CPR Training in Tokyo

Article by Dylan Robertson.

I was told a horror story during my yoga teacher training course.

Apparently, a middle aged man came into a yoga class being taught by one of my teachers’ colleagues. The man completed the class without any obvious problems or issues. As is typical in a yoga class it ended with all students spending about 5 minutes relaxing in Savasana (Corpse Pose). It’s common for students to fall asleep in this pose, so when the man didn’t rise together with everyone, the instructor let him be and then went over to him after the class had finished, intending to gently wake him and send him on his way…

…And then she noticed he wasn’t breathing. She panicked and had one of the students call an ambulance. After they arrived, the ambulance workers confirmed that the man was dead.

The instructor blamed herself and went into deep psychological trauma with guilt that she could have saved the man if she had only known what to do.

You could have heard a pin drop in the room after this story was told. We had all come along thinking teaching yoga was going to be a fun and trendy thing to do. Now we realized that there were real issues to be confronted. After all, you never know – even a young and healthy person could walk in with some medical condition that causes them to pass out and stop breathing.

The story sure worked — I made sure to undergo CPR training before teaching my first class. What I learned is that CPR is highly complex — it’s more than just blowing into the person’s mouth and pumping their chest — and one should ideally re-take the course once a year to refresh one’s knowledge and skills.

I took my course in English in Yokohama. It was taught by a Japanese man who spoke fluent English and was certified by the American Heart Association.

For details, please see www.blsjapan.com/en/