Teaching Schedule:

Laura is not currently teaching any public yoga classes. At this time she is primarily teaching in academic settings.

Yoga: Theory, Culture and Practice. This course examines yoga philosophy and practice from an interdisciplinary perspective. Through the lenses of psychology, anthropology, religious studies, and health students gain insight into the rich history and the multifaceted practice of yoga that has prevailed in India for thousands of years. Additionally, we will critically explore the practice as it exists today within the cultural construct of "western" society and the meaning that is made by practitioners. Within the practice component, we will integrate the learning, apply the practice to elements of our own lives, and reflect critically on the meaning we place within this application.
3 credits. Taught at Lesley University web.lesley.edu

Yoga Psychology. Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior, mental processes, and how they are affected and/or affect an individual's physical, mental, and spiritual state. This course is designed to introduce the student to the classical East Indian texts on the nature of consciousness, mind and psychology. Students will learn the underlining theories (and related practices where applicable) of Samkhya's philosophy, The Taittreya Upanishads and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. At the end of this course participants will be prepared to thoroughly discuss the differences and similarities between "traditional" Eastern and Western concepts of consciousness, and the mind; we will also explore where and how these theories overlap today.
3 credits. Taught at International Vedic Hindu University, Orlando, Fl. ivhu.edu

Ways of Knowing. This seminar uses history and philosophy to examine some big ideas, such as the nature of truth and reality. It provides a framework for exploring how we know what we think we know. We will review Western epistemology (as well as its deconstructionist and feminist critiques), as ways of knowing. We examine the Euro-American worldview from the lens of other ways of knowing, comparing their contrasting approaches to knowledge. We question whether our paradigm (i.e., the one that we are born into) is necessarily the only way to configure reality, or if investigating the world through other lenses can also lead to scientific understanding, deep analysis, and rich inquiry.
3 credits. Taught at Lesley University web.lesley.edu

Nature of Inquiry. This seminar is an inquiry about the very nature of inquiry in our "postmodern" intellectual era, an era that questions the very nature of objectivity, proof, and generalizability as we examine the world we live in. For centuries, "researchers" have asked questions about how our world works and developed methods for answering them. In some cases, they collect data, and then they fashion frameworks for interpreting or making sense of what they have collected. In other cases they develop perspectives, arguments, and theories, a task which requires not data collection but textual work and contemplation that many of us think of as "philosophizing."
In this course our focus will be on honing our capacities to think about issues that often reside below the surface of inquiry that include such matters as our particular historical moment in the long history of social and scientific inquiry, what it means to actually "think" logically for purposes of inquiry, what sorts of ethical considerations are present along the varied terrains of research and the philosophies that underlie it. The issues we will address include assumptions about the place of perception, prior knowledge and belief, and expectation, in making sense of the human world, and how historical events have influenced the very nature of inquiry. We will also focus on presumptions about inquiry ethics, about how those who engage in sustained inquiry must regard and treat all people, their projects, and their aspirations. These assumptions all point to ways of knowing that both inform, and that result from, inquiry.
3 credits. Taught at Lesley University web.lesley.edu