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Late last month, I went back to my alma mater, Spelman College, to bring yoga to the incoming freshman class. We convened outdoors in the course of the first week of classes to practice yoga and meditation. The Spelman Gospel Choir accompanied us, and their songs were our playlist. It was a meaningful and powerful experience for me to have the option to share yoga and meditation in this manner.

Our gathering at a historically Black college delivered the message that it’s vital to have holistic practices that remind us to ascertain in with how we’re experiencing life. That’s very true for these young people.

The event, which was held along side Peloton On Tour 2023, was an offshoot of the Yoga, Literature, and Art Camp for teen girls that I founded in 2013. YLA camp serves girls ages 13 through 17, who could have their sights set on going to varsity or doing something different with their lives. It centers the various experiences which might be unique to those that self-identify as young women, who’re Black and Brown, and who may only see a narrow reflection of themselves in arts and culture.

After I was a bit girl, I used to like to read, however the books were often written through the lens of somebody who didn’t appear to be me or have the experiences of a Black girl like me. Later, once I began practicing yoga, I had an analogous experience: I didn’t see numerous examples that jogged my memory that I had a spot in yoga spaces. I now know that they were on the market, but they weren’t being elevated.

I wanted Yoga, Literature, and Art Camp to normalize our existence—our bodies, our sounds, our hair, our culture, every little thing that’s unique about us—in all our diversity. There are such a lot of spaces where we can’t be free, places that tell us that we will’t be who we’re. People, regardless of what age, need spaces to practice freedom. I wanted this event at Spelman, and future yoga and meditation events like this, to be spaces for young Black and Brown women to cultivate a way of freedom.

Attuning to the Mental Health Needs of Black and Brown Teens

The camp first met on the Spelman College Museum of Wonderful Art where, along with learning the basics of yoga practice, the scholars read and wrote poetry and engaged in art through photography and book binding. I’ve held the YLA camp every 12 months since its founding, including online in the course of the pandemic.

Teaching yoga on campus, within the historic Spelman College Oval, was a full-circle moment. To see my rising freshmen sisters and siblings move through their first week of classes with a yoga and meditation practice grounded my life’s work of bringing inclusive, mindful practices to Black and Brown youths. It’s an experience that I wish I could’ve had once I entered Spelman.

It’s also a practice that I wish more children and young adults could experience. Suicide amongst Black youth has been on the rise since 2000, and research indicates that amongst this population, taking one’s life is usually preceded by a crisis or conflict throughout the previous two weeks.

I believe yoga helps young people gather themselves. Whenever you enter maturity, it’s vital to know what you’re experiencing and to be attuned to your body, your emotions. Yoga and meditation are great tools to support and help navigate that. Through my empirical research, I actually have found that these practices will help young individuals feel more stable, more aware, and more confident as they navigate this world.

My hope is that, by engaging within the practice, the young women I interact with turn out to be more integrated and more connected with their purpose. Because that’s what they need as they move forward on this world. Our young individuals are the leaders of the longer term. After they understand who they’re on this world, they’ll understand where they’re going to take the world in the following lifetime.

Some people consider teenagers as being unformed. But they’re forming. They’re coming into their very own. They’re doing things for the primary time. As adults, can we remind ourselves of what it felt prefer to do something for the primary time and the way scary that’s?

If we make it to maturity, we’ve got to recollect what we ourselves experienced as children and youths. We hear loads about how much stress young individuals are under. Although the last decade or the era may look different, all of us had challenges. Regardless of what time period we were born in, we have to be sensitive and attuned to the expansion process.

That type of awareness all the time starts with the way you understand yourself. If it’s uncomfortable for you to take a seat with yourself, how on this planet are you going to take a seat and be comfortable enough to listen to what a young adult goes through straight away?

After we expand our capability to know and be present with ourselves, we’re going to have the option to expand our capability to be present with anybody else, including the young people around us. And that’s how we’ll have the option to know what children, teens, and young adults are going through straight away.

That is the reference to yoga, a practice that permits us to come back back to who we’re and to see who we were and who we’ve got turn out to be. The more that we practice that connection, the higher off we might be. Once we’ve got that have, it’ll make what anyone else experiences—our young people included—more comprehensible to us. And it helps us understand easy methods to higher support them, and anyone, of their experiences.

Finding Freedom

It is necessary to me that we center Black girls’ stories, that we’re very deliberate about curating an experience that helps them see themselves as being valued and useful, whether through words or art or coming to the mat as a yoga practitioner.

Coming back to my college campus and having a reunion with a number of the girls who graduated from YLA camp was a full circle moment for me. Among the them ended up attending and graduating from Spelman College. Some are still involved with the camp as leaders. After we first began YLA, I met a young woman named Chloe who was a senior in highschool and on her solution to Spelman College. She began helping and volunteering. As a young adult, she has turn out to be a yoga teacher and is the co-director of YLA camp.

As many individuals know, yoga means to unite, to yoke, to affix. The ladies who come are really enthusiastic about yoga. They actually need to be there. Even in the event that they’ve never experienced yoga or meditation, YLA campers want to know yoga and so they wish to be in community with others like them. There are numerous spaces where we can’t be free. At YLA, they’re free to be themselves.

As told to Tamara Y. Jeffries.

About Our Contributor

Chelsea Jackson Roberts, together with her husband, Shane Roberts, is the co-founder of Red Clay Yoga, an Atlanta-based studio designed to assist diversify the practice of yoga. A former elementary school teacher and education scholar, she joined Peloton as a yoga and meditation instructor in 2015. redclayyoga.org