Quiet in My Head
Charlotta Martinus has spent more than twenty years teaching yoga to young people. She founded the Teen Yoga Foundation, now the leading global charity in the field, and taught her first class to a group of fourteen-year-olds in North Somerset in 2003. By her own account that class was not a success, and it set her thinking about the kind of yoga a young person needs. She began training other teachers in 2005, helped found the All Party Parliamentary Group on Yoga, and has since trained more than two and a half thousand teachers and reached close to a million teenagers across more than twenty countries, Australia among them. Her submission argues that the change a student feels comes from the field a teacher creates as much as from the technique. We put a few questions to her.
You argue the change comes from something more than the technique. Do you mean we let go of traditional sequencing?
None of this means abandoning skill or structure. Picture two students in the same class, moving through the same sequence and hearing the same instructions. One leaves visibly softer, more connected, somehow reorganised. The other has had a perfectly pleasant class, useful perhaps, and yet nothing has fundamentally shifted. It is tempting to explain that through readiness or personality, and those factors do matter, but there is something else at play, closer to the heart of yoga. It goes beyond what we teach and into the context in which it is received.
Can you give me a moment where you saw that for yourself?
I remember working with a group of teenagers in a school setting, highly energetic, and not especially interested in yoga. I had planned carefully, the sequence was appropriate, breathing techniques and sound structure. In many ways it was exactly the kind of session we are trained to deliver, and yet it did not land. The group moved, but they did not settle. They followed, but they did not engage. A few weeks later I returned to the same group. Nothing externally was different, the same room, the same young people, broadly the same material, but internally something had shifted in me. I had become aware of my own subtle urgency, the desire for the class to “work”, to produce an outcome. This time I did less. As a response… I slowed my own internal pace, paid closer attention to what was happening in the room, and allowed the session to unfold with far less direction. The atmosphere changed and the practice became simpler, almost unremarkable on paper. The room softened in a way I had not seen before. One of the boys, usually restless and unable to be still, lay quietly for a full minute. Afterwards he said, with a kind of surprise, “That was… quiet in my head.”
So where did that shift come from, if not the technique?
We are often taught that the nervous system responds to techniques, slow breathing, grounding postures, lengthened exhales, and it does, but the nervous system is equally responsive to the relational field in which those techniques are offered. It responds to the teacher’s state, the pace and agenda. Students, particularly those who are dysregulated or stressed, are exquisitely sensitive to this. They do not hear what we literally say, they register how it is being delivered. It is entirely possible to guide a technically perfect practice and still transmit urgency, pressure, or expectation. When there is space and the teacher is not trying to achieve a particular outcome, things can reorganise naturally.
You put it strongly that our effort to do yoga well can get in the way of what heals.
Yes, in many cases it becomes a subtle form of control. We refine, correct, optimise, and ironically recreate the very dynamic we are trying to solve. Pressure to perform and improve, to get it right. For students who are already internally driven, this can be counter to our aims.
And when the context does change?
Everything changes in the same almost anti-climactic manner I described earlier. I see this repeatedly, in work with young people and with experienced teachers. The moment a teacher stops trying to get somewhere with a student and shows interest in what is happening, things light up. When felt experience is prioritised, the body responds well. Breath changes and stillness emerges.
What does this mean for teachers?
Practically, this means noticing our own state before we walk into the room. Are we rushing? Are we carrying some idea about what this class needs to achieve? A teacher who can settle themselves first, even for thirty seconds before starting, changes what is available to the group. It also means resisting the urge to fill every silence or correct every fidget. Stillness in a teenager often looks like restlessness right before it arrives, and if we step in too quickly we can foreclose the very shift we are hoping for.
I would say to teachers: what young people actually need from us is often much simpler than we think. Someone who isn’t trying to fix them. Someone willing to just be there while they find their own way to quiet.
