Doing Yoga Means Doing Good
This is an interview with Judith Sekler, who works with an organization called A Thousand Joys in Los Angeles.
It partners with schools in high-crime impoverished neighborhoods with high-risk children and families who are suffering the effects of trauma-related stress and violence, referred to as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s). ATJ’s school-based program Transform uses healing modalities including yoga, meditation and mindfulness to help students build confidence and control over their bodies and minds. Transform has been shown to help students better regulate their emotions, foster positive social relationships, focus on their studies, and set and meet goals.
I was a poser: backbends, arm balances, leg-behind-head pose, all day long. Yoga was a gymnastic event, a battle of ego and endurance that I never won. Believing that pain was a by-product of my success, I pounded my body into my first hip replacement surgery at age forty-two.
Depressed and angry, I never imagined that time away from the mat would lead me to a true yogic path, one that has nothing to do with pose marathons. My primary practice became mindfulness meditation, where “doing yoga” meant cultivating nonjudgmental qualities like patience and compassion. To my amazement, a flexible mind and heart, not hamstrings, finally brought me a better quality of life. I felt more balance, and the simple (but not easy) meditation of living daily life came into focus. With it came a desire to help others, along with a newfound awareness of a community that I had paid the least attention to: those different than myself. Not Just A Pose(r): When Doing Yoga Means Doing Good | HuffPost