Teaching yoga, Part 3.
Next steps, refining my vision of teaching
A few weeks ago I taught at the Buffalo Girlschoir summer intensive. I taught yoga to two sessions of girls 6-9 and 11-14. I have long been looking forward to this particular booking.
I found that it wasn’t yoga in particular that I was so excited about but using yoga to encourage our girls to be fearless, confident and accepting of themselves and their bodies.
In “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of our Adolescent Girls” a groundbreaking work by Dr. Mary Pipher, published in 2004, she investigates the heartbreaking sea change that takes place in our girls between the ages of about 10-14. They move from confident and empowered to self critical and self conscious.
Her book investigates why this happens through case studies she encountered as a clinical psychologist. I read this book 15 years ago and I saw myself in it’s pages.
In a newly updated 25th Anniversary edition written in conjunction with her daughter, who was a teenager at the time of the original publication, their views are updated to reference a new digital age.
“Girls today are less likely to be in trouble for their drinking, drug use, sexual behaviour, or party-going, but they are more likely to be depressed, anxious and suicidal. Many girls sense that something is wrong with the digitally driven culture they inhabit. They sleep with their phones on and describe the pressure to stay connected at all times. Yet they also feel a deep loneliness and lack of connection.” (Pipher, 33).
This was my chance to help change our girls for the better. What better way to help our girls connect with themselves and disconnect from their phones than yoga.
For so long I thought of yoga as a way of sharing movement with others. For the first time since I started this journey I realized that that yoga is just the medium. What you can bring to a yoga class is so much more than just the postures or the philosophy or the history.
Yoga can be a catalyst for change by embodying all that you are trying to impart verbally in a physical form. Sometimes words are not enough. Through the physical movement of asana yoga can show our girls the way back to themselves. Back to a whole view of their bodies and their minds. Views that have been fractured by the unhealthy manipulation of the female body in the media can be repaired. The pressures our girls feel to stay connected in a digital age can be lessened.
This is the work I longed for when I started this yoga teaching journey. I am ready to get started.
Pipher, Mary. “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the lives of our adolescent girls”. Riverhead Trade, 2005.