LAKE NONA, Fla. — Times are changing, especially in our kids. According to the CDC, the mental health of our nation’s teenagers has grown steadily worse for more than a decade.
But one program at the Lake Nona Performance Club and Chopra Mind-Body Zone is hoping to get ahead of the curve by hosting a program that gets kids away from social media and on their feet.
Setting up the studio, Julie Weiss, is introducing the world of yoga to the Lake Nona community.
“I got my certification right after college. I was a dance major,” said Julie Weiss, Coordinator at Chopra Mind-Body Zone.
She wasn’t always a yogi. Her journey started on the dance floor.
“So, as a dancer, you are always critiquing yourself and comparing yourself to others. I had a really hard time in college,” said Weiss. “I wound up having an eating disorder my senior year, and I took a yoga class, which is part of our dance major program. There were no mirrors in there and I can be whoever I want to be.”
Now Weiss is opening a program for kids so they get introduced to the benefits yoga has to offer at a young age.
According to Frontiers in Psychiatry, they believe yoga can be used as a tool for kids and young adults to deal with stress, as well as regulate their emotions. That’s something Weiss hopes her students take in and outside the studio.
“What happens when you pull yourself away from that technical device is you get to know you. And you are the most important thing,” said Weiss.
Teaching young kids calmness may be challenging for some. But it’s a lesson Weiss says everyone can learn.
“In yoga we breathe, we pay attention to our breath. If you teach your child, oh well, breathing is important, they may not want to hear that,” said Weiss. “But then when they hear why we breathe so deeply and why it’s important. And we call it in adults terms your ‘prana’ or your ‘life force,’ but in kid we may call it your super power.”
It’s meeting kids at their level. For Weiss, that means using her imagination. In a world that never stops, in yoga you can just be.
“In life, we often hear don’t just sit there do something, but mediation is the opposite. Don’t just do something, sit there. Sit and be,” said Weiss.