeutic supplements to serious study; they are offered as sites where body-mind integration has been systematically investigated. This is one of the essay’s strongest interventions. Sellers-Young has long argued that technique forms consciousness, and here that conviction appears with institutional force. Since the 1960s and 1970s, she notes, university theatre and dance programs had already been incorporating Zen and other Asian contemplative and performance systems. The pathways of that incorporation—postwar military contact with Asia, immigrant communities, translated performance texts, visiting artists, student reconstructions, hybrid productions—are sketched not to celebrate multicultural enrichment in the abstract but to show how pedagogical regimes changed.
The exemplary quality attributed to Asian performers in these encounters is not reducible to style. Sellers-Young quotes Robert Benedetti’s vivid description of the actor whose apparent stillness radiates “unresolved energies,” who has learned “not only how ‘to stand still without standing still,’” but also “how to move without moving.” The passage clarifies what the paper values in contemplative performance traditions: not surface tranquility, but suspended intensity, an inner dynamism held in form. Stillness here is theatrical force. It is the management of energy, time, and attention such that the performer’s body becomes charged rather than inert.
This is where David Feldshuh’s notion of the “actor’s mind” enters with particular weight. Sellers-Young describes it as a union of internal verbal and imagistic life with “emptiness,” the “stilling of the babbling brook for conscious awareness.” The resulting mind is “open, ready, and accepting.” Again, the significance lies less in doctrinal Zen than in a trainable condition of availability. Actor training, in this account, should not merely solicit emotion or impose external form. It should cultivate a consciousness capable of perceiving itself, quieting excess intentionality, and responding fully in the present. This is a mature Sellers-Young argument: technique is not a toolbox of effects but a disciplined remaking of perception.
Her alignment of Zeami and Stanislavsky extends that claim. The comparison is intellectually strategic. Rather than opposing Asian contemplative theatre and Western psychophysical acting, she reads both as converging on an integrated account of action. Zeami’s ideal of “one intensity of mind,” in which the actor “bind[s] together the moments before and after that instant when nothing happens,” is paired with Stanislavsky’s insistence that in every physical action there lies “some inner action, some feelings.” The point is not historical equivalence but structural affinity. Both traditions understand performance as a body-mind process in which inner and outer life are “intertwined,” and both displace the reductive opposition between internal psychology and external technique. In Sellers-Young’s hands, this convergence becomes a pedagogical principle: contemplation, reflection, and action are not separate phases but integrated aspects of trained performance.
Her language at this point grows especially characteristic. Performance methods drawing on meditation, tai chi, yoga, and breath work are said to move from ordinary awareness toward “open awareness,” “interest (wonderment),” “attention (committed contact),” “absorption,” and “understanding.” Such sequences matter because they show how she imagines consciousness as graduated rather than binary. One does not simply possess awareness; one refines it. The performer becomes a model for a learner who can widen attention, sustain contact, and reorganize action under changing conditions.
Neuroscience, Embodied Cognition, and the Revisions of Self
The essay’s appeal to neuroscience has a double function. At one level, it seeks contemporary scientific support for a claim performance training has long embodied: that mind and body are inseparable. At another, it provides Sellers-Young with a language for plasticity, one capable of explaining why contemplative and somatic practices might matter educationally. Drawing on Antonio Damasio, she argues that consciousness is an activity of the “body-minded, brain,” arising through the organism’s interaction with its environment. Thought is thus not detached abstraction but a survival-linked process of feedback, adaptation, and response.
This anti-dualist claim is central to her larger career, but in this paper it is pressed toward pedagogy. The student is not a mind receiving information; the student is a whole organism whose habits of attention, memory, and response are embodied. To describe that embodiment, Sellers-Young turns to Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee’s phrase “body mandala,” a striking image for the neural maps that organize movement, internal sensation, spatial relation, and conceptual life. These maps are “formed early in life,” mostly inaccessible to explicit awareness, yet capable of revision across time. Their importance lies not only in physiology but in subjectivity itself. The feeling of coherent “me-ness” arises from these ongoing bodily mappings.
The essay then makes its most ambitious move: contemplative stillness may allow these entrenched patterns to loosen. Sellers-Young proposes that when the individual comes to stillness, “the somatic or memory markers of the neural system relax,” creating “an opportunity for the potential of an adjustment of the body mandala and therefore consciousness.” The sentence is cautious in its repeated appeal to opportunity and potential, and it should be read that way. The paper does not claim a simple causal mechanism by which meditation guarantees enlightenment or creativity. Rather, it argues that disciplined attention may interrupt habitual reactivity, opening space for new neural pathways and therefore new embodied modes of knowing.
Her use of Shauna Shapiro and colleagues’ triad—intention, attention, attitude—gives this process a more nuanced ethical and pedagogical shape. Intention concerns why one practices and how that motive deepens over time “from self-regulation to self-exploration and finally to self-liberation.” Attention concerns moment-to-moment observation of internal and external experience, a faculty she links to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s “kinesthetic consciousness.” Attitude concerns the quality of awareness itself: whether one attends with criticism and narcissistic contraction, or with openness, generosity, and active listening. Together these produce what Shapiro calls “re-perceiving,” the recognition that the contents of consciousness are not identical with the observing awareness.
This notion of re-perceiving is especially important in Sellers-Young’s oeuvre because it provides a bridge between performer training and broader education. The actor learning to observe breath, impulse, and muscular tone without immediate judgment is not far from the student learning to encounter unfamiliar ideas without defensive closure. In both cases, consciousness becomes less fused with habit. One begins to acquire what the essay names “self-regulation, psychological flexibility, clarification of values, and the willingness to explore areas of knowledge that might be outside their social/cultural background.” This is not merely therapy in academic dress. It is a proposal about the conditions under which learning can occur across difference and uncertainty.
The brief analogy to Bourdieu’s habitus deepens this point. By placing the “body mandala” alongside habitus, Sellers-Young hints that embodied patterning is social as well as neural. The body’s dispositions are historically formed. Contemplative and somatic practice, then, are not simply instruments of inward calm; they may also become means of revising socially sedimented modes of perception and action. The essay does not elaborate this politically, but the implication is unmistakable. Education that engages embodiment might do more than improve concentration. It might expose the conditioned nature of one’s own responses.
Somatics and the Inside of Movement
The second half of the paper broadens from contemplative practice narrowly construed to the wider field of somatics. This expansion is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s mature thinking, which persistently refuses to sever inner awareness from cultural and pedagogical form. The historical pairing of Zen-based actor training with the movement theories of Margaret H’Doubler and Mabel Todd is especially telling. H’Doubler’s teaching is described as integrating imagination with physical patterning, though still partly anchored in formal aesthetic categories such as “climax, transition, balance, sequence, repetition, harmony, variety and contrast.” Todd’s The Thinking Body, by contrast, is presented as foundational for “somatic awareness,” with its attention to the subtle reorganization of movement through awareness rather than through overt stylistic prescription.
The distinction matters because Sellers-Young is tracing a shift from externally legible form toward the transformation of consciousness from within. Thomas Hanna’s definition of somatics from the Greek soma, the living body, allows her to define these practices as investigations of movement “as a mode of thinking.” Jill Green’s formulation—somatics emphasizes the unity of mind and body “as experienced from within”—provides a succinct statement of the first-person epistemology at stake. The issue is not simply that dancers have bodies, but that bodily experience itself can become a disciplined source of knowledge.
That claim runs throughout Sellers-Young’s scholarship, and in this paper it is tightly linked to pedagogy. Methods such as Authentic Movement, Feldenkrais, and Rolfing are said to work by altering “prior somatic images” produced by past experience. Attention to inner states can “transform” those images and “open the body to new modes of being.” This is one of the essay’s most revealing phrases. A somatic method is not merely corrective; it is ontological in its aspiration. It seeks not only better posture or efficiency but another mode of being in the world.
The appeal to Merleau-Ponty through Elizabeth Smears—embodied awareness restores the body as both process and object of perception—serves Sellers-Young’s larger effort to legitimate first-person bodily inquiry within scholarly and pedagogical discourse. But she does not universalize somatics into a generic inwardness. Different methods, she notes, use different means: touch, manipulation, breath, proprioceptive improvisation, solo exploration, group attunement. What they share is a commitment to changing consciousness through altered embodied patterning. In this sense, somatics is less a single school than a family of practices unified by the conviction that movement reorganizes perception.
Against the Disembodied Academy
The final movement of the essay turns explicitly to the university. A 2005 Chronicle of Higher Education headline—“Meditate On It”—becomes the occasion for a pointed observation: contemplative practice may appear new in disciplines such as math, science, or literature, but it is “not,” as Sellers-Young notes, new to dance and theatre. The sentence does more than claim precedence. It repositions the performing arts as pedagogical innovators. Fields often required to justify themselves in instrumental terms become repositories of methods that the rest of the academy increasingly needs.
The challenge she identifies is historical and contemporary at once. Higher education remains attached to a model of knowledge as abstraction, even while students confront a world defined by rapid transformation. In informal discussions with incoming students at York University, she hears a desire for education that would help them “make their way in an unpredictable environment,” one in which they must continually “make and remake themselves as the forces of globalization continue to transform and change the world.” This is an unusually clear statement of the essay’s horizon. Contemplative and somatic pedagogy matter not simply because they produce calm or creativity, but because they train adaptability under unstable conditions.
The language Sellers-Young chooses here is notable. Students need “the skill of fearlessly letting go of forms of knowledge, communication, transportation, social communities to engage new forms.” This is not a bland endorsement of flexibility. It recognizes that transformation entails loss, detachment, and the relinquishing of inherited structures. Contemplative training, in this framing, teaches how not to cling. Performance training supplies a practical analogue: focused improvisation, where one must remain alert, grounded, and inventive as conditions shift. Cunningham’s chance procedures, determined by the throw of dice, become emblematic of this pedagogy. Chance is not an abdication of form but a method for dislodging habit and compelling new organization.
The essay concludes by attributing to contemplative practice an enhanced capacity for “deep listening” that perceives “not only the surface level of knowledge but its subtext.” The phrase could stand for Sellers-Young’s own scholarly method. What she values, whether in ritual, intercultural rehearsal, belly dance improvisation, or somatic pedagogy, is not visible form alone but the layered organization of awareness beneath it. Students trained in such modes, she argues, can “engage ideas without becoming so attached that they lose perspective.” This is the ethical as much as cognitive promise of contemplation: not detachment from the world, but a less possessive relation to one’s own thought.
A Turning Point in Sellers-Young’s Career
Within Sellers-Young’s broader body of work, “Contemplation, Consciousness and Pedagogy” is significant because it consolidates several trajectories without collapsing their tensions. Her earlier studies of ritual had already treated performance as a social technology for managing grief, conflict, and communal relation. Her writing on actor training had formulated exploration, breath, and imagery as means of reorganizing the performer’s psychophysical self. Her intercultural work had emphasized that techniques are not neutral imports but consciousness-forming practices shaped by cultural histories. This 2009 paper brings those concerns into a common frame: pedagogy as the training of embodied attention.
At the same time, the paper marks an expansion. Sellers-Young is no longer speaking only to dancers, actors, or ethnographers of performance. She is addressing the university as an institution and, beyond it, a world in which adaptability, reflexivity, and embodied intelligence have become pressing conditions of survival. If later work will deepen her reflexive and autoethnographic attention to the body as archive, this essay already establishes the conceptual basis for that move. Consciousness is bodily, habit is revisable, attention is trainable, and education must account for the learner as a whole sensing organism.
The essay also exemplifies a recurring strength in Sellers-Young’s scholarship: her ability to hold together enthusiasm for embodied practice with awareness of mediation and translation. Zen enters America through selective reinterpretation; Asian performance traditions are adapted within U.S. classrooms; neuroscience is recruited to support claims that originated elsewhere in artistic and contemplative practice. The paper does not deny these crossings. Rather, it treats them as the very terrain on which modern pedagogy must be thought. The result is not a naïve universalism of mindfulness, but a historically aware argument that certain disciplines of attention—however transmitted and transformed—reveal the inadequacy of the disembodied educational subject.
What “Contemplation, Consciousness and Pedagogy” finally offers is a revaluation of stillness. In a culture and an academy organized around productivity, discursivity, and rapid response, stillness often appears inert, private, or evasive. Sellers-Young makes it legible otherwise: as a rigorous suspension in which sensation, memory, breath, and perception can be reorganized; as a condition of creative action; and as a pedagogical practice through which students may learn to inhabit uncertainty without paralysis. Stillness, in this account, is not the opposite of thought. It is one of thought’s most demanding forms.
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