Ms. Mullen’s Journey to Bring Yoga to Hamber
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When Ms. R. Mullen (Mathematics) first started working at Eric Hamber, she was adamant on teaching a yoga course at the school. Now, five years later, she shares the inside scoop on her fight for Hamber yoga – revealing her objectives, the benefits of having the course, the challenges she faced while advocating for it, and more.
“I noticed that there were many students who could use some strategies to help support them with their mental health,” Ms. Mullen shared on her inspiration behind teaching the course. She had been practicing yoga for over 20 years beforehand, and it had helped a lot with her own mental health. Ms. Mullen thinks it would be a valuable class to offer at Hamber, as yoga has many benefits tailored to students’ needs. “Some students are looking for stress-reducing, some are looking for strengthening, some are looking for flexibility,” she explained, “The main benefits, I would say, are mental, physical and community health.”
Ms. Mullen is currently the sponsor of Hamber’s Yoga Club, which meets once a week to practice together. She says that the club works differently than her course would, as its operations are primarily dictated by students. This is a quality of the club that she particularly likes. “While a class would still have lots of input from the students, it wouldn’t be as student-directed,” she stated. Ms. Mullen also mentioned that the yoga club does not study the level of in-depth material as she would ideally like to teach in the course.
Ms. Mullen’s course would not be solely focused on practicing yoga. Although she planned to practice the physical elements of it at least three times a week, the course would also include community outreach and teach the eight limbs of yoga. “One of them is breathing, so we’d talk about the benefits of breathing and different breathing exercises,” Ms. Mullen explained. More content that the course would include are the different ways of living and how to implement them, as well as meditation and mindfulness.
The first step to initiating a yoga course at Hamber was to become a yoga teacher. “I went and did my 200-hour yoga teacher training, so that is certified.” Ms. Mullen shared. Once she became a certified yoga teacher, she brought the prospective course to the school and proposed to offer it. “Once it got put in the course booklet, it was offered as a course,” she stated.
However, this year, Hamber’s yoga course is unable to run. “Hamber’s awesome because we have so many electives,” Ms. Mullen observed. “The flip side of that is [we] can’t run classes with very few students.” Ms. Mullen explained that although the course started off with lots of enrollments, they ended up declining. The yoga course could not operate this year because not enough students signed up.
According to Ms. Mullen, the most challenging part of creating a yoga course was advertising its benefits. “A lot of people have a certain idea of what yoga is, which may or may not be accurate,” she explained. Convincing students to try it out proved to be a big challenge.
When asked when students can expect to have a yoga course at Hamber, Ms. Mullen responded that students can expect to have it once the demand is there. “As soon as students sign up for it, it will happen,” she confirmed.