How Active Reading Strategies Are Enhancing My Yoga Practice: A Mini-Case Study in Reimagining My Sacrum
Image: Author's own
I've often had the experience of taking a yoga class that I forgot about within a few days. When I asked myself what I had experienced in class, very little came to mind.
It recently struck me that there's a parallel with my reading. More often than I'd like to admit, I've read an essay, a news article, or a chapter in a book only to forget what I read by the day’s end. Where did the information and ideas I took in go, I wondered.
As I thought about my experience of forgetting what I read, I realized that I sometimes let slip into dormancy understandings about active reading strategies that I had developed years ago. I have used such strategies to help me not only remember what I've read but construct lasting meaning from it. At times, I've gotten lazy and haven't used these strategies. But it has worked out better when I have.
Given the parallel of my reading experience with yoga, I've become curious about whether adapting active reading strategies to yoga would yield benefits. This essay is a report on what I've learned about trying to do just that--to see whether I could apply lessons learned as a reader to my experience of yoga classes.
The essay is intended for both beginning and experienced yoga practitioners, but especially those who like to read as well as to do yoga.
Let me begin with an overview of active reading strategies and the context in which I learned them.
Reading as an Active Thinking and Self-Regulating Process
Several decades ago, I had the good fortune to work with a group of middle and high school English language arts teachers on curriculum development projects in their field. One of the things I learned from working with them is a perspective on reading. For these teachers, reading was not mainly about associating letters on a page with words. It was more fundamentally about building students' capacity to think about what they were reading, to derive meaning from it, and to create bridges from what they read to their own lives, to other sources of knowledge or inspiration, and to the world. I had always liked to read, and read regularly, but I had never thought so deliberately and conceptually about reading.
Some teachers used the abbreviation KWLA to represent active reading strategies. The abbreviation stood for questions students were learning to ask themselves before, during, and after reading. The questions went something like this:
K What do I already know about this topic?
W What do I want to learn?
L What have I learned? If I'm not understanding something, what can I do?
A How can I apply what I've learned in my own life or in related topic areas?
These questions were deceptively simple. I say deceptively because it turns out that the questions reflected considerable research in what was termed by cognitive psychologists "metacognition," or thinking about one's own thinking. As I looked into the research on reading, it seemed that students who were able to use metacognitive strategies in reading were much more likely to read with understanding and purpose than students who approached reading as a simple comprehension of words on a page. These metacognitive strategies included the ability to activate their prior knowledge about a reading selection, relate new information and ideas to what they already knew, check for their understanding of the material and take deliberate steps to improve their understanding when needed, and apply and extend what they were reading in personally meaningful ways. KWLA was a distillation of metacognitive research and teachers' practical understanding of how to help students become more thoughtful, effective, and self-directing readers.
Application to Yoga: A Mini-Case Study
I endeavored to use the KWLA framework in a recent yoga class that focused on the sacrum and the lumbar (lower back) spine. For present purposes, I'm going to zero in on the parts of the class that centered on the sacrum. What follows is a mini-case study of how KWLA strategies played out in my learning experience related to this bone.
K: What do I know?
I was used to setting an intention at the start of a yoga class, but I wasn't used to asking myself what I already knew about the class theme. My intention for a class might have been, for example, to welcome my experience in class with openness and curiosity. But asking myself what I knew was interestingly different. What the question did was prompt me to bring to conscious awareness ideas, images, and experiences that could help me relate to and make sense of the learning ahead. After all, for learning to be meaningful, I needed to see a connection between what was new and what was already a part of me. Otherwise, new information and ideas would go in one ear and out the other.
The class I'll be referring to was part of a program that I've cited in previous articles, the HeartSong Yoga Sanctuary. Students have a portal to all class materials, including recordings of the classes, which are offered through Zoom. When I saw the title of the class on the sacrum and the curves of the spine, I took a moment to harvest my prior knowledge about the sacrum. I found that I knew some important things about it. For example, even before the teacher flashed on the screen a picture of the sacrum, an image of this "sacred" bone came to mind. I was able to visualize the bone as the very base of my spine. I saw it as an inverted pyramid that curved in a C-shape, with the arc of the curve moving away from the midline downward to the tailbone. Along with this image came a sense of my sacral base as a hub of support for the rest of my spine, the overall uprightness of my body, and the resilient action of my pelvis. I was pleased to see that I brought more than a blank slate to this class.
Yet it struck me that what appeared as more than a blank slate represented not only conceptual knowledge, such as knowledge of the anatomy of the sacrum, but embodied knowledge, the knowledge of how to move my body and touch into my breath to experience the aliveness of my sacrum. To draw upon this body-centered knowledge, even before the class began, I did a few pelvic tilts while in a seated posture, with my sacrum acting like the captain of a ship that was guiding my two pelvic halves forward and back, as if undulating with the rhythm of a gently rolling sea.
As I experienced my sacrum in this captain role, it seemed to me that I was activating both my formal knowledge of the sacrum and my embodied knowledge of its actions and energy. I felt more prepared and more eager to hear what the teacher had to say about the sacrum than if I had begun class without prior thought and without my experience of the sacrum's vitality.
W: What do I want to know?
I don't have the habit of asking myself what I want to learn from a yoga class. I try to be receptive, even enthused, about the class experience that awaits me, but I don't articulate what I'd like to learn. As I reflected on the "What do I want to know" strategy in reading, which helps readers set a purpose and focus for their nonfiction reading, it seemed to me that it might be fruitful to set a priority or two for my learning in a yoga class. This would be noticeably different from maintaining a general openness to whatever learning might come along. Becoming clear about my own goals for learning might enhance my sense of agency and self-direction.
Along with boosting my agency as a learner, setting a focus for my learning might help me to pay attention and remember aspects of my class experience in a more mindful way than suggested by the "peak-end" rule. This rule grew out of a series of ingenious experiments conducted by the late Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-prize winning psychologist, and his colleagues more than two decades ago (see, as one highly accessible source, Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.) The peak-end rule holds that people tend to remember only what is most intense about an experience or what comes at the end. The moment-to-moment experience of an event, and the net overall feelings people have about it, gives way in memory to that which jumped out with strong energy or appeared as the event was ending. So, in the context of a yoga class, an important reason for setting a focus for learning was to assure that I didn't end up remembering only a peak moment or only what I experienced at the end of class.
The main learning focus that came to mind was about metaphors. In the past few years, metaphors that compared a dry and technical anatomical feature or physiologic process with an image I could more readily and energetically relate to have helped me to experience actions in my body in a fresh way. So, I wondered whether the teacher might offer engaging metaphors to re-imagine my sacrum, beyond the literal picture I had in my mind of the basic shape of the bone and beyond the metaphor that arose for me earlier about the sacrum as the captain of a ship, steering my two pelvic halves. I also wondered whether the class might stimulate me to create my own metaphors, a process even more exciting than adopting someone else's.
I knew that class would involve doing poses and not merely exploring metaphors. For sure, a yoga class is an opportunity to move in space and not simply consider the poetry of the body. But because I've been studying and doing yoga for 20 years, I'm familiar with the poses I do in class and the basic principles of alignment that give structure to them. What new or revisited metaphors often do is enable me to travel in my imagination and in my enactment of familiar poses to new places of sensation and, by extension, new possibilities for experiencing life.
L: What am I learning?
Just as effective readers pause during their reading, look up from the text, and check to see what they are understanding and remembering as they read, so, too, did I find it helpful to pause several times during class to jot down notes about what I was learning. In classes in a studio, I wouldn't do this because it would interfere with the collective cohesion of the class; I'd potentially disrupt somebody else's experience, to say nothing of the teacher's instructions, by stepping back from the class to make notes. But in a Zoom class, where nobody needs to see me, I often safeguard a few moments as the class unfolds to reflect on what I'm experiencing and represent that in a written note to myself, like a brief journal entry.
In the class at hand, I wanted to pay special attention to metaphoric learning and new ways to experience the sacral chakra. But I also wanted to be open to a broader theme for the class, one that would generalize beyond the terms of individual metaphors.
Fortunately for me, the teacher introduced two sacrum-related metaphors that enlivened my practice. The first was the metaphor of the sacrum floating on the breath. To feel this metaphor in action, the teacher invited us while standing to place the palm of one hand on the sacrum and the other hand on the low belly and to then take a few slow, deep breaths. It wasn't long before I could feel the hand on the sacrum gently floating up and back on the inhale and sinking slightly down on the exhale.
I recalled the image of the sacrum as the captain of a ship that I had conjured when I was activating my knowledge before class got underway. The floating image evoked for me a variation of the captain metaphor. Instead of a captain, I thought of the sacrum as a buoy floating on the channels of my sacroiliac joints. As we engaged in various poses in class, I kept this floating buoy in mind. It added a bit of lift and vitality to my actions.
The second sacral image the teacher offered was that of a temple roof. At first, this image didn't make sense to me. Wasn't it too big an imaginative stretch to see this bone like the roof of a temple?
But then I let my imagination roam freely. It struck me that as I inhaled, I could visualize my breath swelling the upper inside of my sacrum, where it curved onto itself. As I considered the swelled sacrum, it did seem to me that it could be viewed as a slanted dome of a roof. Further, as the teacher pointed out, the root of the word sacrum was sacred. Perhaps the bone was sacred in the sense that it was the base of what might be considered the divinely inspired structure of the spine, with its graceful natural curves that steadfastly absorbed the shocks of everyday life and gave us both stability and flexibility. I hadn't thought about the sacrum and the long column of the spine that it supports as embodying a divine presence, but maybe there was something to that. Maybe I could bring a quality of reverence, or at least of gratitude, to my sacrum for both its design and its function.
The teacher suggested further that we could imagine the voices of a choir rising up to the temple's roof. Once again, I had to ponder this for a few moments. What came to me was that the breath might be likened to a choir's voice, growing loud on the inhale and then soft on the exhale. As the choir's voice sounded a triumphant note, I felt a kind of exuberance. Who knew that a floating, dome-like sacrum could bring such an uplift?
Beyond embodying specific sacral metaphors, I appreciated the overall theme of the class, which was that we could strengthen our lower core by tapping into the natural rhythms of our breath and the lively and balanced engagement of our muscles without resorting to tightening, squeezing, or clenching. For example, guided by the teacher’s cues, I imagined that I was rotating a ball of energy around my pelvic basin. I rolled the ball to different points along the way, including my pubis, sit bones, and sacrum and tailbone. The muscles that attached to my pelvis and lumbar spine seemed to pop and percolate as the ball rolled along. I was strengthening these muscles and invigorating my lower core by breathing life and playful movement into my pelvic basin without having to force any actions. I could feel more resilience in my core, but I wasn't pushed to my edge.
A: How can I apply what I'm learning?
Application is important because it’s about building on what one is learning to advance understanding and guide action. But at least in the context of yoga, I prefer the term connection because application has a utilitarian feel to it, as in using information to solve a problem, make a plan, or complete a task. While I sometimes apply what I learn in an instrumental way, such as when I do a pose for the purpose of stretching my hamstrings or strengthening my shoulder muscles, this is not typically how I think of application in yoga. More commonly, I apply what I'm learning by integrating it with related knowledge to create a larger understanding and a deeper experience.
In the quest to construct a larger understanding of the sacrum, after the class on this topic ended, I let myself freely associate with the metaphors of the floating sacrum and the temple roof. I found that two other floating visualizations came to mind.
The first was the action of floating my shoulders forward, which I had encountered in a previous yoga class. This image had helped me counter a tendency to pull my shoulders back forcefully and squeeze my shoulder blades together. I think I developed this postural habit years ago when I used to work out with a rowing machine in a gym. Without being aware, I would jam my shoulders behind me, pulling them out of alignment with my arms and hips. This meant that my thoracic spine lost its natural rounded quality. Further, my sacrum, which moved sympathetically with my thoracic spine, flattened unduly, distorting its own natural curve.
When I allowed my shoulders to inch forward a little, the tops of my shoulders floated as if balanced on the even surface of a quiet lake. When my sacrum also floated so that my pelvis found its level plain, neither flattened out nor overly puffed out, I felt more in line with and at home with myself. Considered together, the images of my floating sacrum and my floating shoulders deepened my trust in the spine as a structure that was both strong and fluid.
Another floating image came to me that harmonized with the images of the sacrum and the shoulders. This was the visualization of the heads of the femurs (thigh bones) as buoys floating on water and supporting the pelvis, an image I discovered in Eric Franklin's remarkably creative book Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery, 3rd edition (p. 139). When I visualized my pelvis easily suspended on the strong support of the buoys, and I joined this together with the images of my floating sacrum and shoulders, I felt more ease and freedom when walking, less like my legs were pushing forward and pulling back and more like they were gliding along in smooth water.
Finally, I felt a connection through the metaphor of the temple roof with the quality of awe, which I had read about several months ago in Dacher Keltner’s recent book on this subject. Keltner defined awe as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” In Keltner’s terms, awe is a humbling, captivating, ego-transcending experience that we embrace less with reason than with reverence.
Dacher discussed the different contexts in which people report feeling awe, and one of them was nature. To me, yoga is a way of touching into the natural wholeness of our bodies, an attunement to the nature that we are made of and that we belong to. When I feel my breath swelling the underside of my sacrum, I feel an initiation of a wave-like movement of energy from my sacral curve up through my lumbar, thoracic and cervical curves, all the way to the crown of my head. The spine’s natural curves have the intrinsic grace and sensual undulations of nature’s primal dance. Yes, the spine is awesome!
I’m not worried about forgetting my recent class experience of the sacrum. It’s been helpful to connect with my prior experience, to set goals for learning, and to build a bridge to life off the mat. Perhaps I am learning to “read” yoga classes in the active, meaning-making, and self-directing way my language arts teacher-colleagues taught me all those years ago.
Acknowledgment. I want to thank my astute and friendly editor, Kasey Stewart, for her continuing help in making my writing as clear and sharp as it can be.