Lynch, Paul. “Shadow Living: Toward Spiritual Exercises for Teaching.” College English 80:6 (2018): 499-516. Web.

1. Summary:

Paul Lynch takes us on a somewhat wobbly journey through the dark night of the teaching soul. He starts with an experienced teacher teetering on the edge, standing in class at 4pm, wondering what is happening, entering into a kind of existential teaching criss. Lynch wants to call this moment a demoralization, tracing the etymology of the word, describing how it can occur from sudden failures, but more often from a sort of teacherly burnout. Often, he claims, reflection is the prescribed cure for such burnout, but too much reflection can also be the cause. He seems to grope towards a more murky claim that the real source of such ennui is too much distance from the subject, from the self, from the process. In his later sections, he speaks of the Stoics, who wrote as an active engagement with their lives, not as a reflection looking back in. So the self moves from outside the self—gazing, analyzing, discussing—to a more interior place where writing becomes active engagement—rigorous, focused, alive. This writing, he tells us, is a spiritual practice and may well save us from despair.

2. Quotations:

“There are practices that might help us live, at least occasionally, in the shadows, practices that are often gathered under the rubric of spirituality. Chief among these is a habit of written exercise that seeks neither to make arguments nor provide answers, but instead to occasion a kind of openness crucial for inhabiting a network of obligations.” (501)

“The demoralized person is one whose ways of building confidence and kindling hope no longer serve.” (504)

“The purpose of [Yagelski’s] style of reflection is not to engender a traditional or conventional kind of rhetorical agency so much as a more intense being in the world.” (507)

“Writing becomes a way of engaging and cultivating experience, including the nondiscoursive.” (507)

“Treating writing as a spiritual exercise would provide a way to occasion that encounter when the usual reflective approaches do not seem to work.” (513)

Reflection:

Oh what this article might have been! Lynch’s arguments felt more like a patchwork, threadbare quilt pulling apart at the seams than a tightly woven tapestry. His incessant quotations had the overall effect of making me want to read someone else who might have said it better (Foucault, for instance). It’s unfortunate, because I think he has some important points.

Chief among them that simple writing as reflection does not seem sufficient to do the kind of care of self that may be necessary to maintain a career in which we continue to feel engaged, alive, fulfilled. Analysis may help us gain mastery, but it will not save us from despair.

But what is the nature of that despair?

I would have liked to see Lynch spend a little more time here. It’s a curious choice to have a conversation about Shadow without any reference to Carl Jung or mention of psychotherapy. Perhaps Lynch takes for granted our understanding of what the Shadow is: where it comes from, how it manifests. To me, some further analysis seems necessary.

As a beginning teacher, I would have been personally interested to see him speak a little more on sudden demoralization. What do we do after humiliating, defeating moments? Relive through writing? Practice meditation? Exercise vigorously? How do you live in the shadow of your mistakes without letting them consume you? How do you keep from that persecution of self, that immediate desire to hide and repress? Instead, he speaks briefly of burning out, and then spends a great deal of time on writing as reflection, coming to the uncertain conclusion that it’s good, unless it’s bad.

As I read Lynch’s thoughts on reflective writing, I recalled some of Bean’s thoughts on free-writing. We use free-writing in class to help students formulate thoughts, gain confidence, open some creative pathways, and yes, do some reflection. Free-writing seems like a larger term then, something that could perhaps approach the level of a spiritual practice as Lynch wants to see it. If reflection is too distanced, too removed, a more focused dive into free-writing might bring us back into closer contact with our unconscious, our inner selves, in the same way Bean says it will for our students.

In some ways, Lynch seems worried about making concrete suggestions or even to approach spirituality directly for fear of being disregarded or dismissed. I did found it useful of him to remind us that spiritual practice is just that: practice. Meaning find to the point of boredom and pain. Practice is something that takes energy, commitment, and follow-through. I only wish he had himself followed through here and talked about just what that would look like. The closest I can guess is that he thinks we should all keep a daily journal. Which, fine, I support that, but it hardly comes to the level of a spiritual practice on the level of Marcus Aurelius.

What would go in the journal? What kind of writing would move it from self-indulgence, or surface level reflection, or gossip, or dream notes, and into a practice? What would it take to turn Bean’s free-writing concepts for students into a deep, consistent, rigorous spiritual practice for professionals? Is it a matter of the time spent? Of focus or subject matter? Would we need to share it with an advisor? Doesn’t most spiritual practice seem to revolve around relationship? What would it mean to view writing as prayer?

And what other sorts of spiritual practices might be helpful? How do we go about confronting the shadow world of anger, shame, defeat, boredom, death? Might we try dialogue? Looking ahead to our teaching performance, I am wondering about ways of combining a sort of team-teaching model with an active support system. How we can observe, collaborate, and care for each other, facing some of the dark, existential worries together instead of alone. For I doubt that established teachers do a lot of in-classroom collaboration or a lot of after hours emotional support with one another. It’s not really a surprise that Lynch holds up the lonely Stoic as his ideal. I just wonder whether it really is the best one when we talk about care of self and confronting shadow.

I found this article hoping it would address some of the dark sides of teaching: the lonely, difficult, scary moments and what we do with them, how we live with them. Instead, it turned into a wandering pastiche of other people’s thoughts strung together with blocky prose, poking briefly into a few interesting holes before struggling off into the setting sun, shadow cast out long on the ground, mysteriously unexamined.