Dr. Gina's Blog

An excellent discussion below published in Forbes…given the increasing stressors kids face today, yoga exercises provide a form of movement that help kids to cope, focus and thrive.

In health,

–Dr. Gina

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Forbes (forbes.com) – How Yoga Could Help Keep Kids In School – By Alice G. Walton

Scientific evidence is mounting daily for what many have long sensed: that practices like mindfulness, meditation, and yoga can help us address certain intractable individual and societal problems. Prominent companies – Google, General Mills, Target, Apple, Nike, AOL, and Procter & Gamble among them – and prominent individuals have already embraced this possibility. Tim Ryan, the Ohio congressman who wrote the book A Mindful Nation, has been a big proponent of bringing mindfulness to the masses. He, along with others, believes that mindfulness should be a part of everyone’s day, to help wire our brains to deal with our many modern stressors.

And, perhaps more importantly for our global health, for kids dealing with extreme stressors, traumas and abuse, putting these practices into schools could be the difference between failure and success.

Last month, a group of American and Canadian scholars, researchers, businesspeople, and yoga teachers came together for a weekend at Omega Institute to discuss how this group of practices that helps us self-regulate as individuals could, quite possibly, help us regulate on a society level. The issues the country is facing – the massive dropout rate of school kids, substance abuse among all age groups, PTSD among veterans, the staggeringly high incarceration and recidivism rates – cost the country volumes in human potential, not to mention trillions in dollars.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 27th, 2013 at 6:00 am and is filed under Prevention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.