Marta Vilaplana interview: Hatha yoga teacher defends natural therapies to improve school performance and treat attention deficit disorder

Marta Vilaplana: "There are many adults with Peter Pan syndrome"

Hatha yoga teacher defends natural therapies to improve school performance and treat attention deficit disorder

Yoga for children: 'It is as if you enter into your body' - Professor Marta Vilaplana teaches a class of this traditional physical and mental discipline in her center of Barcelona. The students relate their feelings about yoga.

With the return to the classroom again some problems are accentuated, such as school failure, anxiety and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which suffers about 7% of the child population. Sometimes medication is used to improve the mood and performance of the child, but there are also other more natural alternatives. This is what Marta Vilaplana defends, Professor of Hatha yoga . “To help these children with difficulties, we must promote creative activities where learning is part of the pleasure. In this way, they discover the elements of their own ingenuity that will help them manage their emotions and grow and evolve as a person. ”

From the age of four Vilaplana lives immersed in the world of body expression: whether dancing flamenco, classical and contemporary dance, or exploring psychomotor skills and body rhythm. However, it has been in yoga where he has found his great passion at the hands of great teachers, such as Saúl Martínez. He warns, however, that he is not so much a person of religion as of prophets. Currently, he directs the ViuVida Body Expression Center in Barcelona.

- What was your first contact with the discipline of yoga?
- When I was four years old, my mother suffered from depression, she was a medicated person who was even able to apply electric shocks in the early 1970s. Then, one day a Chilean dermatologist recommended starting in yoga.

- He recovered?
- Fully. As a result of practicing yoga, she was able to stop taking medication, changed her diet, her thinking patterns and became a healthy woman, able to start changing her life - for example, she decided to divorce. Yoga brought me back to my mother.

- What do you think is the effectiveness of yoga when it comes to promoting such changes?
- The most powerful thing is to be able to stay for a while - an hour or an hour and a half - in silence, breathing and working various positions; It is when you start to become aware.

- To become aware of yourself ...
Yes, from the physical, mental and emotional level, which is the whole, the union ... I look at you and feel many things, but if we were silent, I would still feel much more. The noise of the street, the information overload that surrounds us, the lack of time, the feeling that everything is going fast is the cause that it costs us to know who we are and where we are going.

- How does yoga work in our body?
- It focuses first on the ego, on humility - my fears are your fears, my desires are your desires; In the essence of the human being there are not many things that differentiate us, except ingenuity when creating.

- When did you start practicing yoga?
- At seven years old. My teacher was a very cane woman, essential and authentic, who followed Baba Muktananda, a well-known guru teacher at that time who was able to drag large masses. Since then I have not stopped practicing yoga.

- When did you start applying this discipline to children?
- When I had my three children, I realized that they needed to practice it to protect them from hyperactivity, depression and mental dispersion. The essence of children is very important. I teach them to separate the ego and tell them: "You are wonderful just as you are." If they integrate and assimilate it, they create a very large inner fortress.

- From what age do you recommend that children practice yoga?
- At four years, since they can start working the balances, they feel their muscle mass, their movements, they are able to be meditating for up to five minutes with their eyes closed and in absolute silence.

- How do the first classes take place?
- There's a little laugh, but it seems that they are the teachers. The child is presence, does not analyze, feel and do; He is so humble that he absorbs everything; I have never felt contradictions or resistance from them.

- How is yoga applied to the little ones?
- I work a lot at the recreational level, giving priority to the game and the imagination. There is always a very clear guideline: the child needs the security that the guide gives him, but I never impose; I make them feel that they can create, develop, express themselves… They learn to play with love, they recognize each other.

- Does it make them develop ingenuity?
- Yoga in Sanskrit means "union", I am interested in noticing that union, the teacher teaches you, but you teach the teacher, but with great doses of respect, of knowing how to communicate, share; He flees totally from authority and hierarchy.

- Any difficult case that yoga has managed to get on track?
The one who came to me the most was a girl with autism, about 14 years old; I was disconnected, I was very competitive and I was very afraid. In class she tried to demonstrate and I told her that it just had to be the way it was. He told me that he had taught him that his body was his home, where he felt very calm.

Do children come with a lot of stress to classes? Why?
Adults give children things that do not touch them: I have six-year-old children who talk to me about crisis! That can not be. The elderly are responsible for teaching values, for accompanying and giving security to our children, but today there are many adults with Peter Pan syndrome; people who have not become aware of what it is to be a father or mother. There is stress in children because their backpacks are too big for their age.

How can yoga help children affected by ADHD?
I think it is a disorder that is being overdiagnosed. When there is a child who presents such a picture, we have to investigate the map that surrounds the child, something that has to be devoted more time. Obviously yoga is an alternative.

For what diseases or psychic problems can this discipline be beneficial?
Asthma, atypical skin, scoliosis, gastric problems, colds

Improve school performance?
His self-esteem grows immensely, and above all he develops the child's consciousness, which knows when he is nervous and when he is not, and has tools to control it.

Up to what point can you improve school performance ?
In 30% of children who practice yoga fully changes their attitude towards studies and in class.

Apart from yoga, what is taught in a body expression center?
There is also a fantastic liberating channel, which is that of the arts, like painting; the theater, which allows you to express yourself through other characters to facilitate communication; percussion people who fit hard situations, like a cancer, feel that drum represents force-; and dance, in which the teacher contributes 20% of the technique and the rest is given by our creative potential.

Should body expression be more valued in everyday life?
Much more. Nonverbal communication is very sincere, honest; Sometimes the silences are more powerful and the body takes us more to the action.

Source: La Vanguardia

Marta Vilaplana interview: Hatha yoga teacher defends natural therapies to improve school performance and treat attention deficit disorder