Yoga

Kick Back and Give Back!

We want your old yoga mats. Kids all over Manhattan are doing yoga on sheets and naked crummy gym floors while others bliss out under blankets in savasana. If you have a yoga mat to spare, send it to YogaLife (YogaLife, 733 Third Avenue, 15th Fl, NY, NY 10017) and our partners at Lululemon (1928 Broadway at 64th St. NY, NY 10023, T: 212-712-1767) will offer you a 15% discount on the purchase of a new one when you show them the note thanking you for your donation.

Kids on the Mat

When Lisa Rurak started teaching yoga to her first grade special education class in Brooklyn, she heard from some confused parents. "One boy went home and said he was doing ‘yogurt' at school," Rurak says.

Despite the early confusion, those parents are thanking her now. Rurak teaches students with ADHD, language impairments, and learning disabilities. Yoga has helped them calm down, focus, improve their listening skills, gain confidence, understand the human body, and be healthier, she says.

When Rurak first began at Brooklyn's PS 31 Samuel DuPont Elementary School, teaching special education kindergarteners, the school was cutting budgets, so homeroom teachers were put in charge of gym class once or twice a week. While many opted for relay races or running games, "for kids with attention deficit, running around exhausts them but does not teach them how to calm down and get in control," Rurak says.

Rurak had been practicing yoga about twice a week for 3 years, and a friend suggested she implement it in the classroom. Rurak told her students about her own practice, and read them the book Babar's Yoga for Elephants. She had them make paper-bag elephant puppets, and then they took off their shoes, pushed their desks aside, and started trying the poses. "The kids got a big kick out of bonding in a different way. We were all on the floor, rolling around. My shoes are off, their shoes are off, we can see each other's toes-it's funny for them," she says.

"I'm serious about them concentrating and trying to do the poses. It's definitely pretty amazing to watch the kids with attention issues struggle because they want to be looking around to see who's doing what, but they are really trying to do the poses, and they feel accomplished when they get it right," she says.

"When the kids get noisy in the classroom, I'll say, ‘Let's stop and do yoga for a minute,' and lead them in a breathing exercise-10 seconds in, then 10 seconds out-and they are able to refocus and come back to whatever they were working on," she says. "Yoga is very clear and step-by-step, which is how these kids need to operate in school. It teaches them how to calm down, center, and control."

Yoga classes have extended into lessons about the muscles and bones in the human body, and what it means to stay healthy and eat right. Some of the students even practice at home. "It's nice to see the kids appreciate it enough to take it home," says Rurak, who has been a teacher for 13 years. "I think back to some of the classes I've had over the years and think about how much it would have helped those kids to try this. I have not found one down side to this. I just wish I had done it sooner."