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.”