What patience taught me: reading the student behind the enrolment form

Ask Mallika what makes an ideal teacher and she answers without slogans. First: pass the test of patience. Second: know your subject so every query can be answered. Third — and most important — read the student's mind. Most people arrive naming one problem. After they start practising, the real issue is often something else.

Most students come with one problem, and after they come and start practicing, it is seen that their actual problem is something else.

Ten or fifteen minutes after class

Especially with teenagers, she has often stayed back when the room emptied — ten or fifteen minutes alone — when a face said something mental was sitting under the physical complaint. She talks. She gets closer carefully. Sometimes the enrolment reason was never the main reason. In those moments she has felt that mental support mattered as much as the exercise plan.

The same pattern appears with women after retirement, and with women who enrol after losing a husband or someone close. They can be deeply disturbed. Drawing on spiritual reading such as the Gita, she shares stories that ease the mind while the body work continues. Over nearly 25 years she has learned to become someone students call first — in trouble and in joy — because she treats older and younger students alike as her own children.

Related Body Care resources

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  In 2004 Mallika Some lost her husband in an accident. With a young son and a childhood love of yoga, she built the fitness classes that became Body Care.

• Beginner fitness for women

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• Face Yoga for facial tension

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