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Mabel Lui

When Alison Drake was teaching in a primary school in Hong Kong in 2008, she learned that her father had just been diagnosed in the UK with stage four cancer – and did not have much time left.
The then-25-year-old was devastated, especially because they shared a close relationship.
“I was just always following my dad around since I was a little girl,” she recalls.
She began flying back and forth between Hong Kong and the UK – where she was born and raised – and found herself turning to running as an outlet for her feelings. Later, she discovered yoga and she credits both with helping her navigate the grief that came with her father’s illness and death.

She has found a way to use what she learned to help others: Drake is now a full-time yoga teacher who specialises in teaching children and teenagers. Her classes are focused on mindfulness and emotional regulation to help her students learn to process how they are feeling, something she used to struggle with.
For Drake, her father’s diagnosis left her simply going through the motions to get through each day. “I was on autopilot really, just trying to put one foot in front of the other,” she says.
That was when she took up running.
“I just knew that I had to run, and it became such a focus for me just to get out there, just to run off that nervous energy.
“I look back and see how symbolic that time was for me, and it was a reminder I was strong, that I could keep going,” she adds.

Running became her passion. Before her father died in August 2009, she told him that she would one day complete a marathon. She made good on her promise in 2012, when she ran the London Marathon for non-profit organisation Cancer Research UK.
She has now run 14 marathons, including five of the six Abbott World Marathon Majors. Running is a way for her to keep her dad’s memory alive, and she often runs in support of cancer research charities.
Over time, she realised that despite feeling connected to her dad during her races, they were a form of distraction – an avenue for Drake to “run away” from her life. That was where yoga came into play.
She started practising yoga when her father was first diagnosed but gave it up after a particularly distressing session in which the class had been asked to lie in the savasana – or corpse – pose. She could not hold in her emotions.
“Just to lie down in silence in a room full of people you don’t know, it’s massively confronting. One day, it was just all too much,” she says. “I started getting really annoyed, thinking, ‘What is this class? I paid for it. I wouldn’t pay to lie on the floor.’ I started crying, and that was it. I stopped going to yoga for a while.”

A few years later, she returned to yoga, and this time she was fully able to work through her emotions. “It was the thing that pulled me back and helped me to slow down and actually sit with my feelings,” she says.
She started introducing some poses to her primary-school students as a way to get them to move in the classroom. She then trained as a children’s yoga teacher and later did training to teach adults. Poses, she learned, were but a small part of the practice, just one of its eight “limbs”.
Mindfulness, breathing exercises and emotional regulation were some of the other integral parts – all of which Drake knew would be hugely beneficial for children and teenagers to learn for their mental health.
By August 2018, Drake had quit her job to focus entirely on teaching yoga, opening OmSkool Yoga. She typically teaches those aged three to 18.
For young children she makes the classes fun through themes, songs, games and discussion. A typical class might begin with a warm-up, followed by sun salutation poses – a beginner-friendly sequence that helps stretch, strengthen and energise the body – and the introduction of a theme.

If a class is centred on self-belief, for example, she might teach some poses that are more challenging and require balance. As part of her Lunar New Year class this year, she showed them the snake breath, which involves making the “sss” sound as one exhales.
“When you do a long exhale, it soothes your parasympathetic nervous system, so it’s calming for them. The kids think that they’re just being a snake, but they’re also learning how to regulate themselves,” Drake says.
Above all, Drake focuses on mindfulness and emotional regulation, whether she is teaching children or teens.
“We talk about how we’re feeling,” she says. Doing so helps students to become aware of their emotions – to name them, to know where they feel it in their body – and notice how their emotions can impact their behaviours.
Drake also teaches relaxation techniques to enable them to practise healthy coping strategies in adverse situations.

“My job is very much equipping children with those skills for when they need them,” she says. One student told Drake that they were able to calm down before an exam by repeating a self-belief mantra learned in Drake’s class.
The benefits of yoga and breathwork for young children are not limited to mental health, either.
According to a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine in the US state of California, at-risk kids were able to sleep better and gain almost a half an hour of REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep – the sleep stage where most dreams happen – after completing a mindfulness curriculum that taught them how to focus on the present.
“There is theoretical, animal and human evidence to suggest [REM is] a very important phase of sleep for neuronal development and for the development of cognitive and emotional function,” said sleep expert Ruth O’Hara, the study’s senior author.
For those who may want to practise mindfulness themselves, or with a child, Drake suggests that you simply check in with how you – or they – feel every day. You can ask where that emotion is felt, its colour, or whether it feels like a type of weather.

“It’s so important to let children know that they are allowed to feel their feelings. All the feelings are valid, it’s just that some behaviours are unacceptable, so [it’s about] learning healthy ways to cope with those feelings and process them.”
Drake also recommends practising gratitude.
“Something I love to do with the kids is reflecting on three things in their day that they’re grateful for. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking you have to be happy, first of all, to then be grateful. But I think [if you are] grateful first, the happiness comes from that.”
She can attest to this herself. “Life will be hard. We’ll all have difficult times – grief, relationship issues, friendship issues,” Drake says. But if more people in the world are equipped with strategies to deal with these issues, it can only lead to positives.
“When people feel better about themselves, you just show up better in the world.”
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At OmSkool Yoga in Hong Kong, Alison Drake makes classes fun through themes, songs, games and discussion. Photo: courtesy of Alison Drake

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At OmSkool Yoga, Drake typically teaches those aged three to 18, and tailors her classes based on the age of her students. Photo: courtesy of Alison Drake

To help engage young students, Drake uses props in her classes, such as a singing bowl and a breathing ball, which can expand and contract to mimic inhaling and exhaling. Photo: courtesy of Alison Drake

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Alison Drake’s yoga for children includes not only poses but mindfulness, relaxation techniques and self-regulation. It can help with exams


Alison Drake’s yoga for children includes not only poses but mindfulness, relaxation techniques and self-regulation. It can help with exams.


Gratitude or happiness, which comes first? Hong Kong yoga for kids that’s a whole lot more

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Alison Drake’s yoga for children includes not only poses but mindfulness, relaxation techniques and self-regulation. It can help with exams

Alison Drake’s yoga for children includes not only poses but mindfulness, relaxation techniques and self-regulation. It can help with exams