Devoted yoga teacher shares her gift of serenity

Sanjukta Sharma was introduced to yoga in her hometown of Assam in northeast India when she was just 11.

“My mother insisted that we were taught one-on-one at home,” she says. “My teacher was from the Sivananda lineage and as a child I saw the sense of calm in his disposition. He really focused on the breathing.”

Shama learned the tenets of yoga at a young age and continued to practise, as a career in financial services, marriage and two children followed. Her husband, who is in shipping, was given a new position so the family moved to Hong Kong from Mumbai in 2002.

Sharma asked at South Island School if she could help out. She was assigned a young boy with autism “who punched me hard 10 times on the first day”.

Sharma, who at that point had no experience of children with special needs, went to see an education psychologist and went on to accompany the boy for the next several years. “We ended up writing a cookbook together, with all the recipes I had taught him to cook,” she recalls.

She trained for a postgraduate diploma in Education, specialising in children with special needs and worked for the English Schools Foundation for 10 years. It was during this time that she began to think that yoga could benefit these students.

Many children with varying degrees of autism or other special needs can be emotionally frustrated and angry, says Sharma. So since yoga had been so beneficial to her both mentally and physically, five years ago she set up a class for children with special needs.