Yoga for Youth provides incarcerated youth in Los Angeles County Detention Center camps with a yoga and meditation program conducted by accomplished yoga instructors, any of whom have 15-20 years of teaching experience and creative arts exposure and training with professional artists. The program consists of up to six months of Yoga and Meditation instruction to detention center youths prior to their release into the communities. The program is design to help facilitate their transaction into a more constructive life by teaching skills in anger management, stress reduction, and emotional control. Learning stress and anger management through Yoga and Mediation demonstrates alternative means to deal with their daily challenges and generates different cognitive ways of perceiving themselves and the world.
Participants at detention camps Kilpatrick, Miller, and Sylmar Juvenile Hall Yoga Classes, eagerly report how Yoga has helped them control their tempers more easily and keep calm when other inmates are trying to antagonize them. Their outlook on life invariably changes from one of hopelessness and despair in the early stages of the program to one of optimism and determination in the later weeks. It also demonstrates to their own potential growth, self-actualization, and for developing a feeling of competency.
During the spring of 1998, channel 2 CBS News reported that Yoga and Meditation was good for children especially for those suffering with Attention Deficit Disorder, Stress, and Asthma. Though the news reporter focused only on these particular illnesses, other studies in the past 25 years acknowledge the ability of Yoga to lower blood pressure, strengthen the heart, expand lung capacity, and reduce the possibility of diabetes and headaches.
Background further shows that many mainstream artists, theologians, educators, and business executives have testified to the practical uses of YOGA as an aid to self-fulfillment, personal and professional success, and an increase in general health and well being.
The impact of our “Yoga for Youth” program has had on the young people in the Upward bound program at USC over the past three years, is a further testimony to the positive reception YOGA has had with “at risk youth”. Out of 125 students a year for nine years, more than 85 per year remarked that the Yoga has helped them relax, sleep better, and control their tempers more easily, concentrate for longer periods of time on their school work, and feel better about themselves as individuals.
YOGA is an ancient science of self-awareness. The practice of YOGA provides an experience of Oneness, empowers the practitioner with an inner strength, while fostering harmonious relationships with others. It creates a foundation of relaxation and peace mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Numerous studies have demonstrated the powerful effect of exercise on the physical, mental, and emotional development of young people. YOGA exercises and postures are particularly useful as they work directly to reduce stress, strengthen the nervous system, and stabilize ones emotional foundation