Yoga Accepts
Janet Kuypers
6/21/19 (written on the
International Day of Yoga)
Back in the 6th grade, we had this one old lady for a teacher
(I’m not going to say her name, because I don’t want to mar
future generations with her name), and she really took the cake.
She read from the original Tarzan novel to us every Friday in class,
she explained to us that she was sure she was reincarnated
from the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, I mean, this white-haired
bee-hive hairdo lady actually thought this was physically true.
But one other thing she did in class every week, and back
in the day no one did this in a public school with 6th graders,
but she set up a regular time daily where we all did... yoga.
And to this day the only thing I can remember is standing
with one foot at the inside of my other knee, then raising
both hands over my head, touching fingers or arms out, so
we could all be a tree. Now, I think each and every student
in her class thought she was insane, and she very well could
have been, reading Tarzan to us or talking about her living
past lives of famous historical figures. Without understanding
the point of yoga, I’m sure all students thought this was a funny
way to contort ourselves for a few minutes without doing
and actual studying or “work” in school. And sure, this teacher
may have been stranger than anything to us kids in school —
but if nothing else, she was at least trying to teach us something
no other teacher in their right mind would try to do in a public school
like this. Because yoga is something we adults have learned to embrace
now, if we want to stop feeling so stressed out with work, or home.
Wait, if our back is hurting more now — maybe the one thing we
desperately need is stretching, or meditation, or even yoga:
because maybe that crazy teacher had the right idea. Let’s keep
our lives together with yoga, maybe we can learn this lesson as adults,
that the modern revival of yoga accepts that Buddhist yoga can
even be embraced in Christianity (the Pope has even appreciated
infusing meditation and yoga from other religions to make a person
more whole). If you’re religious or not, no adult can argue with that,
even if we were too young as 6th graders to piece one teacher’s
fragmented rantings together to understand that yoga has real value.
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