Resilience, Hope, And The Power Of Yoga

At Achieve Charter High School in Paradise, students practiced yoga both before and after the Camp Fire. This article is about resilience, hope, and the power of yoga.

Reading time: 6 minutes

The yoga started before the Camp Fire…

In 2018 I was hired at Achieve Charter High School in Paradise, CA to teach Spanish. Because this was a new school with an incredible vision for the future (entrepreneurship, anyone?) I didn’t just teach Spanish. I also taught Exploring Careers and Physical Education. That third class was tacked on to my teaching load because adding those PE classes assured me a full-time position at the school. As an e-RYT, I made a suggestion when I was offered the class. “I’ll teach PE at Achieve so long as I can teach yoga as PE.” I received thirty yoga mats, packaged and delivered to “mi clase de espanol” before the first day of school.

Establishing a Yoga Routine

At the beginning of each PE period volunteers would help stack tables and chairs and clear space so that we could stretch across our mats and complete a full 60-minute session. This allowed time for yoga journaling. Amongst so many other things lost in the Camp Fire were those journal entries. One reflection sticks out as the most memorable. After a student's first yoga class she wrote, “I have never not been anxious at school. This is the first time that I wasn’t having anxiety, and I actually felt relaxed.” One class, one student, and a life-changing practice.

When the weather shifted from scorching to moderately hot, we added meditation walks to the PE agenda. Nature bathing and slow, purposeful steps were part of our afternoons. We basked in the outdoor parks and trails that surrounded the school. We walked to the duck pond and circled round in contemplative laps.

There was no way to guess the magnitude of trauma that these students were about to face and the coping mechanisms that we would employ just to get through. If we’d known, there likely wouldn’t have been any amount of training that could have prepared us, but I would have advocated for more yoga and sooner.

Yoga is different from other practices in that there is not necessarily a specific goal. In volleyball, by comparison, strength is built for a purpose, to jump higher, move faster, hit harder, to win. The goal is measurable and attainable with drills, dedication, and game time. In yoga, the strength we build serves us in ways that we do not anticipate. In that way, it is an act of hope. Yoga is action that demonstrates a belief that another breath will come and another day will bring us joy and pain and pleasure and struggles. There will be a time when all of the discipline matters and yoga becomes useful and applied.

Yoga as an Act of Hope

Prior to the Camp Fire, I taught a drastically different group of students. Generally, the participants were in their 60s and 70s, retired people who could come to class at 10:45am on a Tuesday. One man always came right up to my mat. I would scoot back after I started the class. It wasn’t until I’d been playing at this retreat for a couple months that I learned he was hard of hearing. He wanted to be as close as possible so that the words I spoke would reach him. After class one day he stayed to chat. He wanted to share a story, a yoga experience. He was sitting in an airplane on a transnational flight when they ran into unexpected turbulence. The woman across the aisle from him had a panic attack. As she struggled to breathe, he asked her to hold his hand. He remembered all of the classes that he’d taken with me, and he told this stranger the words that I’d said so many times before. “Close your eyes. Notice your breath. Let your breath be a little deeper.” She calmed down, thinking that he’d saved her. He came to me, expressing his gratitude because he believed it was my voice speaking through him. It was also the voice of many teachers who came before me. All of us owe our gratitude to the practice of yoga.

I share that story because teaching high school students is different from teaching students of other ages. Feedback isn’t shared so freely, and even when it is raw and honest, those experiential shares are rarely immediate. With that story, I knew that I made a difference in a stranger’s life through yoga. I am confident that Achieve students also benefited from the classes that every student took prior to the Camp Fire. It’s just not possible to measure now.

Breathing Through the Storm.

The Trauma We Couldn't Predict

November 8, 2018 was not like any other day. We’d already been warned about potential school closures because of high winds, but the power wasn’t shut off and school was in session. By the time the first bell rang at 8:00am the sky had turned from yellow to black. Unnatural colours and the ominous darkness in place of blue skies created a sense of dread. We started sending students back into their cars with their parents before the official evacuation notice was in effect. The rest of the story, the fire, evacuations, and the burning of Paradise, is well-documented.

What I saw as an educator when I returned after the fire was something that I could not have prepared for. My bright and wonderful students were sad and in shock. One fourteen-year-old student sat rocking himself, seated on the floor in a tight ball, for most of the first morning back. Normally, that behaviour would have warranted a referral to a counsellor. Under the circumstances, the outward expression of his overwhelming grief and stress seemed appropriate. On that first morning back in December at a church, which was our temporary school site, we began our resiliency training. Our director and administration team were proactive and intentionally created spaces that allowed for our staff and students to learn the six domains of resilience. This was the beginning of a long journey back to wellness.

One step at a time…

We literally took one step at a time. We went outside and walked the second day back and nearly every day until the end of the 2018-2019 school year. We needed to return to something that felt communal, routine, and normal. Our PE walks in Paradise had been a highlight of school life. Our post-fire walks were more challenging. Where before we’d walked at generally the same pace and rhythm, paying attention to our posture and our surrounds, in Chico the experience was less communal. Students lagged, students raced ahead, students made videos of puddles and threw rocks into streams. And we let them. We let them walk out some of their pain in the ways they needed to.

The post-fire school schedule was balanced between academics and elective classes. We offered literature, science, and math, and students were required to attend at least two of these classes per day. We also offered art, Spanish, knitting, and yoga, and students had to attend at least one of these classes each day. Of course, one of my elective offerings was yoga.

Yoga was only gentle yoga. That was not my original plan, but I needed to be a responsive teacher. The students who joined me did not exhibit the stamina to work in class like they had prior to the fire. In fact, one student regularly attended and laid still on his mat in savasana for the duration of the class. The low lights, the gentle music, and the mat was therapeutic for him. The more the students returned to the mat, the more capable they seemed of coping with the rest of their days.

Yoga as a Tool for Healing

There are moments that arise as opportunities for yoga to be practiced as worldly action. In these times, we can react in all sorts of ways, but the one thing that seems to be most consistently beneficial is the return to the body and the return to breath. Before anything else, we breathe. We don't need to be perfectly in tune or aligned or divine to reach out to others and offer what we can.

I didn’t keep track of the data and healing effects that yoga had on these teens. I wasn’t acting as a scientist but rather was using the tool that I had to help kids heal. Did I notice an improvement in their mental health over time? Yes. Do I believe that yoga was helpful in the process? Yes- both before and after the fire. What I don’t know is whether the breathing, the meditations, and the asanas were equally beneficial or whether the students were mostly emotionally intact because of a school that pulled together to serve its students despite the devastating losses so many in our community suffered.

Achieve Charter High School closed in 2019.