Jeremy David Engels

A little about me…

I grew up on the dusty prairie in Wichita, Kansas, a child with asthma who fell in love with the library. Though I spent my childhood days and nights on the baseball diamond I felt most at home with my nose in a book. My calling came to me pretty early. I always wanted to be a teacher. What would I teach? Peace, of course. Peace has always been my goal.

I encountered the perennial philosophy in high school. One summer I visited as many holy places of worship in my hometown as I could. I understood then that timeless ideas require timely voices, voices in time. We are here, not there, now, not then. Ideas are voiced, and every time humans speak we shape reality. Even timeless ideas require people to pronounce them. Faith has a way of proving its own verification. The question is, what do we believe in?

Pursuing the perennial philosophy I read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that book I encountered rhetoric for the first time (the protagonist in the book is a professor of rhetoric). Rhetoric is the ancient art of controversy and contestation and public speaking. To me, it seemed like the art of conflict resolution—at times a goad to war, but just as often an agent of peace. So I went to graduate school to study rhetoric with dove’s wings, earning my M.A. in rhetoric from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003, and my Ph.D. in 2006. I got my first job as an assistant professor of rhetoric at Penn State University in 2006, and have been here ever since (I was promoted to full professor in 2020).

I believe that Plato was right when he hypothesized that before each of us was born, the gods split us in half. I found my other half, my soul mate, during my first week of college at the University of Kansas, in an honors seminar on the death penalty and in a biology class whose professor died during the third week of the semester (romantic beginnings, indeed). Anna Sunderland Engels is my brilliant beautiful picture-snapping world-traveling companion. There's much I’d like to say about her but the words soon fail, as they so often do. No words can capture the sun or its light.

Studying yoga and mindfulness has taken me and Anna around the world and to many unexpected places. We’ve been to India and back, four times at last count, and to Nepal twice. We studied Sanskrit, yoga philosophy, pranayama and chanting at the world-renowned Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in 2012 and 2013. We’ve embraced and rejected and then made peace with the great ancient sage of yoga, Patanjali. She left her academic job in clinical psychology to teach yoga full time in 2014. We opened a yoga studio together with friends called Yoga Lab in 2015. In 2018, we sat in meditation under the Bodhi tree, the very same place where the Buddha found enlightenment by practicing mindfulness. Returning home, we reimagined our mission at Yoga Lab – our goal is now to blend functional movement with mindfulness practice (we define yoga as “mindfulness in motion”). In 2018 we watched the sun set at Nalanda University, the oldest university in the world in northern India, while chanting the heart sutra with Buddhist monks. I published two more academic books, The Art of Gratitude (2018) and The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita (2021), describing practices from around the world for promoting peace. In 2023 we visited Thich Nhat Hanh’s root monastery in Vietnam and walked in his footsteps under a chilly December rain. While sitting under a Bodhi tree at Tu Hieu monastery, I decided to pursue the calling of becoming a dharma teacher in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition. I created the “Dharma Lab” sangha in January 2024, and began offering formal mindfulness classes in addition to the yoga classes I regularly teach to the State College community at that time.

I consider myself to be an American Transcendentalist, and stand proudly in the lineage of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and, especially, Walt Whitman. My students at Penn State know me as the “bed-headed professor” and “yoga prof” and “Swami J.” My classes in communication, ethics, and mindfulness have been described as “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood meets Walt Whitman, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Good Place.” I believe that words should, as Emerson wrote, “repair the decays of things.” The best scholarship is poetry, the best communication, yoga.

And here we stand, on our lovely, imperiled planet, doing our part as best we can to contribute to a peaceful future, a future founded not on acquiescence or spiritual apathy or complacent individualism but on justice.

No peace, no justice.

And make no mistake, the path to peace is not a solitary path. Peace requires working together. Hand in hand. So let's get to it.