'You Say Goodbye, I Say In-tro!'
Once you have completed writing and editing your essay, you can begin the introduction. That’s right, right when you think you are saying goodbye to your essay, you say hello to your listener— the intro is your last step! The essay is your cake, and the intro is it’s icing— quite literally as an intro rests on the body of your work, like icing, and is the first thing people see when they encounter it, and taste when they bite into it. Often times we don’t leave time to focus on the introduction, but with a little guidance you’ll see that the introduction can be the most creative part of your teaching process for both you and your students.
As we concluded in the last chapter, the body of your introduction is based on your outline, which is yet another reason the outline saves you time. Sometimes the process of using your outline to frame your introduction will actually inspire a final level of fine tuning of your outline and essay, as you start to really see how everything comes together.
The introduction itself encapsulates the body of your work in 3-4 sentences, which is helpful for your students to get a sense of the path we will be taking to the mountain top of your presentation. But we can do even better. Every introduction also includes a single sentence that encapsulates both the path, the obstacles and the goal of our work— like taking a moment to look up at the mountain, the path, and the peak before you embark on your journey. In academia we know this as the thesis statement, in yoga we would call this a Sutra— A single seed that houses the DNA of the entire teaching. Like a seed, it is concise and memorable enough to be carried home in the mind of the student to be planted in the soil of their practice. And like the seed of a tree, there’s a lot packed into this small space. Needless to say, you can’t find your thesis from the outside in, trying to fit every step of your journey into single sentence. You can only find your thesis from the inside out, turning your attention within and feeling the essence of your experience. It’s poetic and scientific all at the same time, communicating both feeling and instruction. Read through the Shiva Sutras, the Yoga Sutras, or the Vijnana Bhairava and you’ll start to see the magic of the sutra. One of my favorite Sutras is from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: “Through self-enquiry the practitioner gains insight, but eventually all mental logic must come to an end in bliss— Following that is the comprehension that all is the Self (yoga)” (1.17) It says so much in a single memorable seed: You have the path, the obstacles, and the goal, all in one sentence.
So by now we’ve used our outline to write the body of our introduction, and then turned within to discover a powerful and concise Sutra. Our last step is the opening line of our essay/presentation. The way you begin your essay or presentation is almost like it’s own mini intro itself. It’s the first impression. If the essay is the cake, and the intro is the icing on the cake, then the opening line is the birthday song you sing as you bring the cake out—-“happy birthday to yooooouuuuu!!”. It’s hard to imagine a birthday cake without that special opening line.
In the world of writing, there is a general consensus on the top 3 ways to begin an essay/presentation, and the top way not to begin. The top way not to begin your essay/presentation is by saying, “this essay is about the witness practice. I had a great time researching this topic and learned alot along the way. I hope you enjoy this presentation.” Why shouldn’t we start like this? Because the very fact that you are presenting this material already tells us all this— we are here to listen or read from you because we assume you did research, found something worthy of telling another person, and are excited to tell us about it. Imagine if instead of singing the birthday song someone just said this while they brought you the cake: ‘this is a birthday cake I got for your birthday today. I enjoyed buying it for you. I think it looks delicious.” Everyone would rather hear the song, and see candles, and breathe in the magic. So let’s talk about the top three ways to make it special.
The third best way to begin your teaching is with a fun and fascinating fact that really brings perspective to the topic. If, for example, you were writing an essay on the witness state and the screen of the mind, you could start with a fact like “on average, Americans spend 12 hours a day in front of screens,” and then tell people, “yogis wrote about this 1,000 years ago in the Pratybhijnahridayam when they said that all of reality is projected onto a screen.” The fact gets people’s attention, and then the tie in brings a real depth of perspective to the topic.
The second best way to begin your teaching experience is with a question, or some kind of thought experiment to get people personally engaging with the topic. If you were teaching online, or even being read online, then you could ask the following question: ”Take a moment and zoom your attention out from the screen you are looking at me on right now. Can you see the room you’re in and this screen too? How do you zoom out from this screen of the mind, the screen through which you view this room? Meditation will give you just that ability.” A good question is more than an inquiry about a topic, it’s an experience of it.
And many writers agree that the best way to begin your essay or presentation is….drum roll please… with a story! Yes, a story! There’s nothing more instantly captivating than a great story. It could be a personal story, or a zen parable, or something from the Hindu Pantheon, as long as it supports your topic. Don’t be afraid to really just open with the story, no preamble or explanation, just start the story. Again, whether they are reading your essay, or listening to your presentation, everyone already knows why we’re all here together— they’re more ready than you’ll ever know and can’t wait to get started!
Breaking free of the Script
As yogis, we all yearn to be able to teach from our hearts, not our heads, as much as possible. We know from our teachers that teaching from the heart unlocks the magic of our practice, but we also know that we are in a teaching position because we have students who need clear instruction, not to mention we have worked really hard gathering this information for them. For those reasons, most teachers will tend to error on the side of teaching from their script. Many teachers try to get off script, but find themselves off track quickly, and then struggling to find their way again. We all start somewhere, but we shouldn’t let ourselves stay at this level too long. The word Shambhava itself means the work of having one’s awareness on the arena of one’s life while maintaining an inner focus-- so essentially being able to maintain awareness of your presentation while teaching from the heart going to help us grow as yogis. So let’s look at a few ways we can get ourselves moving in this valuable direction.
This first method is very straight forward and easy to incorporate. It basically entails breaking your essay down into individual thoughts, or ‘rungs on a ladder, so that instead of looking down at full paragraphs when you glance at your essay, you are looking down at each step of your essay. This doesn’t mean you put a paragraph break between each sentence, but rather that you read through your essay and try to separate each individual thought. These individual thoughts become rungs on a ladder for you to climb through your presentation with ease. You’ll find that when you see the first few words of a certain rung, the rest of that thought can flow without needing to read off the script. Other rungs, especially those with quotes, might require a word-for-word reading. The ladder rung method gives you the opportunity to make that choice as you’re going.
Here’s a quick example— in the following paragraph you could put 3 line breaks to help you see the 3 different thought: //Facts like these tell us what we all already know but don’t always want to admit: to actually effect a change in our bodies, and in our lives, we have to participate in the process in a conscious, disciplined steadfast way. // Or as Patanjali put it in his Yoga Sutras 2,000 years ago, “Regular, whole-hearted application over time will create a foundation whereby the practice is firmly integrated” (1.14). // Advice like this is easy to understand when it comes to our physical bodies, as if the Sutra could say ‘Regular whole hearted sips of water throughout the day will create a foundation whereby hydration is firmly integrated’— but very few of us take time to apply this same principle to our spiritual practice.
Another method to help yourself get off script is do a ‘stepping stone’ practice. This method is based on your outline. Can you walk casually through your essay in a clear and simple way? This means that you have simplified the path of the essay into clear 'stepping stones’ that you can actually remember enough to teach from. Practice doing this with a friend over coffee— keep it casual so you can see if your path is really simple enough for you and your friend to follow. If you can’t communicate it with ease, you might need to simplify your message. I have personally found that this method also forces me to come to terms with my essay as a whole, much like the introduction did, and often shows me redundancies in the essay, or overly complex areas. Being able to talk through your stepping stones could be a great boost to your essay’s clarity and your student’s comprehension.
Last, sometimes we just need force ourselves off-script a few times in our essay just to feel that it’s possible. There are two very obvious times in every presentation that you should feel compelled to raise your eyes from the paper. The first time is any time you are telling a personal story. No matter how well you wrote it, looking up and connecting with your class will always write it better for your listeners. It’s your story after all, you can’t tell it wrong— in fact, you’re the only person in the world who can tell it. So no matter how you tell it, it’s great. So let yourself drop the script and enjoy this moment in your presentation.
The other moment of your presentation you can be sure that your student’s will benefit from your effort to get off script is after reading a quote. When we read a quote, of course we will be reading from the script, and after the quote we should always pause for students to reflect. This gives students the all needed quiet moment to feel the quote, and it also gives us a moment to glance at the next ‘rung on our presentation ladder’. After the pause, we can now look up and connect with the students for our next point. This is especially helpful because quotes are so exact, and sometimes heady, and talking more casually and from the heart can help your students connect back with the experience of the presentation in a more natural way.
Hopefully these simple methods get the ball rolling for you, but of course there is always the intangible quality of ‘effort over time’ that ultimately frees us from the bondage of our script and mind: The more you teach, the better you’ll get at teaching. Getting off script is a part of our practice as ShambhavAnanda Yogis— ‘with essays open, but attention within'.