Refugees Discover How to Move and Breathe with Ease
Refugees discover how to move and breathe with ease
Nick recently visited Selwyn College in Auckland to teach moving and breathing in the REAF programme (Refugee Education for Adults and Families). He wrote this blog post about his experience:
I had the opportunity to teach yoga to a group of refugee men from Afghanistan a few weeks ago.
Since 2000, the Refugee Education for Adults And Families (REAF) programme offered at Selwyn College in Auckland has helped newcomers settle into life in New Zealand. As well as English as a second language courses the refugee men and women are helped with adjusting to daily life here in NZ, with parenting programmes, sewing classes, garden plots to learn to grow local vegetables and ongoing help with issues they might be having such as housing and benefit problems.
I met with the Afghani men who had fled their homeland, seeking peace and a new life for them and their families. Their new beginnings here hold some relief from the traumas of the past but also hold with it a handful of new challenges to overcome.
Our conversations of broken English and a myriad of gestures, pointing and sounds, eventually flowed into shared breath together, the room sounding like a soft ocean roll. Inhaling to the sky and exhaling to the ground, the room softened as the men began to find refuge in their own breath.
For me, this was a rewarding experience and made me think back to my first lessons with my teacher (friend and sister in-law) Minami, where I began to move from a cluttered busy picture of life, into spaciousness, to see life as it is. My relationship with yoga brought me to a real understanding of what was showing up in my life and the world around me. Passing on the simple principles of yoga to these men, I hope they also find space and calmness in their lives here.
Recently training in the Yoga Education in Schools programme, I’ve learnt awesome tools to teach anyone who might show up. Helping young people connect with life and the world feels like an important cause, as more and more disconnection in the world causes suffering for ourselves and the natural world. I would love to see Yoga in all schools, not only as a practical tool for young people to deal with daily pressures and stress but also as a means to nurture an inner peace and stillness, no matter what might come up in life.
Nick
P.S. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the father of modern yoga, was emphatic that yoga does not belong to any particular cultural group, but it is a universal human practice for everybody whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or Atheist. Yoga is to be fitted to the cultural background of the student, he would say. And there are stories of him carefully adapting yoga to Muslim students using chanting and imagery from the Koran so that it was participation in what he called “your religion of love.”
Teaching Ocean Breathing to Year 4 Students
Y.E.S recently visited Khandallah School in Wellington
Y.E.S recently visited Khandallah School in Wellington to meet with their year 4 students and show them how to do Yoga; in particular, how to do a super power breathing technique called “ujjayi breath.” For the kids, we call it ocean breathing.
“You know how when it’s a really cold day and you’re walking to school and you can make a plume of smoke come out of your mouth with a long haaaa sound? Let’s all try that together. Now, here’s the big trick. Who can make that same sound with their mouth closed?”
I was blown away by how quickly the kids found their breath.
We started each session with a cool story about ocean breathing. Like when our friend Patrick taught the German soccer team how to do it.
When Rosalind and I went back over the following weeks we asked the kids if they had done any ocean breathing at home. Several hands shot up. And out came the most wonderful stories.
Stories from the kids
My grandparents have these two dogs that are really big and bark a lot and I get a bit stressed. I knew it was going to be a busy day. Before going over in the weekend I did my ocean breathing and it worked. I was calm.
I did it during a soccer game because I had to take a penalty kick. And I scored!
I did it because I was happy.
I do it after school because school is long and you need to calm down after school. Before I go to my room I just do it for one or two minutes.
I did some before I went to bed and I went to sleep straight away.
My baby brother was crying so I held him and started the ocean breathing and he stopped crying and then he went to sleep.
What I loved the most about these kids is that they received this tool and then experimented with it in their daily life without being prompted by anybody else. When emotions or difficult situations came up they tried some ocean breathing.