Yoga Through Dance in Primary Schools

By Ivana Brigliadori

In July 2007, thanks to the Memorandum of Understanding between the Ministry of Education and the National Confederation of Yoga, the ancient art of meditation and asceticism based on a combination of sequential positions (Asana) and spiritual reflection tied listen to your own breathing and to a greater awareness of their existence in the "here and now" as body and soul, officially joined in schools, leading to the development of new pedagogical and educational projects that help children, teens as well as adults to find themselves through yoga.

Need a much more compelling as it is becoming more virtual space in which they act and live our kids (not just their ... alas), a company reaching out to the image flowing, uncontrolled sedimentation of the moments that we are not aware of living, a company that pays little attention to children as children, but as recipients of consumer goods whose advertising bombards their mothers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enrico Massetti
• Release date: Jul 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311071668

Ivana Brigliadori

Ivana Brigliadori si occupa di teatro danza e di discipline e arti orientali dal 1980. Ha conseguito il diploma “Il teatro danza visto da vicino” coordinato da Susanne Linke e Carolyn Carlson 2005; il diploma e master “Trasformational hata yoga” Y.A.I (Yoga Alliance International) Pisa 2010 - Pondicherry (India) 2013; il master “yogaeducational” (operatore yoga nelle scuole) Bologna 2011-2013; ha frequentato la scuola di formazione insegnanti Magnanelli.

Book preview

YOGA

Through Dance in Primary Schools

(From Unsung Heroes to Asana)

by

Ivana Brigliadori

Translated by: Vittorio Felaco

VRF Translations

YOGA

Through Dance in Primary Schools

Published by Enrico Massetti at Smashwords

© copyright 2014 Ivana Brigliadori

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781311071668

"We don’t need no education,

We don’t need no thought control.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom!

Teachers leave them kids alone!"

Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall

To my daughter Caterina

Table of content.

YOGA

YOGA

Table of content.

Preface

Education and the child today

A DREAM!

Uncle Pasquale

Today’s Society and the Child

HOW TO SET UP A YOGA PROGRAM IN THE SCHOOLS

Large Classrooms and Imagination

Scope: from Yoga to Dance and from Dance to Yoga

Yoga as a Tool Integrated into Western Culture

Rage in the Age of Changes

Introduction to Yoga

ASANA

DHYANA

DHARANA

PRANAYAMA

Silence

EMPTY TIME AND THE CHILD

IRONY AND THE CHILD

THE CREATIVE ACT OF DANCE THROUGH YOGA

EXERCISES

SEQUENCES OF ASANA (music by Goran Bregović to the MANTRAs)

SURYANAMASKARA (SUN SALUTATION)

HOW TO PRACTICE

Expiration: From YOGA to Dance

THE ELEMENTS

FROM ELEMENTS TO FIGURES

EXERCISES USING OBJECTS

FROM EXERCISES TO IMPROVISATION

Guide of the Non-Judgmental Teacher

Composition in Real Time and PATANJALI

Places of Representation (from Patanjali to the Angels)

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

The Author

Books, ebooks, DVDs and Tango CDs-mp3s

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Preface

In July 2007, thanks to a protocol of understanding between the Ministry of Public Instruction and the National Yoga Federation, the ancient meditative and ascetic art of Yoga based on the sequential combination of positions that are generally known by the Hindu word ASANA and the spiritual reflections that come from listening to one’s own breathing and a greater awareness of one’s own existence in the here and now as body and soul made its official debut into the public schools of Italy, thus determining the development of a new pedagogical and educational project capable of helping children, boys and girls, and adults as well to find themselves anew through Yoga. 

The space in which our children (and not just them) act and live impels us toward the virtual world rather than the real world as we become a society ever more inclined to follow the images that flow before us, the uncontrolled accretion of the instants that we don’t even realize we are living, a society that pays little attention to children as children but appears to value them only as individuals destined to be consumers of the products that advertising incessantly promotes to their mothers. 

The ever more widespread use of information technologies and the most modern technological instruments with all their applications make it necessary for us to find new keys to the interpretation of what the moment of learning is all about.

The author draws the actual narration of her project of inserting Yoga in the schools directly out of the sample exercises and practices that bring together music, movements, words, and teachings in an attempt to discover an alternative language that emerges from the numerous literary citations relating to the child and his development as well as from his relationships to teachers and parents.

The last thing, the most complex and probably the most delicate for the teacher to actually carry out, is the moment of improvisation, the one that deals with the child’s creativity.

The essay is therefore multifunctional and filled with an abundance of clues and reflections on the possible ways in which the pedagogy of Yoga can be articulated. 

The author highlights the different bonds that tie together Yoga and School by analyzing actual cases and projects that can be realized within the educational structures with individual and collective exercises that can be simple enough to draw the attention of the boys and girls not toward external objects but above all toward their inner consciousness as they live it as an expression of freedom: Yoga becomes an authentic ludic instrument, the stuff that makes up the experience of life. 

The parallels between the sequences of ASANA and the figures of choreography become, at this point, necessary: a dance implies movement, the coordination of the entire group in order to execute compositions and images with one’s body and, at times, also with words. This is how we also explain the ASANA functions of the instruments directly connected to Indian physiology: through the assumption of diverse body positions (think for example of the salutation to the sun, the SURRYA NAMASKARA) – on a musical background and with modalities that the author suggests from time to time – the child becomes capable of purifying his own energy channel (NADI) and channels energy toward specific points of his body and thus gains a notable psychophysical benefit. The ASANAs are further enriched with MUDRA (symbolic gestures of the hands), PRANAYAMA (breathing techniques) and MANTRA (sounds), so as to modify or empower its effects.

This essay is both useful and exhaustive for anyone who wishes to bring his or her children or students closer to Yoga and wishes to discover the thousands of possibilities of a cultural proposal that is strongly tied to the body and the mind of the child.

Valentina Corsino

Education and the child today

Today, those who find fault with education and those who praise its achievements are often inclined to ascribe both the faults and the achievements to the technological advances that have taken place in education, and the child, who is at the center of the discussion, is fought over by those who support the use of digital devices and those who oppose them. The child finds himself at the center of a phenomenological description of the potential that the new tools of education can offer. These new approaches, however, appear to embrace all the values and all the limitations that can be ascribed to these new educational machines as if they were able to move in a vacuum and did not have any parents so to speak and were not the offspring of any producer and were not meant for any user.   

But when you take a closer look, this same attitude becomes a theory and a practice that lead to total removal of any sense of personal responsibility. 

It is claimed that disasters will happen, but no attempts are made to prevent those disasters by identifying the remedies that could prevent them.

In summary, for some, the computer kills the book, mechanizes creativity, makes banal human intelligence; but we could counter that the lack of appreciation for reading, the failure of the schools in promoting in their students adequate instruments of cultural learning and of original expression, are phenomena that have long preceded the arrival of the computer. 

Similar faults have been found from time to time in sports, cartoons, television, and the excessive ease of affluence that spoils children, but then we also discover that it appears that those who use the computer read more books and those who do not have one or do not use it read less. 

The times when you took a book out of the library or waited anxiously for it to be returned to the library so you could borrow that book so close to your heart are over, and so are the times when the book you owned was lovingly covered with paper or recycled newspaper to protect it.

It is prophesied that new learning paradises are coming with new machines that will make it possible for an individual to easily access information and communication modes of formidable power; but one can also argue that it is not enough to be able to navigate, one must also be properly motivated and have a degree of competence to do so, and it is not enough to be able to communicate, for one must also have something worthwhile to say. 

Meanwhile, the more it becomes true that the medium is the message, the more culture and power concentrate in the hands of a few owners of the media, and those who own those media are never, in spite of how it is made to appear, the users themselves. 

Less discussion is going on over the fundamental theme of how content is treated, as if the problem did not exist.

The result could turn out to be that we end up proposing again the worst didactic models of the traditional school, supporting them this time with a splendid and deeply innovative technical apparatus; those same models that are based on rote memory and underestimate the value of participation, the usual ones that focus more on the choice of procedures and are by far less convincing when it comes to the achievement of actual competence. 

Overall, it’s a matter of laying claim to an instructional model based on true education and not just on replacing education; the technology model must once again be in the service of education and thus assume a role that is subordinate to that of education and not an end in itself as it appears to be at risk of becoming today.

In other words, we need to regain ownership of the interpretive model that is inadvertently acquired the moment we turn to machines and programs that, not by chance, we have defined as technologies whereas they should simply be tools and techniques of the educational process. 

It’s quite possible that this plan may turn out to be naïve, just as naïve as the ant that, sitting on the head of an elephant, is convinced that it will be able to lead its movements. On the other hand, education itself is nothing but a naïve notion, but one that finds precisely in its naiveté its true revolutionary force. 

A DREAM!

"There should be somewhere upon earth a place … in which children would be able to grow and develop