Yoga for Young Asylum Seekers
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” This quote, attributed to Frederick Douglas, describes what I hope to do by developing a programme for teaching yoga to young refugees.
Called ‘Resilience and Peace of Mind – Yoga for Young Asylum Seekers’, the yoga program has four main aims: to bring tools of joy, resilience, dignity, and relaxation to this group of youngsters.
It’s an intention I’ve kept close to my heart since 2018 when I started teaching at a Fedasil Centre outside Brussels. The centre hosts some 50-80 youngsters.
Over the years, I have met hundreds of refugee minors. They are unaccompanied children sent by their families or sometimes fled from violent war zones, poverty, persecution and hopelessness.
They come by foot and different means of transport, mainly from Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East, to seek a better future in Europe. They all fended for themselves, and some have lived through horrors.
I feel lucky to use my yoga teaching skills with these youngsters who, in the end, teach me as a human being as much, if not more, than I teach them.
I’m a yoga teacher, not a psychologist, nurse or doctor. But as a mother in my sixties, grandmother and wife with a long career as a journalist behind me, I am used to observing people and keeping my eyes open.
The boys and girls I meet at the centre have suffered gruelling experiences. However, I don’t bend over backwards to see them as victims but as young individuals who have come a long way alone.
As individuals, they reconfirm to me something deeply human – the universality of moving together, sitting still together, sharing across generations how the mind connects to the body, and vice versa.
“We are stars wrapped in skin. The light you are seeking has always been within.” ― Anonymous