Some inner-city school students have become so hooked on yoga they like it more than football - and their teachers say it's doing them good. Conor Pope reports
A group of 12- and 13-year-old boys are on their hands and knees, acting like cats in an old Christian Brothers schoolhouse that has played host to its share of past horrors. Gleefully they leap about, shouting and laughing, and it is both difficult and all too easy to imagine what the brothers who once stalked the corridors of St John's on North Brunswick Street in Dublin would make of it all.
The boys turn onto their sides, where they lie motionless before suddenly scrambling onto all fours again when prompted. They alternate the cat pose and the prone position and practise deep breathing exercises. Then they fall silent and still. Some of them just look as if they're sleeping. Others are definitely sleeping. But they won't be forced to kneel contritely on pencils or be introduced to a Christian Brother's strap for acting the maggot.
The shouting, shaking and sleep-like states are key elements of their Satyananda yoga class, part of the Pathways Through Education programme set up by Dublin Institute of Technology in 1998, to address the alarming drop-out rates among students in disadvantaged areas.
The Pathways project identified low levels of self-esteem, confidence and motivation as the principal reasons for the high drop-out rates. The yoga classes are the newest strand of the scheme, and although they have been taking place in St John's CBS and Presentation Secondary School in Warrenmount, Dublin, for less than a month, the children are already converted.
The boys' yoga teacher, Cormac Lennon, takes them through their paces, beginning with some physical routines. "If you're feeling stupid, you're doing it right," he tells them. After jumping around for a while, they do some very, very loud breathing exercises. "You can make a sound if you like, shout as loud as you can," he tells them. They don't need telling twice.
Then they lie on the floor, wrapped in blankets like air-raid survivors, and he talks them into a relaxed state. It's remarkable to see 15 extremely vocal, exuberant and enthusiastic children fall so silent so quickly. There isn't a sound in the old schoolhouse as he asks them to pick two sentences to repeat silently to themselves, giving as an example: "I am fit and healthy. I have strength and determination." Then he reminds them in a soft voice: "If you say that when you're really relaxed, the deeper the seed will grow and the greater the chance it will become a reality. Every one of you can choose whatever you want to be."
Later, he explains: "The practice we did at the end, going around the body, mentally painting each part of the body, is a practice called yoga nidra." Yoga nidra helps the children to relax and experience sensory withdrawal.
"Once they have that sense of withdrawal and they repeat the positive affirmation, it becomes a resolution," he says. "With practice, this resolution can manifest itself as a pattern of positive behaviour - that's the nature of the mind. All these kids have negative patterns of behaviour. They pick it up from home or their friends. These patterns can be terribly destructive. We're trying to break that cycle of negativity."
Teaching yoga to children at risk is not a new concept. Pilot schemes in London and several US cities - and in at least one fee-paying school in Paris - have all had positive results. Running classes for children requires a particular approach, according to Lennon. "If I was teaching adults the cat posture, for example, I'd be saying: 'Make sure your hands are directly under your shoulders and make sure your hands and knees are the same distance apart . . .' We don't do that with the kids. It's less rigid. We have to allow them to get into the position which they think a cat would be in," he says.
Physical-education classes used to be where you learned to lie ("I left my gear on the bus, sir") and to smoke (not much else to be doing when sidelined because your imaginary "gear" has been left on the imaginary bus). Not here. "They were messing around a bit at the beginning of the first class," says Lennon. "I made the mistake of not doing enough movement with them, so when they got down on the floor they were very restless."
Now, just three weeks into the six-week programme, they adapt to the meditation with ease. "These kids are very lucky. They're being trained in meditation at 13. I'm 39 and am only getting the hang of it now. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache over the years if I'd had this opportunity.
"I want them to develop an attitude that yoga is a good thing and that it is something they can do. It's not for rich people, it's not just for Madonna and Sting.
"Yoga can make them believe in their own ability, their own capacity to step outside the normal course of their day, to give themselves a little head space," he says.
Head space is also on the mind of Fiona Masterson, the programme's co-ordinator. Late last year, she approached the Sanctuary in Stoneybatter, where Lennon teaches yoga.
"My idea was that if students could develop a capacity to think and walk away with that, it would be a fantastic thing.
"Most of them don't have the skills needed to block out the external stuff or focus on what they need to do. They get overwhelmed with family problems. It would be different if they could learn to give themselves a bit of space to think and problem-solve."
The yoga classes are giving the students "a positive experience of self-reflection and self-relaxation" that they "absolutely love" - and the success of the programme is easy to measure, according to Masterson. Already, teachers in the school have reported that many of the children are much more at ease, and there is less evidence of self-destructive behaviour commonly associated with children from troubled backgrounds.
The Pathways programme, run in association with the Dublin Schools Business Partnership of Dublin Chamber of Commerce, has long identified a need to alter such patterns of self-destruction.
"A lot of the students can process all the other emotions," says Masterson. "Anger is different. In their world, if you are angry you hit out. It is very hard for them to see that there is something else they can do with anger. By bringing their anger into yoga, they can let it out in another, more creative way."
Although they might not express their feelings about practising yoga in these terms, the children are also big fans. It appears the seed is beginning to grow.
The verdict
"It's deadly, brilliant!" says Gerry. "It relaxes you and takes all your worries away. You feel you can do more things, because it helps you to concentrate."
Paddy, a boxer, thinks it's "grand" because, like boxing, it helps in "getting your temper out" constructively.
A lot of the children say they prefer it to football, their other great passion in life. "When you do football with the school you have to do Gaelic as well, and you do be freezing," explains Mark.
Dean also thinks it's "deadly", because it "gives you your own private space, which helps you to think clearer."
Daniel says: "It gets everything off your shoulders, any troubles you might have. I love to do it. I'm going to do it on my own, because it shows you that you can be anything you want to be."