5.3: Habits of Mind and Body- Metacognition

The data I continue to collect from my classes convinces me that approaching writing through yoga has the ability to increase writers’ embodied awareness of themselves and the world in which they live because it places their writing bodies at the center of the composing process and not at the periphery. In turn, student writers become more attentive to the other bodies to which they are connected by virtue of their shared materiality, prompting both selfand other-awareness. In other words, yoga helps students develop a corporeal orientation to themselves, to others and to the writing process by making them mindful of the ways their bodies help create meaning in their papers. They see how their bodies shape their perspectives as well as the evidence they cite to support their arguments, and they notice the physical dynamics and demands of the writing process itself. In the contemplative tradition, mindfulness is used to describe awareness of the present moment and attentiveness to experience. Rather than getting ruminatively “caught up with the ‘internal chattering’ of the mind or other contents of awareness, individuals who engage in mindfulness practice learn to observe their thoughts, emotions, and sensations in an objective and receptive manner, focusing on the process of awareness, rather than the content” (Robins et al., 2010, p. 118). Developing mindfulness allows writers to become aware of and then monitor their thoughts and feelings. With awareness, they can begin to regulate their thoughts and emotions in productive ways that transcend automatic habits and thoughtless reactions. Practices like yoga that cultivate mindfulness are not simply relaxation techniques then, but are “rather a form of mental training to reduce cognitive vulnerability to reactive modes of mind that might otherwise heighten stress and emotional distress” (Bishop et al., n.d., p. 6). For instance, restorative poses such as Savasana, a supine position on the floor, encourage us to become aware of our feelings of restlessness, imbalance or rigidity so that we may release and relax into an attentive calm we might not otherwise achieve if we never consciously attended to those feelings.

Because mindfulness engages students in monitoring their thoughts and redirecting them, it can be understood as a metacognitive skill, or one that engages students in thinking about thinking (Bishop et al., n.d., p. 11). The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing defines metacognitive abilities as including the ability to analyze epistemology, or the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking in ways that puts it in dialogue with “cultural processes and systems used to structure knowledge” (2011, p. 5). In writing courses, metacognitive acts draw students into an analysis about their thinking processes and about their writing practices and the ways writing creates meaning (and doesn’t simply reflect it). This analysis encourages writers to make epistemological conclusions about context, place, form and audience—or, most simply, the situatedness of meaning. Attentiveness to situatedness is a direct application of our yoga practice and is embodied every time students make choices about which poses to integrate from our yoga labs. I encourage my students to apply the embodied knowledge they gain from the integration of yoga and writing strategically and mindfully based on their needs, developing physical writing habits that are best for them: those who find a practice of restorative yoga poses helpful to promote focus and clarity are encouraged to use these; others who find more energetic poses beneficial to generate ideas are encouraged to use those. And all are encouraged to mix and combine these methods since their bodies and minds are dynamic and therefore unification of their energies can proceed in different ways on different days.

Because they are both involved in generating new knowledge about the visceral and situated nature of writing and in contextually applying these ideas to their own composing processes, students who practice yoga and writing together are, I argue, thinking metacognitively on a consistent basis. Using their blogs to spur their reflections simply enforces this kind of thinking; writing about writing leads to thinking about thinking. What’s more, because students approach such metacognition from an activity of mindfulness, they more readily assume a learning orientation “characterized by curiosity, openness and acceptance,” the state of a mindful mind (Bishop et al., n.d., p. 9). The return on this orientation is open acceptance of writing bodies, as I’ve shown, and a growing acceptance of the physicality of the composing process. Students’ blog responses further enact what we might understand to be the three primary elements of metacognitive thinking: planning an approach to a given learning task, monitoring comprehension and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task (Lv & Chen, 2010, p. 136).

Approaching Writing

As I’ve illustrated in my previous sections, consciousness of how the body bears on the process of making meaning changes how students think about and complete writing tasks; students confront the ways they may have narrowly categorized the writing process as a “brain activity,” a conception that previously encouraged mindlessness in regards to bodily influences on their writing. Now conscious of their writing bodies, they begin to attend to the shaping powers of materiality on meaning and on the meaning making processes of writing. For instance, Terry notes that a regular practice of doing yoga helps him “get ideas for writing.” Terry believes that if not for yoga, his brainstorming would suffer:

Had I forced myself to sit and write in front of a laptop, I doubt if I would come up with ideas so easily. Had I limited myself only to the mental aspect of writing, I would never have enjoyed writing at all. Who would love writing if he has to sit for three straight hours and struggle to write his papers? This is the reason I become obsessed with writing overnight.

Terry examines the mindset he takes into the writing process and finds that yoga helps sustain motivation because it gives his body a release from the stress of staring at a blank Word document. His reflective response represents the ways he has learned to use yoga specifically for brainstorming, which has worked so well that he has become “obsessed” with the writing process as a result of our class. If metacognition entails being able to notice changes to ways of thinking and to adapt execution of the writing process in order to respect these new ways of thinking, then my student here demonstrates this ability.

Students also begin to do the metacognitive work of unpacking how their bodies’ intelligence transfigures the meaning, and not just the transmission of ideas, in their writing. Terry tells us how he begins to tap into the intelligence of his body in order to create more effective and creative writing sessions. In contrast to his yoga-writing practice, approaching writing as only a mental task, as he did prior to our course, is a “limitation,” he tells us. The metacognitive act of thinking about writing spurred on by our yoga practice and supported by our classroom discussions helped another student reconceptualize writing similarly. Peter states that he began “to see writing as an animating physical task rather than a monotonous mental chore.” He reports in a blog post that this changes his relationship to writing, as he begins to understand how the process of writing was physically demanding in ways he hadn’t typically respected, as all-nighters meant to finish papers ignored up until their due dates confirmed. New understandings of the writing process, of “writing physically” as he calls it, also breed new ideas about meaning creation for this student. Reassessing the content of his writing, Peter remarks that even when he isn’t writing in first person, his ideas “originate from what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, what we feel, with everything being alive and activated.” Conceiving of writing in this way brings my student not simply motivation for process drafting but also increased respect for the ways knowledge is sensory and visceral.

Monitoring Comprehension

While I’ve already explained the ways contemplative activities such as yoga help students develop a self-monitoring mindset to the end of increasing their attention in my section on persistence, this mindset also applies to the metacognitive processing that these activities encourage. As they explore their changing approaches to the writing process, students must come to terms with how changes in the execution of the writing process positively impact their understanding of writing too. As they write differently, their concept of composing substantially shifts.

Sarah’s new appreciation for writing as an embodied process is such a liberating one for her that she begins to critique standard forms of academic writing. She sees these in a new light because of how successful integration of yoga and writing is for her. While she frames her understandings in common language since I provided little framework and no jargon for these insights in class, she specifically questions the masculinist bias inherent in those standards of keeping “yourself out of your writing, even when it’s you always writing.” Instead, she believes it’s important to “respect our bodies” as writers. Writing a decidedly feminist statement in regards to the liberatory potential of embodied writing, Sarah claims a newfound appreciation for the importance of experience as evidence in her writing and how “remember[ing] how our bodies affect our emotions” can help her draft more persuasive arguments. While these new recognitions specifically “help when writing more creative pieces,” they also pique her interest in hybrid, critical arguments that require recounting and analyzing personal experiences alongside other forms of substantiated evidence. These inclusions are “something that we don’t usually do, we usually compartmentalize our minds from our bodies and even parts of our body from our body as a whole” according to Sarah. Developing her feminist message, she goes on to say, “and this happens more with women; women tend to be partialized.” In a conference with me, Sarah disclosed why she was so passionate about critiquing the ways women are encouraged to see their bodies in parts: this stemmed from her experience with seeing fellow competitive figure-skaters succumb to disordered eating because of the pressures they felt to stay thin. Sarah noted that she herself had only just begun to value her strength as a competitive athlete over her thinness. Because Sarah thinks “it’s harder for women to think of their bodies and minds as wholes instead of individual parts,” she believes in the feminist potential for contemplative writing practices that validate the body’s felt intelligence. For Sarah, a female writer and a lifelong figure-skater, the embodied imagination of the writing yogi is necessarily a part of a feminist epistemology which changes her understanding of how certain choices in writing lead to the creation of different ways of knowing and being in the world. Certainly, these are life-changing conclusions that were spurred on by our contemplative agenda.

Other students note changes in their understanding of writing on a smaller scale, in terms of their confessed weaknesses. A weakness many students’ metacognitive remarks coalesce around is the value of focus and the means to sustain attention, which is helpfully developed by our practice of yoga. Summarizing her peers, Samantha states, “My personal writing pain comes in the form of focus.” But yoga helps Samantha to relax: “I was trying to brainstorm over the weekend and I laid [sic] on the floor and put my legs up and thought. My roommate thought I was crazy, but I think I actually like what I thought up. I was relaxed and when relaxed, it’s easier to connect to my body and mind …. Hopefully my narrative will benefit from this connection and ease I felt while brainstorming.” And it does, perhaps because she develops this metacognitive insight: “When writing [the second paper] I kind of answered each point individually, and I think next time I’m going to try and avoid doing that. Instead I’ll try to make [my analysis] more focused and connected so I’m not just answering one part and then another.” From this metacognitive vantage point yoga becomes a means of problem-solving. Devon uses yoga to solve his problem of jumpiness as well: “Yoga gave me a way to see inside my writing. My writing can be extremely jumpy from time to time. Yoga paired with the breathing exercises helped minimize the jumpiness … with my improved focus, my papers began to make more sense and stick to one topic.”

That yoga can help my students “see inside” their writing and can help them describe the process of creating drafts that exhibit cohesion and clarity testifies to the power of contemplative acts to bring about metacognitive awareness of the writing process. Yoga gives writers new methods to plan the writing process and work through the stages of writing from drafting to revising. It also helps them monitor their understanding of audience, exhibiting a sense of mindfulness about how audience, purpose and organization are connected.

Self-Evaluation

Finally, yoga writing can give students a new method for self-evaluation, or for gauging their learning progress and determining successful completion of writing goals. My student Sarah says, for example, “The whole process [of using yoga for writing] has also brought me to see writing on a grander scale,” because yoga exercises “allowed for self-evaluation” when writing. Yoga helps Sarah become a more flexible thinker and writer. And as she notes, “I think that emotionally, I got a lot more relaxed about writing, and that is growth.” Sarah continues her self-evaluative reflection and states that yoga helped her see how writing should be like “a person on a page, and that’s not perfect.” What this means to her is that rather than hiding from ambiguity in her writing, she should embrace it:

Confusion can be shown in the paper, though not by confusing the reader, and instead by asking questions about the world and our being … though initially chaos may ensue from the lack of concrete knowledge, the ultimate result of imagination and exploration of self will be incredible …. Then we can continuously redefine ourselves without fear of change, without fear of loss.

While Sarah’s formulation may be one of the more direct and perceptive I’ve received, her classmates responses rally around the shared understanding that by alleviating anxiety and prompting self-evaluation, yoga helps student writers successfully cope with ambiguity at the level of meaning making in their writing. That yoga becomes for students a new way of understanding writing as well as a set of practical tools to help them cope with these negative emotions of writing is telling of the lessons students can potentially learn as writing yogis, which have both imaginative as well as lived consequences.

Sarah is not alone in her growth. Nicole also believes that yoga helps her to stop ruminating on her “flaws” as a writer and helps her to accept them as points for future growth, not signs of present failure: “To be able to know that you can improve in the future [as a writer], and to be able to find your own flaws is growth. I don’t understand how I was never able to do that before.” And this growth helps Nicole approach writing more joyfully, now that she better recognizes her own thinking: “My writing process is so much more relaxed, so much less tearful, when there is less pressure on me to make it perfect, and I never really realized until this year that the majority of that pressure was not placed upon me by my teacher or peers, but instead by myself.” This revelation transforms my student’s attitude toward writing and learning and releases the intense pressure she felt when writing previously—so much so that she confided in me shortly after writing this blog that for the first time, she enjoyed writing and hoped to find more ways of making it a part of the fabric of her life.

As my students have shown, contemplative writing pedagogies can help writers develop habits of mind consistent with the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. When I began this chapter, I noted that I would not fully explore the cultivation of each of the eight habits the Framework lists out of a concern for space but would instead focus on just three. In the exploration of those three, I believe it becomes clear how one habit unfolds to reveal the others. Before I end, however, I’d like to draw everything together by reviewing this unfolding and bringing these three habits in dialogue with the others once more. I remain general in my closing, hoping the reader will reference specific examples from my case studies above.

Because approaching the composing process through yoga necessarily involves students in a novel process of inquiry that has them asking creative questions about the physicality of the writing and meaning-making process, it piques students’ curiosity about how writing works, what it can do and also about different, culturally-contingent ways of knowing. In thinking about how their bodies shape the writing process and, therein, the written product, students confront the Western conception of knowledge as removed from the body and complicate this with Eastern concepts of the body-mind exemplified by our practice of yoga. This engagement helps them open up to new ways of thinking and being in the world, especially those that are less dualistic. As students notice how simple things like posture affect the meaning they create in their papers, they begin to wonder how knowledge is impacted by even larger material and social factors, so much so that one of my students developed his own theory of situated composing he later reduced to a personal mantra of “where I write is what I write.” This is creativity at its strongest.

Understanding knowledge as situated helps students flexibly adapt to context, genre and audience and to recognize the value in certain writing conventions, which can help foster communication with and through a myriad of differences. Practically, students also learn to work with their own embodied differences as writers, figuring out how and when to integrate yoga poses and techniques in their writing process in order to become more persistent, focused writers who can sustain interest and attention. Sustained interest, students learn, is partly accomplished by learning to be responsible to both their writing bodies and minds, which cannot be easily accomplished in all-nighters that produce a first-and-last draft paper. From a yogic perspective, these lessons of navigating our inner worlds translate to external applications so that as students become responsible to their own bodies, they extend this responsibility to other material beings by virtue of their connectedness to them. In the writing classroom, this application starts with students’ classmates. Students come to see how peer review, for instance, derives its meaning from its ability to foster resonant, material connections between writing bodies with dissimilar ideas, less so because of its function as a tool to catch errors before a paper is due.

All these efforts represent a new way of thinking about the writing process as well as a new method of doing writing that includes attention to the body and a working with it. These changes, therein, encourage students to entertain a level of metacognition about their writing that may otherwise be absent or at least not enthusiastically exercised in classrooms where the reflective stakes are lower, often because students can mindlessly pass through while remaining within their learning comfort zones. My experiences have shown me how contemplative writing pedagogies encourage authors to reflect on themselves as embodied, as writing yogis, to experience the writing process as physically demanding and to recognize the writing product as materially saturated. With these habits of mind and body cultivated and enacted, students exposed to this pedagogy become embodied imaginers in all the ways I describe in previous chapters. In the next chapter and interchapter pair, I turn to the last element of imagining: feeling. Chapter Three explores how contemplative pedagogues might attend to feeling using understandings of flexibility from yoga and Interchapter Three tests these theories out, applying them to examine the consequences of integrating exercise of pranayama, or focused breathing, in the writing classroom.