Yoga Teacher: to calm the body and integrate the mind

I am a yoga teacher and a teen yoga specialist. I am also a teaching assistant in a secondary school and I support many young people, some with special educational needs, who find it hard to focus on their learning. You may think that yoga is just a physical set of exercises designed to help you become more flexible and look beautiful in tight lycra! But it is so much more than this (and it has nothing to do with changing your body shape to fit the ignorant stereotyping of what the yoga body 'should' look like on Instagram!) Neuroscience was at the heart of my teen yoga training and it has been a fascinating journey for me to learn so much about the development of the brain in these crucial years of adolescents. The ground-breaking research of neuroscientists teaches us that the ability to learn is often distracted by emotional dysregulation, so common in adolescents; the emotional brain takes control and access to the executive brain is limited, curiosity and the hunger for learning is diverted. Emotional distress makes goals and targets harder to achieve and often results in behavioural difficulties that further hampers maturation and learning. Add any other learning, sensory, behavioural or physical disability to the pot and academic learning is extremely hard to achieve. Research into yoga shows us that mindful movement and breathwork helps to calm the Sympathetic Nervous System which is hard wired during adolescents to dominate due to, firstly, the brain seeking a constant hit of dopamine, the thrill seeking hormone and, secondly, the primitive brain still being in a ‘fight and flight’ response to enable the young teen to survive these years (woolly mammoths and all, aka now social media!) Neuroscientists have discovered that yoga and mindfulness can actually help to integrate the brain and build positive, neural pathways between the emotional and the executive parts of the brain. So, while yoga will undoubtedly improve your physical health, it will also improve your mental wellbeing and agility and therefore improve your ability to learn, retain facts, lengthen concentration and increase your pleasure in learning about your academic subjects and hopefully about yourself too. I am able to teach online or in person, if location is suitable.