The Oxford dictionary defines the word Holistic as ‘characterized by the belief that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole’

In my Montessori training we heard the phrase “teaching the whole child” very often, I remember doing my Module 1 Kids Yoga Training and thinking about how similar the Montessori ethos was to Yoga. During the Industrial revolution where children worked as hard as their parents in factories and on farms Maria Montessori took on the exponential task of changing the way adults saw children, they moved away from seeing them as adults in smaller bodies and moved more towards seeing children as children, with very different needs to those of adults. Montessori revolutionized our society’s viewpoint on children and brought to our attention the fact that we need to look at the child as a whole – physically, emotionally and mentally.

 It is often found that there is a focus on just intellect within most schools, in Yoga we not only encourage intellectual thinking but it comes within a physical practice and even better it supports emotional well being through positive thinking and positive self affirmation. When you look at it that way it is teaching the whole child, just like Dr. Montessori.