Any person with all normal faculties keenly alert can be excited over something new breaking the routine of the day. How much more those who are hard of hearing or deaf can welcome a new interest is impossible to estimate.
But if eye-sparkling enthusiasm is any way to judge, then deaf people are madly keen about a new interest—yoga. The first class in Auckland, now six months old, gave a demonstration last week before four prominent yoga teachers, one of whom described the evening as “the most exciting thing she had seen.”
“On the whole the deaf don’t participate in normal activities and are self-conscious about joining in,” said Miss Fay Fenton, the instructor, whose idea it was to start the class. “Because of their disability they find it difficult to relax and tensions build up, but yoga lessons can help this.”
Surprisingly the class stretched and relaxed in the neat yoga positions with perfect unison. For many of the movements heads are averted so they are unable to watch the instructor. Miss Fenton solved any problems by standing before the class for exercises that should be done in a horizonal position so they could watch her, and by knocking on the floor whenever the time came to change a position. The deaf people can geel the vibration of the knock.
“I knock with a darner now,” she said. “My knuckles got so sore the first few nights.”
Last week a deaf mother was accompanied by three “hearing” sons who formed a class of their own behind the tutor and entered into the spirit of the evening. A mother and two small girls, all deaf, are part of the class, which includes a German boy and a Yugoslav girl.
“So they all understand without a language barrier,” said Miss Fenton. A secretary, she was overseas for a time and learnt to “speak with hands and face,” as she described it, so feels she is able to get a message across to the deaf with simple gestures and yoga examples.
Miss Fenton has studied yoga for three years and was formerly a fencer.
“In six months they have done so well,” said Miss Fenton, “yet it is so more difficult for them as they have to concentrate harder than a hearing person would have to do.”
It was simply because she liked people so much that Miss Fenton began to wonder what she could do to help. Now that she has seen the success of her experiment at the Deaf Welfare Centre in Balmoral Rd she feels a similar class could be arranged for the blind people.
“And I would like to demonstrate the class to other centres, such as Hamilton,” she added. “I feel yoga has opened a new world for the people who have attended the class and I do hope it expands.”
Captions:
- Pupils concentrate on their exercise at a meeting of the deaf yoga group last week.
- On the left, Miss Fenton demonstrates an exercise while the class follows. In front of her is the darner with which she knocks the floor so that the class will know the time has come to “breathe out.”
- Wendy Sedon raises her body after an exercise. Wendy and her smaller sister, Kathy, were having their second lesson. Usually they are in bed while their mother, Mrs Pauline Sedon, becomes a pupil.
