Michael D Higgins says he believes yoga should be taught to all school children across Ireland

Trine Jensen-Burke

Yoga should be taught to all school children says Michael D. Higgins

And as a yoga teacher, I one million percent agree, of course.

A keen yogi himself, President Michael D Higgins recently said he and his wife Sabina would like to see yoga taught to schoolchildren all across the country.

The 80-year-old was a guest on Brendan O Connor’s radio show on RTE One recently, and talked about how he has been doing yoga on and off with his wife, who is a keen yogi.

When asked by O Connor if the presenter simply needed to accept he would never become truly ‘great’ at yoga Higgins replied: “Well it isn’t about that.”

He then explained:

“A person who knows so much more about all of these things is my wife Sabina who has been practising yoga for most of her life” and he said she knows “it isn’t about evaluating your performance… it’s about gentleness.”

Having clearly understood what yoga is all about, the President explained:

“It isn’t about competition, you are not competing with anything.”

Expressing a desire to get back into “the flow” of yoga now that his own practice had lapsed, Higgins said he would like to see more people – especially children – take up the practice.

“I wish, and Sabina would say the same, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were teaching it in schools and teaching it in institutions and [that they were learning about] the great wonderful gentle respectful way that [yoga] is to the human body?”

The President’s own personal yoga instructor, Michael Ryan, has previously spoken about what a good student the President has become over the years.

In a 2018 interview with the Sunday Independent, Ryan explained:

“At the age he is – he is incredible. Particularly being a man, because a lot of men tend to get tighter and tighter as they get older, but Michael is opening up more and more all the time and becoming more and more supple.”

He said, in their hour-long sessions at the Aras an Uachtarain., the President, who was then in his late 70s, was able to do several of the classic yoga asanas (poses), such as downward dog, and also balancing poses such as chair pose and tree pose.