Without this hour to find some quiet, there might not be another opportunity…

by Rebecca Yarmuth

Filed Under Board member | 4 Comments

There are so many ways in which we over-book, over-whelm, over-schedule, over-nurture, over-indulge our kids. Living in a place like Boulder, it is easy to do. There are endless activities and options for kids, many of which begin after a full day of school and continue into the weekend. For those kids who are not booked with rock climbing and Nordic skiing classes, there are many who spend long days in a school building attending back-to-back classes, leaving to work or raise their young babies, coming up for air only for brief interludes. The pace we ask many of our kids to keep is frantic, but it is also the reality of our culture.

Yoga classes with TWI offer a perfect antidote to the frenzied pace of our kids’ lives, while still working within the overall structure of their world. It can be scheduled into the school day (thanks to schools adopting this as an important part of their curricula) or into their afternoon and weekend activity-marathon. But, even if it is one more thing in an already too-busy schedule, it is the one thing that can slow things down, get us to remember our breath (what is that!?), and re-center us so we can tackle (or decide not to tackle) all that lies ahead.

As a school administrator, I know how eager my students are to stop, quiet their minds, do a relaxation exercise, breathe. When I visited a TWI class at New Vista High School there was a palpable sense of urgency amongst the students to slow down, and the urgency seemed to stem from the fact that without this hour to find some quiet, there might not be another opportunity.

Wellness is about many things, but one of them is balance. TWI is offering this precious commodity to students who need it most—whether they need it because their lives are filled with privileged activities or the reality of being a teenage parent. In both cases, and all the cases in between, pausing to find one’s breath, check in, and practice yoga is where we should all be offering our support.

Rebecca Yarmuth, TWI Board Member &
Director of Admissions and Development at the Watershed School, Boulder

Filed Under Board member | 4 Comments

We Should All Support The Wellness Initiative

by Eric Weissmann

Filed Under Board member | Leave a Comment

The outcomes produced by Colorado’s public educational system are disgraceful. Denver Public Schools only graduates about 50% of its students, and the rates for black and Latino students are even worse, 39% and 31%, respectively. Many of you know that education is one of my top policy priorities – I serve on the boards of three non-profit groups in the education arena. One of these is The Wellness Initiative – a Boulder-based group that provides yoga and nutrition instruction to lower, middle, and upper schools in Colorado (at-risk schools get it free, better-funded schools pay for the programs). I’m pretty sure that I am the only conservative involved with TWI.

Today, I visited a yoga class at the New America School in Lowry. This is a charter high school focused mainly on recent immigrants. They offer both day and night classes, and heavy English immersion instruction. The yoga class offered is on the curriculum as an alternative to P.E. The 5:40 P.M. class was attended by five young women and two young men, all between sixteen and nineteen, and all ‘of color’. This is a challenging environment – three of the students had children of their own.

The class began with a journaling session – Alison, the TWI instructor, gave the students a few minutes to journal thoughts on their similarities with their peers, and their distinctive qualities. Once the students understood the instructions, the room was quiet. This was the most focused group of high school kids I’ve ever seen. The students than shared some of their observations, and related them both to the unique yoga environment and their lives. Alison then led the class through 40 minutes of yoga poses, with reminders to stick with the mental side, like “focus on your exhale.” I did the yoga side by side with the students, and I can tell you this is no watered down “yoga for wimps” practice.

I spoke with one young man, Dontrell, who is not quite seventeen but looks twenty-four and is the father of a nine-month-old daughter. Dontrell said two things that stuck with me. First, he told me that through yoga, he has “learned to stay calm in stressful situations” and this used to be much harder for him. Also, he has learned delayed gratification – he is “willing to be poor and work hard now to be wealthy later”. How many sixteen-year-olds think that way?” How many, indeed. I’m confident that both Dontrell and his daughter will be well-served by these learnings.

What are my own thoughts from this experience? First, all of us should support The Wellness Initiative. Click here to make a contribution, or contact me if you want to be more involved. Second, we need to think very broadly about potential solutions in education. How many ‘education experts’ in Denver or Washington would come up with something like this on their own? Something that seems offbeat or wacky on the surface may have a real impact; the awesome creative power of the marketplace of ideas must be harnessed towards education. Third, we need comprehensive school choice – including schools both public and private – in Colorado now. The children of wealthy parents today enjoy a wide array of options for their education – both public and private – and the autonomy to decide which of these options best fits their child’s needs. Why shouldn’t Dontrell’s daughter – and the other two young children of the yoga students – have the same opportunity?

Eric Weissmann, TWI Board member

Filed Under Board member | Leave a Comment