Barbara Sellers-Young’s 2009 conference paper, “Neuroplasticity and Performance,” belongs to a particularly fertile moment in her career, when long-standing commitments to actor training, somatics, Asian-influenced performance pedagogy, and embodied cognition begin to converge with a newer vocabulary drawn from neuroscience and contemplative studies. The paper is not merely an argument for meditation in the arts classroom, nor simply a report on scientific findings that happen to support ideas performers already know in practice. Its more ambitious wager is that performance training has for decades cultivated a mode of knowing that higher education has too often failed to recognize: a disciplined, embodied, revisable attention through which thought, action, and selfhood can be reorganized. What neuroscience offers, in this account, is not the origin of that insight but a language for making legible what theatre and dance have long practiced.
The paper opens with a paradox that Sellers-Young treats not as metaphor but as method: “stillness in motion” and “motion in stillness.” Taking Merce Cunningham as emblem and case, she begins with the proposition that art has to do with “the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos,” then places Cunningham under the sign of a sustained investigation into those “inner qualities—serenity, rigor—that do not change even as their physical outlines are transformed again and again.” The appeal of Cunningham here is exact. He allows Sellers-Young to refuse a common opposition between contemplation and performance, as if one belonged to inward quiet and the other to outward activity. Cunningham’s work, as she reads it, demonstrates that contemplative discipline can be fully kinetic, and that virtuosity need not be understood as the opposite of inward stillness. The performer’s task is not to choose between action and repose, but to discover a quality of consciousness in which each informs the other.
That opening choice matters because it quietly reorients the terms of discussion. Sellers-Young is not interested in contemplation as withdrawal from the world, still less as a private spirituality added decoratively to artistic work. She is interested in contemplative practice as a way of organizing attention under pressure—an embodied disposition that changes how artists move, perceive, decide, and adapt. Cunningham’s “entire life at home, in the rehearsal room, and on the stage,” she writes, was “an investigation of stillness in motion.” The phrasing is important: contemplation is not sequestered from rehearsal or from life, but continuous with both. The question that follows is therefore not whether meditative practices can be imported into performance from outside, but how such practices have already shaped performance pedagogy, and what that shaping reveals about learning more generally.
To answer that question, Sellers-Young turns first to a short genealogy of Zen in the United States. The historical sketch is compressed but purposeful. Soyen Shaku’s appearance at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions marks a public entrance; D. T. Suzuki and Nyogen Senzaki become the two crucial channels through which Zen entered American culture. The distinction she draws between them does much of the paper’s conceptual work. Suzuki’s Zen traveled through writing and through a discourse of “self-realization” legible to Western psychological and artistic interests. It was this version, linked to “ever-present time, repetition as the basis for discipline,” intuition, irrationality, and the unconscious, that became especially potent for mid-century artists. Senzaki, by contrast, transmitted less an idea of Zen than a discipline. Through the Los Angeles zendō, Americans encountered Zen as bodily practice, as the labor of quieting the mind rather than merely celebrating spontaneity. If Suzuki helped render Zen intelligible to modern American artists, Senzaki helped prevent it from dissolving into generalized mystique.
This distinction between idea and practice, fascination and discipline, recurs throughout Sellers-Young’s work on intercultural transmission, and it is already fully active here. What travels across cultures is never simply doctrine. It is filtered through institutions, bodies, pedagogies, and needs. In “Neuroplasticity and Performance,” that broader intercultural insight is focused on a specific historical problem: how certain Asian contemplative and performance systems challenged American assumptions about what artistic training is for. Sellers-Young notes the postwar pathways through which Zen and other Asian forms entered theatre and dance programs in the 1960s and 1970s—military contact, immigrant communities, universities such as Hawai‘i, visiting masters, student replications, hybrid productions. But she is less concerned with inventory than with effect. These encounters offered American artists a visible model of a stage presence grounded not in emotional display alone, nor in technical execution severed from inward life, but in concentrated embodiment.
Her central evidence here is Robert Benedetti’s evocative description of the “oriental actor,” whose stillness is charged with suspended energy, who can “stand still without standing still” and “move without moving.” The terminology now bears the marks of an earlier U.S. theatre discourse, one often prone to broad civilizational contrasts. Sellers-Young does not pause to critique that rhetoric in this paper. Yet her use of the passage is more precise than any simple East/West opposition. What interests her is the pedagogical shock of encountering a performer whose “apparent stillness” is “filled with tremendous motion.” Such performance unsettled inherited binaries that had organized much American training: inside versus outside, emotion versus form, psychology versus technique. The “heightened presence of embodiment” modeled by Asian performance did not merely add exotic alternatives; it helped make visible the poverty of those binaries themselves.
From there the essay moves inward, toward what David Feldshuh called “actor’s mind.” Here Sellers-Young isolates two linked propositions in Zen-inflected performance discourse: first, that the self is not a fixed interior essence but a stream of “internal dialogue of words and images”; second, that contemplative stillness can quiet that “babbling brook” sufficiently for awareness to emerge. The result is not emptiness as vacancy, but emptiness as readiness—an “empty mind that is open, ready, and accepting.” In Sellers-Young’s hands, this becomes a practical account of performer consciousness. To perform well is not simply to feel intensely or to execute accurately. It is to cultivate a state in which one is not wholly fused with the noise of one’s own internal discursivity. Such a state makes response possible. The performer can attend, receive, and act rather than merely repeat conditioned reactions.
This emphasis on observing consciousness rather than being wholly captured by its contents leads the paper into one of its most consequential formulations: contemplation as a “third way of knowing.” Drawing on Tobin Hart, Sellers-Young distinguishes the contemplative from the rational and the sensory-empirical. The rational “involves calculation, explanation, and analysis”; the sensory “lives off of observation and measurement.” Together these define the dominant epistemology of modern education. Contemplation, by contrast, seeks to “shift the habitual chatter of the mind” and cultivate “deepened awareness, concentration, and insight.” Sellers-Young’s larger concern is not to replace one regime of knowledge with another, but to expose a deficiency in the modern academy’s understanding of cognition. If education privileges analysis and measurement while neglecting disciplined forms of inner observation, it produces students trained in only a narrow band of human attention.
This line of argument is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s wider pedagogical philosophy. Again and again across her work, she resists the assumption that embodied practices are supplemental—good for expression, wellness, or artistry perhaps, but not for thought proper. “Neuroplasticity and Performance” intervenes directly in that hierarchy. It suggests that contemplative and somatic practices are not anti-intellectual alternatives to academic rigor but methods for enlarging what rigor can mean. Deep attention, self-observation, adaptive response, and the capacity to hold ideas without immediate attachment become intellectual virtues, not merely therapeutic benefits.
At this point the paper turns to neuroscience, but it does so in a distinctly Sellers-Young manner. The scientific material does not stand as triumphant proof from an external authority finally validating artists’ intuitions. Rather, it is placed in conversation with performance training to show a structural correspondence. Antonio Damasio’s “body-minded, brain” supplies a vocabulary for rejecting any strict separation between body and thought. Consciousness is “an extension of the body-minded brain’s feedback mechanisms”; mind emerges from organism-environment interaction. This is precisely the kind of anti-Cartesian claim that Sellers-Young has advanced throughout her scholarship, though elsewhere often through somatics, ritual studies, or actor training rather than neuroscience. Here Damasio enables her to state with unusual clarity that bodily disciplines of attention are cognitively consequential because cognition itself is embodied.
The Blakeslees’ notion of the “Body Mandala” extends this point. The body is mapped neurally in overlapping systems that organize movement, internal sensation, orientation, and the felt continuity of selfhood. These maps arise early, support the solid sense of “me-ness,” and yet remain changeable. Sellers-Young’s attraction to this concept is evident: it offers a way to think together bodily habit, identity, and plasticity. What one experiences as self is not a static essence but a dynamically maintained organization. That insight resonates deeply with her enduring view that bodies are historical archives patterned by experience, training, and culture. Here, however, the language shifts from cultural embodiment to neural mapping without abandoning the former. The body mandala becomes a physiological counterpart to the socially formed performer’s self.
Her next step is crucial. Contemplative practice, she argues, can bring the organism into “a state of rest” in which “somatic or memory markers can be relaxed to allow new states of conscious awareness or the potential for a revision of the body mandala.” The significance of rest here is easy to miss if one reads too quickly. Rest is not passivity. It is an interruption of automaticity. Sellers-Young has long been interested in how training can reveal and reorganize ingrained pattern; in this paper, contemplative rest becomes the condition under which pattern may loosen enough to be perceived and altered. The body’s habits are not simply overcome by force of will. They are rendered available to revision through a change in attention.
This is why the paper gives such weight to the psychology of mindfulness. Drawing on Shapiro, Carlson, Astin, and Freedman, Sellers-Young identifies three components: intention, attention, attitude. She is especially alert to the fact that mindfulness is not reducible to concentration alone. Intention matters because the aims of practice evolve—from “self-regulation to self-exploration and finally to self-liberation.” Attention matters because it trains observation of “moment-to-moment experience,” including the kinesthetic awareness Maxine Sheets-Johnstone describes. Attitude matters because the quality of attention conditions what kind of transformation is possible: critical, harsh, and self-enclosed attention does not yield the same effects as open, compassionate, nonjudgmental attention. These distinctions save the essay from a merely technicist understanding of mental training. Contemplative practice is not just a way to sharpen focus; it is a way to alter the practitioner’s relation to self and experience.
The key term here is “reperceiving,” the ability to recognize that what is observed in consciousness is not identical with the observing awareness itself. Sellers-Young treats this as the psychological correlate of neuroplasticity and as a pedagogical threshold. Once a student can observe rather than simply inhabit a pattern, self-regulation, flexibility, and value-clarification become possible. That shift is at once modest and profound. Modest, because it does not promise transcendence or total reinvention. Profound, because it creates the possibility of change at the level where habit is usually most intractable. Sellers-Young then links this possibility to Bourdieu’s “habitus,” suggesting that the revisable “body mandala” may be understood not only as a neural formation but as a socially and historically conditioned disposition. This is one of the paper’s most suggestive moves. It implies that contemplative and somatic training do not merely change private mental states; they may intervene in embodied patterning shaped by culture itself.
The implications are especially rich in light of Sellers-Young’s broader body of work, where technique is never neutral and bodily vocabularies are always culturally mediated. Even though “Neuroplasticity and Performance” does not elaborate this social dimension at length, the comparison to habitus keeps the account from collapsing into purely individual self-fashioning. Neuroplasticity here is not a celebration of free-floating personal reinvention. It names the organism’s capacity to reorganize itself, but always from within inherited formations. The possibility of change does not erase history; it makes history available to conscious renegotiation.
This tension between embodied openness and historical patterning leads directly to Sellers-Young’s critique of academic disembodiment. Citing Maria Carozzi, she argues that the academy reproduces a selective training of attention rooted in a long mind/body split, one that treats discursive work as if it were incorporeal. Reading, writing, and silent discourse become bodily habits too, but habits that suppress awareness of “the contribution of the entire self.” This critique is not anti-intellectual. It is diagnostic. Academic life, in her account, already trains bodies, but it does so covertly and incompletely. It disciplines students into certain postures of attention while disavowing embodiment as the condition of thought. Once this is recognized, the relevant pedagogical question changes. It is no longer whether one should “add” embodiment to learning, but what combination of contemplative and somatic practices might deepen experience sufficiently to enhance creative and critical thought.
That question returns the paper to the performance studio, which becomes both exemplar and testing ground. Dancers and actors, Sellers-Young writes, already work in a mode of concentration akin to contemplative forms. Their labor requires sustained sensory attention, sensitivity to partners and audience, and a capacity to maintain internal and external awareness simultaneously. For this reason, theatre and dance teachers turned to Zen and Asian performance training in order to “move beyond conflicts between ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ advocates, and to unify the performer’s mind/body.” This is not a casual observation about pedagogical fashion. It is a historical claim about the reorganization of modern performance training itself.
The synthesis she identifies between Zeami and Stanislavski is particularly revealing. Zeami’s ideal of “one intensity of mind” is quoted at length: the actor must attain “a concentration that transcends his own consciousness,” binding together the moments before and after “that instant when nothing happens.” Sellers-Young reads this as the dramatic extension of meditative concentration, then joins it to Stanislavski’s physical action. The result is not an eclectic mixture but a reconceived actor whose inner awareness and outer doing are mutually constitutive. What matters is not choosing between inward authenticity and formal action, but sustaining a concentrated state through which action becomes charged and stillness becomes active.
The “points of concentration” exercises that emerged from this lineage provide the paper with a concrete pedagogical form. These exercises begin often in repose, with breathing and muscular release, and then move through standing, walking, and locomotion. Their purpose is not to isolate meditation as a separate activity but to carry awareness into action. The actor seeks a state that Barton and Benedetti call “relaxed readiness” and “here and now,” and that Gronbeck-Tedesco names “getting ready to act”: centered, grounded, open, still, secure, responsive. Sellers-Young’s interest in these exercises lies in their refusal of static boundaries. Breath becomes the bridge between inward sensation and outward performance; stillness becomes preparatory energy rather than inactivity; movement becomes thinking in action. The performer’s consciousness is trained not by abstract reflection after the fact, but by embodied rehearsal of attention itself.
A parallel genealogy in dance allows Sellers-Young to widen the frame beyond acting. Margaret H’Doubler and Mabel Todd appear as earlier architects of body-mind integration in movement education, each in different ways understanding physical patterning and unconscious intention as central to imagination. H’Doubler still bears the marks of early twentieth-century formalism—balance, climax, sequence, harmony—but even there dance is conceived as “an artful science” of integrated embodiment. Todd’s The Thinking Body pushes further toward what would later be called somatics. By invoking Thomas Hanna’s coinage and Jill Green’s description of somatic practice as knowledge “experienced from within,” Sellers-Young makes explicit the first-person dimension that had been implicit all along. Performance training is not only about producing visible form; it is about cultivating the capacity to sense and revise movement from inside.
This commitment to inwardly lived knowledge places the paper squarely within Sellers-Young’s mature somatic thought. Somatics, for her, is never simply a set of techniques. It is a claim about epistemology and about the trainability of consciousness. Authentic Movement, Rolfing, and Feldenkrais are mentioned not to homogenize them but to identify a shared premise: attention to inner states can transform prior “somatic images” shaped by experience and open “new modes of being.” This phrase is characteristic. She is not interested only in better movement efficiency or reduced tension, though those may occur. What is at stake is the revision of embodied organization itself—neural, perceptual, imaginative, affective. The paper’s neuroscientific language gives this claim a new frame, but the underlying conviction is the same one that animates her work on breath, imagery, actor training, and reflexive ethnography: bodily attention can change the knower.
The paper’s final movement broadens from performance to contemporary education and social life. A questionnaire of incoming students at York University, Sellers-Young notes, showed their desire for skills adequate to “an unpredictable environment,” one in which they would have to “make and remake themselves” amid globalization and constant change. This is more than a timely reference to educational rhetoric in the late 2000s. It crystallizes the paper’s ethical and political horizon. The capacity she values in contemplative performance training—letting go of fixed forms, remaining open, adapting without panic—becomes a civic and existential necessity. Cunningham’s chance procedures serve as an emblem for this condition. The performer confronting improbable transitions and dice-determined sequence models a broader human demand: to move intelligently within uncertainty.
It is here that the paper achieves its largest intervention. The studio is no longer a special enclave for artists alone. It becomes a model of pedagogy for a world in flux. Sellers-Young points out that by 2005 contemplative methods were beginning to enter classrooms across the university, but theatre and dance had been doing analogous work since the 1960s. This reversal is telling. Performance is not the decorative edge of the academy belatedly borrowing seriousness from science or contemplative education. It is one of the sites where embodied forms of learning have already been developed with rigor. The humanities and arts are thus repositioned as laboratories of cognition, not merely domains of cultural expression.
What, finally, do contemplative practices contribute? Sellers-Young is careful not to confine the answer to “increased physiological coherence” or improved nervous-system function. The deeper contribution is attitudinal and epistemic. Students may learn “deep listening,” become attentive to “subtext” as well as surface, engage ideas without over-identifying with them, and remain open to creative insight. This is a notably subtle account of education. The goal is not mastery through control alone, nor creativity as unstructured freedom. It is a disciplined openness: enough form to sustain attention, enough spaciousness to allow novelty. In this sense, the paper belongs to Sellers-Young’s larger effort to redefine technique as consciousness-forming. A technique of breath, stillness, concentration, or somatic inquiry is never merely instrumental. It teaches a way of being in relation to self, others, action, and uncertainty.
Within Sellers-Young’s career, “Neuroplasticity and Performance” marks a significant consolidation. Earlier work had examined ritual as social structure in motion, intercultural transmission as embodied misunderstanding, and actor training as psychophysical integration. Here those concerns are drawn together through the concept of plasticity. Habit is embodied, but embodiment is revisable; culture patterns attention, but attention can be retrained; performance is artistic, but also cognitive and pedagogical. The paper also anticipates later developments in her thought. Its concern with how practice reshapes the self foreshadows her expanded account of reflexivity in somatic autoethnography. Its critique of academic disembodiment prefigures her later arguments about arts-based learning and sustainability as perceptual reorientation. Its cautionary distinction between Zen as idea and Zen as bodily discipline resonates with her continuing insistence that borrowed forms must be understood as techniques of subject formation, not free-floating concepts.
If there is a tension in the essay, it is a productive one. On the one hand, Sellers-Young seeks a broad account of embodied cognition that can travel across disciplines and support educational reform. On the other, her examples arise from specific historical transmissions—Zen in America, Asian performance in U.S. studios, somatic dance lineages—that are never wholly neutral. The paper does not dwell on the ethical complexities of intercultural borrowing as fully as some of her other work does. Yet even here, the emphasis on discipline, practice, and concrete pedagogical effect guards against easy universalization. Contemplative forms matter not because “the East” offers mystical wisdom to “the West,” but because particular practices of attention have demonstrably altered how performers and students inhabit their own bodies and minds.
The lasting force of “Neuroplasticity and Performance” lies in this refusal to separate art from cognition, or cognition from embodiment. Sellers-Young does not simply say that bodies matter to learning. She shows how a historically specific set of performance and contemplative practices made available a richer understanding of what learning is: a reorganization of perception, habit, and response in living time. Stillness, in this account, is not the suspension of thought but one of its conditions. Motion is not the expenditure of form but the field in which consciousness becomes visible. Between them lies the paper’s most enduring claim: that education worthy of contemporary life must teach people not only to know, but to notice how they know, and to remake that knowing through the disciplined life of the body.
Reflect with VABS