ACTION & INSPIRATION

Introducing breath-awareness in mainstream education

Over the past few weeks an idea for a new project has been brewing in my mind and only yesterday did it finally take shape as an abrupt phrase – 50 schools in Japan!

The 200 odd testimonials I collected during my previous trip to Japan were deeply appreciative of the breath-awareness workshops. I was amazed and touched that the participants took time to write very insightful feedback – about what they felt during the workshops and how they would apply the breath-awareness activities in everyday life. So it isn’t much of a surprise that I am very keen to further my work in the Japanese context.

However, that is easier said than done. There are a number of challenges that need to be address and I have been wondering about the best way to move forward. Past experience has shown that I am most motivated when I have a definite goal to work towards, which is why I have been dwelling upon – to use a terrible cliche – the bigger picture. One thing is for sure, I definitely want to work in mainstream education. Despite the constant demands placed on students, they are considered to be ‘healthy’ until they begin to physically manifest the effects of stress, anxiety and tension. This is why I feel it should be a priority for schools to introduce training which empowers students with emotional-control and behavior management skills. As I have mentioned in an earlier blog post, seeding breath-awareness is perhaps the best way to achieve this. And I spent a considerable amount of time and effort whilst pursuing my PhD research to create a pragmatic and secular framework through which this could be done.

Coming back to the issue of furthering my work in Japan. The last time I worked with somewhere between 170-180 children and a small number of school teachers. For the next time, I want the scale of the project to be significantly larger. There are a number of reasons for this and I assure you that a misplaced yearning for grandiosity isn’t one of them.

[more later]

‘And I wonder,
Where you come from?
I know they have no answers,
But their bloodlines’
- Tanita Tikaram (Bloodlines – Lovers in the City)

A year or so ago, someone asked me when would I be heading home. When I replied sometime around 6, he asked me once again, when would I be heading home. It took me a moment to realize what was being implied. To be honest, the questioner was innocent and didn’t really have an agenda. After all, at some level it is fair to assume that all brown skinned people ultimately go back to that one source of… brown skinned people. So I gave him a polite smile whilst silently composing a mini-essay, bordering on a tedious academic monologue. Fortunately, such unnecessary gravitas doesn’t linger long and soon the essay took on a much lighter hue which finally manifested into a little mini photo project. By now I think I have spent all the nervous energy incited by this photo project idea and am posting it here.

Just a brief note on the concept – home, for me, is a place which holds you accountable for your actions, whether it is a country, city, street or four falls. A number of other sentiments emerge from this sense of responsibility – pride, respect and so on. Some are negative and some are positive. The other stuff on the surface, language, accents and so on, are important but in a way incidental. To be put on and taken off as a sort of second skin. So the idea behind the photo project was to define myself through the sentiments/emotions/aspirations incited by different places I call home.

I present some of these images to you here and look forward to your feedback and comments.

Delivering a breath-awareness workshop in Japan

When I began my research with the intention of creating a ‘unique’ digital instrument, I had little idea that four years later I would end up delivering breath-awareness workshops to children at primary schools in Japan. Perhaps I will delve into the details of this journey in another post, at the moment I would like to draw your attention to a puzzle I am trying to solve – How can I introduce my work to mainstream education practitioners in the UK? There is definitely a context for it, the SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) initiative.

Breath-awareness sounds strange, especially when juxtaposed with the relentless demands placed on school teachers to meet an ever increasing number of targets. It seems silly to suggest that they encourage their students to become aware of their breathing and develop effective control over it. But then again, such activities can have a positive impact on students’ behavior, emotional control and academic performance (again, some of the key objectives of SEAL). I am not making this up as I go along, there are a host of scientific studies that have demonstrated these claims and I will be happy to point you in the right direction should you be interested.

So how does one present breath-awareness to mainstream education?

When I decided to focus on breath-awareness in my research, I knew that the most important challenge would be to dissociate it with some of the, lets say… rather esoteric associations. This is because many so called holistic therapies attribute a fantastic array of benefits to breath-control and awareness. They aren’t necessarily rooted in science fiction, its just that these benefits have been extrapolated and exaggerated to such an extent that they alienate most rational, clear-thinking people. Furthermore, many breath-control methods use vague and elaborate instructions, so there is no objective way to gauge the application of their exercises or systematically evaluate their benefits . Clearly, there is no room to introduce breath-awareness in this way within secular educational establishments in this manner.

Although it was a tedious exercise (given the sheer volume of literature available on breath-control) it was relatively easy to separate the rational approaches from the irrational and come up with a list of complimentary therapies which formed the base of my research. Along the way I drew some surprising conclusions. For instance, although the Alexander Technique and Pranayama would appear to be disparate techniques (in their teaching and practice), their fundamental principals are rooted in similar concepts such as self-awareness. No doubt this would deeply trouble F.M. Alexander who strongly denied any links between the two.

To cut a long story short, I identified a series of exercises used in Alexander Technique and Pranayama, and correlated their basic principals with those of Respiratory Physiotherapy Rehabilitation. This created a rational framework for my research. The next step was to bolster this framework by eliminating as many variables as possible.

[end of part 1]