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.

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.