Editorial
The authors would like to thank Devon Woods for helpful insights on the first draft of this paper.

Yoga and Learning English: Being Here Now

Ana Maria Ferreira Barcelos, Brazil

Ana Maria F. Barcelos is a teacher of Applied Linguistics and English at Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil. She is interested in beliefs about language learning and teaching. She has co-edited Beliefs about SLA: new research approaches with Paula Kalaja published by Kluwer/Sringer and Narratives of language learning and teaching EFL with Paula Kalaja and Vera Menezes by Palgrave. Email: anamfb@ufv.br

Kat Mills is a yoga instructor at Rama Lotus Centre in Ottawa Canada.

Email: makataliving@gmail.com

“The instructor’s business is not to show the way itself, but to enable the pupil to get the feel of this way to the goal by adapting it to his individual peculiarities” (Herrigel 1989, p. 73)

What yoga has taught me about teaching foreign languages:

Be patient with my students and with myself respecting their limits and limitations (as well as my own), but also gently encouraging them to go a little further beyond those limits within their own comfortable zones.

Give them options of where they want to be in their language learning thresholds in certain phases, times, days and classes. Give them options in fluency, pronunciation and accents. “Wherever you are today, this is you”. “Be aware of your own body, your own language, accent and yourself”.

Be kind to them as well as to my self towards my (im)perfections as a teacher and as a human being, especially in those down days when little seems to work (doesn’t it really?).

Be kind to themselves and to each other. Or as Gilbert (2006) says: “you must be very polite with yourself, when you are learning something new” (p. 56).

Help them see that language learning is a roller coaster (Murphey, 1998).

Help students to relax and find the positions, the places, the accents, the strategies, the beliefs that best work for themselves.

“Keep breathing” and “find their own breath” and keep trying no matter what, for they are “stronger than they know!”

Accept themselves as they are and that their English “doesn’t need to be fixed” – that they should accept their pronunciation, accent, proficiency wherever they are at, but that they can build into it if they want, “refine it” and work from there. I am there to guide them and show them the options.

Accept that some days their tongues are more relaxed, more flexible and fluent or not and that is ok.

Respect their states, flexibility, phases, stages, limits. Help them go with the flow, have flow, not force them, but gently help them see the desire within them and help them manifest it.

Help them concentrate on their goals and act on them.

Know that they can try out new strategies, new options and can “hold the pose longer” and find the place in their language learning path where they feel comfortable with themselves and with their language learning and their language and can find their inner truth and peace being their wonderful selves.

“Be there”. Be present. Be in your practice. If it’s in the classroom, be there, be present, listen and observe everything, even for students’ unconscious (Bache, 2008), without waiting for the “expected correct answer”. The “wrong” answer sometimes can teach students and teachers so much more. Listen to students and be amazed by their epiphanies (Murphey, 2005).

Have fun with language learning and teaching! Play with it! Explore! Make it a “breath of joy”!

And finally, teachers and students “do acknowledge each other!”

Namaste!!

References

Bache, C. M. (2008). The living classroom: teaching and collective consciousness. New York: State University of New York Press.

Gilbert, E. (2006). Eat, pray and love. New York: Penguin Books.

Herrigel, E. (1989). Zen and the art of archery. New York: Random House.

Murphey, T. (1998). Language Hungry. Tokyo: Macmillan.

Murphey, T. (2005). A-mazing students. In: Tim Murphey’s pursuit of WOW! Stories. South Mountain Educational Publishing, p. 4-5.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.