Micheline Flak PhD

I was a teacher of English and I also taught yoga. For a long time I did both separately, that is I taught English in my school and I taught yoga outside in a hall. But finally, something happened. By learning and imbibing yoga, I found my way of teaching English had improved in a subtle way.

That was important but I kept asking myself a question: ‘Is teaching the way I have been trained to teach, really teaching, or is it putting the children out of shape?’ I got an answer to the question after practicing yoga for a while. I found that by changing myself, I could teach in a way that was more satisfactory not only for the learners but also for myself.

I started thinking about the teaching process and conducting experiments in my classroom. I started teaching yoga to children, but not in a hall. I did not give a yoga session to children. I did not teach them yoga this day or that day.

I introduced yoga into the classroom so you can imagine the children had to have me with my yoga methods. They could not evade it and guess what: they adored it. Since I was a yoga teacher, outside the classroom I was somehow immersed in it and the children had got an English teacher of a special kind; they could not escape from it and they learned better.

So, in France, I got the reputation of being a teacher who taught English through yoga. It all started when some journalists came to listen to a lecture given by Swami Satyananda at Condorcet, the high school where I was teaching. He had been invited by my head mistress, a remarkable woman, who had immediately perceived the value of yoga adapted to a classroom context. She invited inspectors and parents. The children themselves had decided to give a sort of shoe of what they were doing in class with me to improve learning. The audience heard the Indian master advocating yoga for children and they enjoyed the children’s performance. Some journalists came to my classes afterwards. That was in 1979. Since then, numerous newspapers have publicized the experiment. I was lucky to have a Swiss friend named Jacques de Coulon. He was a schoolteacher at the time. Later on, he got a PhD in philosophy and is now at the head of an important high school in his country. He had written, at the beginning of his career a book on the subject of yoga for children. He introduced his pupils to yoga exercises on a Coptic school that he had visited in the USA during a sabbatical leave. There, he learnt some exercises that can probably be traced back to the time of Ancient Egypt. Then, he wrote a thesis called ‘Awakening and Harmonizing of the Child’s Personality’. The publisher heard about my experiments in Paris and wrote to me saying that he had a book, which seemed to contain an account of experiences similar to mine. He sent me the book, but that was not enough, I absolutely wanted to meet the author because I realized that we shared the same views on education.

Since then, we have been working together organizing seminars and conferences throughout Europe. Many teachers have managed to introduce our exercises into their own classrooms. The movement thus started, quickly gained momentum and I am going to explain the reason for this impact. If you go for regular yoga classes, you will find a large proportion of the participants are teachers or educators.

Why do so many people of the teaching profession practice yoga? The reason is they need a lot of energy to do this job and yoga gives strength, yoga gives courage, yoga gives creativity. Formerly, men and women worked very hard physically, cutting wood, carrying water, polishing floors, walking long distances on foot and many other chores which are now done by machines. Now, they do not work so hard physically, yet they get tired. Teachers generally are not weary from doing bodily labour, and they have a lot of holidays (that is their reputation) yet they are extremely tired. When the holidays come, teachers are really exhausted. They realize that this weariness is not something that can be rid of by just sleeping. There must be ways and means to recapture the energy, which is dissipated through mere teaching. It is a very difficult job but nobody can see where the fatigue comes from.

As a result of practicing yoga, the level of my energy had gone up significantly. I realized that I might get fro the practice of yoga what I needed to carry out my profession in a way that fulfilled my wish to be just me. That is why I think that a lot of teachers do yoga, as I did, because yoga is a help as it improves their self-esteem.

To order these booklets please contact: info@ryeuk.org

top