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Yoga helps to promote healthy development, self-esteem, and emotional adjustment in teens
Yoga reduces aggressive behavior in young people
Yoga reduces teenage stress
Yoga helps treat eating disorders
Yoga helps promote a healthier body image
Art and the Eight Limbs
How and why The Art of Yoga Project uses creative expression with incarcerated teen girls
A New Article by Mary Lynn Fitton, RN, MS, FNP
Why Art and Yoga? “Your program offers girls their full humanity” wrote author Margaret Scott, after learning about AYP. We believe this is due to AYP’s innovative weaving of creativity into the yoga experience, because art is uniquely human.
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The Yoga and Creative Arts Curriculum, while respecting the wisdom of a 2000-year-old tradition, offers an effective modernized approach suited for adolescents. The result is a dynamic and vigorous experience challenging participants, both physically and emotionally.
The Art of Yoga Project’s focus on yoga practice assists youth by giving them safe ways to push limits and test boundaries. It also helps balance the intense hormones and powerful emotions of adolescence. The Project builds trust in a circle of supportive peers and women elders, which is especially effective for young women with histories of physical and emotional abuse.
Yoga and creative arts help at-risk girls channel their emotions. Art and yoga provide essential outlets for adolescent girls and offer healthy alternatives to violence, self-harm and substance use. Artistic expression gives young women a voice. They can write, paint or draw about feelings and convictions instead of acting out with high-risk behaviors.
Art helps girls understand yoga’s deeper meaning. Through art, the girls are able to incorporate core concepts of truthfulness, non-violence and self-contentment into their lives.
In addition, the program grants a young woman a new identity. She becomes ‘an athlete,’ ‘an artist,’ and ‘a writer’ instead of being labeled as ‘troubled’ or ‘at-risk.’ Each young woman carries this new, positive identity into her future, enabling her to create better choices for herself.