Yoga Ball Revolution

“This is the way we were brought up”

The trigger point for writing this article was a chance encounter with some old footage of me as a kid having a piano lesson preparing for the ABRSM Grade 8 exam. I have forgotten much about those early years of piano learning, and watching it brought me quite the shock. Firstly, seeing how I was struggling with the scales (which I did eventually fail in the exam), I don’t think anyone would have anticipated me becoming a professional pianist; however, the more disturbing part was a general feeling of frustration, discouragement and silent suffering permeating through this 30-minute clip that make the adult me cringe and cower. Everything that my teacher said and did was well-intentioned and we were out of time, so it was natural that my teacher’s annoyance at my apparent lack of cooperation began to grow; I don’t remember what thoughts had gone through my mind all those years ago, and my body language didn’t express much aside from some mild discomfort, but if I were to experience it all again I think I would feel being blamed and being helpless. I do know for certain that the whole process was unpleasant enough that I stopped piano shortly after passing the Grade 8 exam with 118/150 marks (we need 100 marks for a pass, 120 for merit, and 130 for distinction). 

Having been reminded of what happened to myself when I was learning the piano, I began to recall regretfully the instances where I have similarly made my students feel helpless and other kinds of discomfort. These days, even though I try consciously to do something different, I still often end up falling into the old pattern of fixing things, subconsciously expecting the student to conform and comply to my solutions, expecting my methods to work because those methods do work on me and meanwhile forgetting the fact that the methods often leave the students stranded in confusion and helplessness. This model of finding errors and fixing things is how I was brought up and how I’ve always known piano teaching was supposed to work. You might well ask, what is the point of having a lesson if we don’t fix things? So, here comes the revolution part of the picture.

We are fixating on narrow definitions of creativity, intelligence and education

It was already 17 years ago when Sir Ken Robinson did his first TED Talk Do Schools Kill Creativity  (76 million views on TED and and 23 million on YouTube) and demanded a revolution in the education system. I have only just got to watch this talk recently and much of what he said 17 years ago is still applicable now. Our education model and our idea of intelligence is focused solely on academic achievements when intelligence is actually much more diverse. The ones who thrive in this academic system are those who end up being in academia as university professors, which are just one kind of people in our world, a lovely bunch who “view their bodies as only a vehicle for bringing their heads to meetings.” Likewise, our model of piano learning seems geared towards producing competition winners, a specialist group of musicians among a much wider possibility of music-making. Education from kindergarten to high school and university has become a gradual process of shifting our attention from the limbs up to the heads, and then increasingly to just the left side of our brains, our logical and rational side, neglecting the development of healthy connections to our emotions, our bodies and the people around us. As children we start from a place of curiosity and creativity, which is gradually educated out of us by the need to fix things, get things right, score good marks in exams and tests. We are being told “whatever you do, don’t do it wrong” but we cannot be creative if we don’t allow ourselves to be wrong. Our society constantly evaluates us on how creative and how intelligent we and our kids are, as if there is a universal measurement of creativity and intelligence. Instead, we should be asking how we are creative and intelligent in our own way. Take this experiment below for example where the participants have to extract a peanut from the tube. The children and adults in the video have all failed but a chimpanzee could do it - it doesn’t mean that the chimpanzee is more intelligent than those people, but rather, even a chimpanzee can be intelligent in ways that humans might not necessarily be. So the question is, how much of our own intelligence and creativity have we overlooked when trying to conform to society’s expectations? 

Another influential educator, Jukka Sinnemäki from Finland, has a motto of “see the unseen”, whose classroom is a thing of wonder (link). He tells a story of how when he was a principal at a school, he had a student who struggled through the years, and on the last day of school the student came into his office carrying a beautiful oil painting, saying that she wanted to leave behind at least one good memory for the school after all the trouble she had caused. Mr Sinnemäki asked if she painted it herself, the student answered “yes.” “This is beautiful! How did you become such an amazing painter?” “By watching a 9 minute YouTube tutorial.” 

Even at a school led by an innovator such as Jukka Sinnemäki, we can have a student spending years struggling on the fringes when she could have used that time to do more with her gifts in the visual arts. In this world with increasing deference to automated production lines and artificial intelligence, surely we have even less of a need to mass-produce kids that possess the same skill sets, no matter how fundamental those skill sets had been to us in the past and present, and certainly not at the expense of their unique talents.

What are we seeing in the student?

Going back to that old footage of my piano lesson, I was startled by something I heard while the little me was being lectured on how to manage my time to get the scales sorted - at that moment I had no capacity to listen to my teacher, and was instead doodling around with Fauré’s E minor fugue from the Pieces Breves. That was one of the pieces in the exam book, and even though it wasn’t my exam piece, I remember having always been drawn to that music; it didn’t matter if I could only get through the first few lines, just playing the fugue subject would give me an incredible sense of purpose. This is one of the few things that I do remember from that period of piano study, and it was a part of me that went unseen for years; I now recognise it as my innate fondness of how fugues are layered, they captivate me on an intellectual level. At that time, it was seen as distracted behaviour, and I never felt comfortable enough to ask if I could learn that piece, let alone to seek help in getting beyond those first few lines. The first fugue that I did learn was 4 years after that. 

Being responsible adults, we will inevitably have some agenda about how we nurture the kids’ talents, yet I have found it so dangerously easy to confuse the child in front of us with the images playing in our heads; we think we see the kid, but actually we are projecting our own concerns onto them. This is especially true for me when I am under pressure, and I would treat behaviours like distractedness or disobedience as something that needs to be fixed, because I really need them to do as I say in order to meet the deadline. But the deadline is not the student. The real student is covered by the outward behaviours. For example, in that clip of me as a kid, my inability to get the scales sorted was not because I was wilfully disobedient, but a sign that I was struggling with something, and it hurt; my distracted behaviour of doodling with Fauré’s fugue was not because I wanted to be disrespectful to the teacher, but actually because I needed something to sooth my inner conflict of wanting to be a good student but not being able to do so. Fixing the disobedience (if it was indeed fixable) would not have helped me find out what in the scales were causing me to stumble; seeing the doodling as simply distractedness meant missing the child’s effort to communicate what’s important to them. Adults live with so much stress and pressure that we seldom have the space to really just be with the kids; every little thing that helps us create that space would ultimately be beneficial to everyone. The yoga ball has helped me do that; in fact it has been so effective that I feel my world has since turned upside down. That is why I call this article the yoga ball “revolution”. 

Neuroscience developments

The yoga ball is so effective because it immediately signals a shift away from traditional mindsets of learning that require the student to sit still, concentrate, conform and comply. Recent developments in neuroscience are indicating that combining movements with learning is always more effective than having the student sitting still. (And it’s not just for the student: can you imagine what it’ll be like for a classroom teacher to conduct a lesson while being seated all the way through?) Moving about is usually more engaging than sitting still, and it helps to offset the number one obstacle to effective learning, which is disconnection; disconnection between the teacher and the student, disconnection between the student and the activity, and disconnection between the student’s mind and the body. This is often shown through a collapsed posture, and sometimes the children aren’t even aware of their body collapsing because they are living the majority of their lives in the left sides of their brains and may have dissociated from their bodies. I myself am a very left-brained rational person and have trudged through most of adolescence and early adulthood with a hunched back and round shoulders (I still do). By sitting on the yoga ball, we are helping to reconnect with our sense of balance and with our lower trunk (the core muscles). If we extend our use of the yoga ball and have the students bounce in synchrony with some simple playing, we can also engage their vestibular system (the system inside the ear that detects how we move through space); and the vestibular system has a direct link to the neural pathway that controls our facial expressions and our social engagement system (the ventral vagus nerve). In other words, exciting our motion sensing system facilitates the nervous system to engage in social connection. I have been experimenting with the yoga ball for a few months now and have generally seen more engagement from the students, especially for those who come in with a lower energy level and would otherwise have started to get sleepy and doze off. Several students have remarked that the yoga ball is my most effective teaching tool yet! (I have tried many other tools…) 

(The "Brain" icon created by Nithinan Tatah was downloaded from the The Noun Project on 23 May 2023, https://thenounproject.com/icon/brain-2452319/)

Our body’s quest for safety is the main driver in our behaviours

Going back to the ventral vagus nerve, it is a nerve that belongs to the autonomic nervous system (ANS, please see this video for an animated illustration), which determines our physiological states such as alertness or calmness. Students of biology or medicine may come to know the ANS as having two opposing sides: the sympathetic nervous system that is responsible for mobilisation of stress responses (the ‘fight or flight’ response); and the parasympathetic nervous system that is responsible for calmness and restoration. A new model called the polyvagal theory that is now widely adopted in therapeutic circles gives an additional side to the ANS: we still have the sympathetic nervous system, but the parasympathetic nervous system is now divided into the dorsal vagal pathway and the ventral vagal pathway. The three sides of the ANS take turns to influence our physiology (heart-rate, blood pressure, muscle tone) according to how safe we feel in the environment. Safety is felt through the senses and not conceptualised by thoughts, and safety is different for each individual body. From the perspective of law and order, we may consider something safe when no physical harm has been inflicted, but in the body of my childhood self, not knowing how to play those harmonic minor scales in 3rds and 6ths was a sign of danger, not having enough time to prepare for the exam was another sign of danger, and not having developed the organisational power to dedicate myself to practising was yet another sign danger; in such an environment of piano learning, the last thing I needed was being blamed for not practising enough and being told that I wasn’t good enough, that my brother was better and I needed to catch up; it just proved that all those signs of danger did really lead to an actual danger of being inferior to my brother and being rejected by my teacher. That feeling would no doubt have been unbearable (I have no recollection of how I felt back then), and hence the need to drown out my perceived inferiority and rejection through the behaviour of distractedness. Although the distractedness resulted in a disconnection between me and my teacher and may seem to have a negative effect on my piano learning, it served to protect me from being completely overwhelmed by the experience, leaving some room for me to recover. Perhaps it would have been more constructive if I voiced out my discomfort (e.g. I don’t understand how the harmonic scales work, or I can’t get myself to practise) and ask for help, which would also maintain the student-teacher connection, but that level of maturity was not available to me, and is not available to most kids and adolescents. I probably did not even know that I needed to understand how the harmonic scales work; perhaps all I knew was they were much harder than the major scales and they didn’t seem to improve after trying to practise. This kind of mental planning and processing is called executive function, and it doesn’t fully develop until our mid-20s for females, or early 30s for males. In that case, ideally the adults might have recognised that I was struggling, then step in and give compassion for the discomfort that I was in, and reassure me that they would go through this dangerous environment with me and keep me safe; that they would maintain connection with me and accept me for who I was instead of rejecting me for not being able to do those things. However, back then there was less of this information and perspectives available to the adults; they did the best with what they had, just like we are doing our best with what we have now. 

(The "head" icon created by Sergey Demushkin was downlaoded from The Noun Project on 23 May 2024, https://thenounproject.com/icon/head-188874/)

Shutting down

The fact that I chose to distract myself by playing Fauré’s fugue is perhaps indicative that somewhere inside me I really have a deep connection to music. For students whose genuine interests lie elsewhere, if they frequently sense danger in learning the piano, their bodies may adopt a strategy of compliance in order to get through childhood and fulfil the adults’ expectations; outwardly they may follow all of our instructions but inside they might not be engaging their thinking brains. In other words, they disconnect their minds from their bodies so that the perpetual feeling of danger doesn’t enter and overwhelm their consciousness, just as I have no recollection of whether I did feel anything at all in those piano lessons. Once they get to adulthood, if they are fortunate, they might find other routes such as yoga or dancing to reconnect with their bodies, but piano will likely play no further part in their lives. This shutdown adaptation is a result of a shift to the dorsal vagal pathway and is something our bodies will turn towards when we feel there is a life-threatening danger. ‘Life-threatening’ may sound laughably exaggerated; afterall we are only talking about piano lessons, it’s not like anybody will actually die from learning the piano. However, in the body of a child, life-threatening danger often means the risk of abandonment and rejection by their carers, because children don’t have all the means to care for themselves yet. They might get this cue of abandonment from phrases such as “if you fail the exam then we will take away your phone” or “if you don’t practise then you are not a good child”. While these comments may seem entirely sensible to adults, from the child’s perspective they might be experienced as “if I fail the exam then I would be flawed and nobody will want me” or “I am not lovable if I don’t practise”. In the short term, we may see that the children will take action (practise more) to try and avoid those life-threatening implications, but the practice will often be robotic because the mind has been disengaged to protect it from being overwhelmed by fear; the body moves on its own, following instructions where possible but without much cognitive reflection. In the long term however, the children may become habitually anxious when playing the piano, always worried about making mistakes, shutting off the possibility of being creative, and drastically diminishing the capacity to actually enjoy the music while playing it.

(The "human-robot" icon created by Cahya Kurniawan was downloaded from The Noun Project on 23 May 2024, https://thenounproject.com/icon/human-robot-6878626/)

All this talk about perspectives, safety, bodily needs and feelings are still relatively new to me, and I have a hard time trying to implement them. Whenever I reflect on my lessons and recall how the students’ bodies start to collapse, or how their eyes drift off as their minds disengage, or how they try to avoid certain tasks by relentlessly changing topics, I feel a mix of guilt and shame that makes me want to curl into a ball. In case you also feel distressed about this, I have found it useful to remind myself that we are always doing the best with what we have. We never wilfully wish for the children to suffer. We always have the best intentions to help them grow, and we could only do it in a way we know, which is the way we were brought up. Sometimes what we see in the children really triggers something in us, causing us to want to react immediately; in those moments, I am trying to recognise my anger or my shame, own the feeling, and be compassionate to myself. Whatever that trigger is, it is something that makes us uncomfortable, and we can only soothe it by recognising it and giving it compassion. When we are able to pause, we have more space to see the children for who they are, and not as the behaviours that trigger us. Of course, there are still going to be times when my feelings get the better of me and I say or do something that leads to a rupture in the teacher-student connection; we can never be perfect, and we don’t need to be perfect, because there are always going to be ruptures in a relationship, and it is by repairing those ruptures that a relationship can grow to be secure and solid. 

Stress and fight/flight behaviours

Humans are wired for connection; all children want to connect with the adults and they will not willfully set out to destroy that connection. If they appear to do that, then it is a signal for me that they are being overwhelmed with some sort of danger and their immediate need for safety has overridden the need for connection. Such a stress overload might prompt some kids to shift to the sympathetic nervous system and display fight/flight behaviour. In a piano classroom, that might be constant arguing, grumpiness, chattiness, freaking out, and other avoidance behaviours that would mean not playing the piano. In those situations, I try to remember that the cause of those behaviours is stress overload, and the last thing they need at that point is anything that might create even more stress. It might be also useful to note that stress is accumulative; the same stressor (e.g. reading notes with many ledger lines) might seem fine one week, while the next week it could trigger a complete breakdown because in that second week the child might be having relational problems at school, or struggling with academic work, or lost something important at home, or having problems with sleep. 

Play (not necessarily playing the piano but genuine play) while being connected to each other is known to be one of the quickest ways to (re-)establish safety. I have two yoga balls in my piano classroom, so that when the students bounce on their ball, I also bounce with them on my ball. That usually lifts the atmosphere immediately and helps us to be more attuned in our movements and our energy level. We can also try to incorporate other forms of vigorous movements such as skipping and stomping to stimulate our bodily sensations, but if the child is already over-activated, then perhaps some quiet play with puzzles or word games could help. 

(Image source: Private Collection)

Resilience and regulation

One may wonder - if we are always being so kind and fluffy to our kids, always emphasising safety, how will they survive in the real world? Indeed that is a difficult balance to manage. We want kids to be resilient, to be able to move through difficult situations. Some researchers define resilience as the ease to shift between the different physiological states of social interaction, stress and shutdown, but before our brains reach maturity in our 20s and 30s, we cannot reliably shift these states by ourselves. This shifting of physiological states is called regulation, and we need someone to co-regulate with us enough times before we can internalise that experience into self-regulation. To co-regulate with a kid, we have to first check which physiological state we are in, and find ways to get ourselves back in the social engagement state, for example by practising deep belly breathing or taking a walk (or even bouncing on the yoga ball); when we are in the social engagement state, the kids’ nervous system will sense it, and it will become easier for them to mirror us and return to the social engagement state. By taking a moment to regulate ourselves, we would also be setting a great example to the kids on the importance of regulation. If we are confidently rooted in the social engagement state, we may also try to say something or do something that helps us land in the other person’s safety zone and (re-)establish a connection. 

Things to be careful of: pointing out mistakes

I find it very difficult to land in the safety zone of a new student. Perhaps it’s because I usually have one foot planted in the stress response mode, worrying about how I am being perceived, and thus have failed several times when meeting a teenage student for the first time: they already looked somewhat tense the moment they stepped in, and I ended up saying things that made them even more uncomfortable. Some of these students would persevere and we eventually gained each other’s trust and the lessons became effective; others dropped out after a few months or a few lessons. That is one reason why I buy into the idea of not unilaterally fixing things, because fixing things just means pointing out mistakes and if the teacher-student relationship hasn’t built enough trust, repeatedly pointing out mistakes will be interpreted as a signal of rejection. One 12 year-old student actually reflected to me, “Didn’t you know? You should only say nice things to a new student in the first 3 months, or even the first year. Afterwards, you can start pointing out the mistakes.” Now I am even questioning the necessity to point out mistakes at all, because if we give them space, the students will usually notice the mistakes by themselves; if not, then I would try to approach it sideways, to make sure they have the tools to be aware of what they are playing. To date, I have become quite comfortable at not pointing out the wrong notes and wrong rhythms, but at the higher levels I still struggle with not pointing out what I perceive as problems in balance, phrasing, and technical issues. That doesn’t mean we leave them as they are - in my understanding, what we can do is to help them be aware of what they are doing and check that it is what they want to do with the music. Also, I have to check if I am actually being triggered by aspects of their balance/phrasing/technique and have moved to a stress response, in which case what I say and how I say it may likely elicit a defensive response from the student and that won’t do us much good. Perhaps the point is not really about whether I point out mistakes or not, but rather from which physiological state I am acting on. Is it a triggered response? Or is it coming from a place of social interaction? 

Things to be careful of: frowning

While constantly pointing out mistakes could easily be misinterpreted by the student as rejection, another social cue that I am learning to be careful with is the frown. Biologically, we are sensitive to the body language of rejection and disgust. If a child senses a disgusted look from the adult, they could easily misread that as “I am disgusting”, “I am not lovable”. I am fortunate to have students who are trusting enough to tell me that I frown a lot. That really strikes me, and so I try to consciously lift my eyebrows when I start to feel them furrowing, which probably looks a bit weird, but it is still important for the kids to see that I am trying to be better for them and their feedback matters. The more effective but also more difficult method would be to learn to see the kids as who they are and appreciate them as who they are. 

(Illustration: Queena Chu)

Furthermore, I find that my frowns are usually not directed at them, but at my past selves. Something in the students’ playing might have reminded me of the times when I got big-lettered comments from professors saying that my playing was SO BAD, or maybe it is reminiscent of some flaw I have heard in my own recordings that I have worked so hard to remove. I get triggered - the traumas return to haunt me. But they are my traumas, I don’t need to, and certainly don’t want to pass it on to my students. 

Acknowledge and redirect

The kids have enough stress to deal with in their everyday lives. When the stress hormone cortisol is constantly high, it actually damages our brains. The natural way for the brain to counter cortisol is through oxytocin, dubbed the chemical of love, which is released when we are connected with each other through compassion and empathy. I learned that one way to connect with compassion and empathy is to use a two step method called “acknowledge and redirect” (video here). What that means is, when we see a behaviour that we are not comfortable with (e.g. the student doodles something on the piano while we are trying to say something), we make a guess at what they are trying to express in that behaviour, acknowledge their needs, and through that acknowledgement we will actually be giving compassion: “I see that what I am saying might be difficult for you to take in, and so you may not want to hear me talk.” Once that has sunk in, we can ask if there is another way for them to express that need so that we keep a good connection: “Is there another way for you to let me know that? Perhaps you can tell me that you need some time to cool down or maybe we can make you a card to raise up when you would like me to pause the talking for a moment?”