Delivering the self-awareness session was a challenge simply because these students had never been in a situation before where they had to reflect on their physical/emotional state and that too in the presence of their peers. Whilst I was glad that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the various tasks, it was quite a challenge to keep them engaged. And to be honest, when the entire class had to work as a group I was certain the session would descend into chaos. Fortunately my little repertoire of breath-games kept them interested.

Going by the usual benchmarks it seemed that the session hadn’t been all that effective. It was only when we sat down for a question answer session did I get a sense of the impact the various activities had made.

Quite spontaneously, students began to mention incidents/situations which had upset them in the past. They were surprisingly forthright. No one passed a judgement when someone admitted to hitting a friend, nor did anyone laugh when a few said they cry when they are upset. There was a moment of shared empathy. This was followed by questions such as – why do I fight with my best friend, what do I do when I feel angry, and how do I control myself when someone wants to start a fight with me? When asked what they usually do I was dismayed to hear that amongst other things they had been advised to punch pillows to calm down. Quite unsurprisingly many of them admitted that this didn’t make them feel any better and ended up making them feel confused and upset.

Pillows are only meant for sleeping and fun stuff like jumping when no one’s looking! So we tried out some more breath-games to see how easy it is to control the mind and body. By this time the students were more receptive and occasionally someone would shout ‘It works!’ Mind you, there were a few who weren’t quite convinced. At this point, the class-teacher and nybep representative chipped in and encouraged them to keep trying.

In conclusion, I am happy with the way things went. I am also encouraged by the class-teacher’s reaction. She was very surprised (and quite pleased) at how the students opened up and shared their experiences in a way they had never done before. This suggests that the workshops can also facilitate a more meaningful dialogue between students and with their teachers.

At a personal level, this experience shows that I need to put a bit more effort into making the workshop more accessible, especially to those who have never done something like this before. Needless to say, I can hardly wait to work with another batch of students and try out some new ideas in the process.

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]