Forces in Yoga

When Janet Tsai steps in front of her Saturday morning yoga class, she's got a different vantage point than most instructors.

Instead of seeing her students like this...



She sees them like this...


Janet is a Ph.D student at the University of Colorado; her focus is engineering education with a twist (er, ardha matsyendrasana). Janet studies forces in yoga, or how fundamental laws in engineering can be identified in basic yoga poses.

An example: Janet shows Newton’s Third Law in sukasana, or the "easy sitting pose".

“Your sit bones contact the earth as your mass is pulled down by gravity. At the same time, you can feel the equal and opposite reaction of the earth as it supports your weight, pushing back up exactly equally and oppositely. Notice that your bones do not actually sink down into the earth, and the earth does not actually lift you up — instead, it’s exactly equal and perfectly matched.”

Janet breaks her research down further to show physics concepts happening in isolated body parts: torsion in a twisting spine; torque and lever arm in a bent arm. She says this example of torque is more universally accessible than, say, the infamous wrench and pipe.

“What if I’ve never used a wrench, what if I don’t know what (torque) feels like. That’s what everything else is based on. If you don’t know that first step then the rest of it’s going to be shaky. If we make people tangibly feel (torque), then they’ll have a sort of self-reliance.

Janet once counted how many free body diagrams in an introductory textbook related to structures such as cars, rockets and airplanes, then noted how many men verses women were pictured in the book. “Six women in the entire book,” she says. This is what Janet, through yoga, is trying to change.


Engineering & Yoga’s Hot Asian Lovechild

As a high schooler in Fort Collins, Janet was far from turned off from the supposedly masculine career of engineering. She was big into robotics club--“I loved creating things“ and “Guys made fun of me sometimes but it was no big deal because I was the smart Asian kid”. She proceeded on to the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, where she was part of the program’s first graduating class of 2006. The school has a unique 50-50 male to female ratio, something that Janet took for granted at the time.

When she landed her first job “laying out the curves” on robots for the company I-Robot, the lenses were abruptly removed. The company sent her to supervise factory production of their products in Shenzhen, China. “Literally, I was the only woman always,“ she said. “I was frequently mistaken for an escort.

“I felt like I was between masculine and feminine because I had to be ‘manly’ all the time.”

Janet found release in yoga. She began doing yoga constantly--in her room; her hallway; the massive seven studio center she belonged to in Hong Kong. When the year was up Janet was sent to Boston, where yoga got smoother and engineering got rough. Massive recession lay-offs in Janet‘s department meant endless work on her desk. After two years she abandoned her robotic dream job and moved back to Colorado.

In Boston she had taken a yoga teacher training course in Ashtanga-based Vinyasa, which is a classical yoga philosophy that guides its practitioners through eight steps of separation with the impure before achieving bliss. When she settled in Boulder, she began to experiment with different studios and styles. She learned the more flow-based Colorado (er, California) style, as well as Anusara, a form of yoga grounded in the Tantric philosophy. Tantric is a “heart-centered" philosophy--instead of realizing a separation of mind and body, the mind and body are connected. "It teaches you that everything you need is within," Janet says.

The practice helped her put her engineering experience into perspective.

“I realized that I can actually see things in a different way than most of the people I work with in engineering…and maybe I can try to change it.”

Janet applied and was accepted into the engineering education PhD program at CU Boulder, just as she broke into the heavily saturated Boulder yoga community and landed a teaching position. The forces of yoga became stronger (or, the arrows on the free body diagrams became more defined).

Though Janet is still trying to get monetary support for her forces in yoga research, she believes in her cause. "We can empower these students," she says. "We can give them mechanical intuition." Still, the department doesn’t traditionally fund the unconventional, so it’s been an uphill battle.

One thing CU Engineering does offer in no short supply is men, many of whom Janet insists interact with no women outside of their families.

“I try and wear a skirt once a week,” she says, smiling.



Janet‘s site: http://forcesinyoga.com/pa/Home.html

*CALLING ALL ENGINEERS: What are your thoughts? Related experiences/ideas to share? Nerdy jokes to replace "forces of yoga getting stronger"? Please comment!