 Inner-City Inner Peace
By Barry Boyce
When
you grow up in one of the hundreds of underprivileged neighborhoods in
American cities, the odds are stacked against you. Ali and Atman Smith
and Andy Gonzales know firsthand how easy it is for children to lose
their way and succumb to fear and despair. So when they returned to west
Baltimore after graduating from University of Maryland, they began
working with schoolchildren to help them lower stress and become more
resilient.
In
2002, the principal at Windsor Hills Elementary, where Ali and Atman
Smith’s mother worked, asked whether they would like to coach sports.
“After we thought about it,” Ali told me, “we decided what we would
really like to do with kids is yoga, because we saw the effect yoga was
having on us. It makes you feel stronger and more limber, but, more than
that, there is a meditative element. Stress rolls off of you so much
more easily. Your demeanor is calmer. You have a peaceful spot you can
go to inside. No matter where you are, what you’re doing, what turmoil
you’re going through, you can find that peace.”
Gonzales
and the Smiths started working with fifth graders, using yoga, which
the brothers had learned from their parents. “When we started the
program,” Atman Smith said, “the kids thought yoga was the little guy
from Star Wars.”
But soon, yoga poses, breathing techniques, and periods of mindfulness
became the means for the children to find solitude and develop inner
resources.
Most
of the participants were “what you would call problem students,” Ali
Smith said, “and at first we broke up fights on a daily basis. We often
had to collect students from detention.” Then teachers started sending
notes urging the three to keep doing whatever they were doing because
the teachers were noticing a change in those taking part. So were
parents.
“They
weren’t perfect little angels,” Ali Smith said, “but they were better
able to concentrate in their classes, and they weren’t going out and
starting fights.”
The
program began with fifteen students, and when the school year ended,
they kept working with those original students through an afterschool
program at the Druid Hill YMCA. The original fifteen students grew to
twenty-five, and almost all have stayed in touch with the
instructors—for help with getting started in college or on a career path
or to work as assistant instructors. The three activists set up a
nonprofit, the Holistic Life Foundation (www.hlfinc.org),
which in addition to the in-school and afterschool yoga programs,
offers mentoring, tutoring, homework assistance, gardening,
environmental advocacy, hip-hop in the neighborhoods, and basketball in
the parks. “We want to cultivate the feeling of being interconnected
with other people and the environment,” Ali Smith said, “so we take the
kids on field trips, camping, growing food. When they’re out in nature,
they feel connected to the planet. When they grow food in the garden we
started in the neighborhood, they see the fruits of their labors.
Meditation is about coming out of isolation and getting connected to
something big.”
In
2007, the Smiths’ mother put them in touch with Mark Greenberg,
director of the Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State
University. (Prevention research focuses on preventing negative outcomes
that can result, in part, from difficult school environments.)
Greenberg, who has long advocated more active forms of mindfulness for
children, checked out the YMCA program and was impressed. “If we asked
kids to just sit there, be quiet, and follow their breath,” he told me,
“they wouldn’t get into it, but I saw these kids really having fun with
the poses and then becoming relaxed and quiet, abnormally quiet!”
Greenberg
asked the Holistic Life team whether they would be willing to have
their program studied, “recognizing that a study might not demonstrate
changes in the developmental trajectories of risk or well-being—it might
just show that the kids are having a good time.”
A
pilot study was set up at four Baltimore public schools, led by Tamar
Mendelson, a clinical psychologist in the mental health department at
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who develops and
tests interventions for underserved populations. The study worked with
boys and girls in the fourth and fifth grades, and tested the
effectiveness of a twelve-week program during the school day, which
involved mindfulness and yoga-based movement. Forty-five-minute sessions
were held four times a week, with two instructors leading about
twenty-five students per class.
Mendelson
was impressed with the way the classes were structured, “beginning with
the most active movements so they could release some of their excess
energy and ending with students lying there in silence, a silence that
is so rare in their lives.” These children “are exposed to high levels
of chronic stress, and research shows that those kinds of ongoing
stressors can impair kids’ ability to regulate thoughts and emotions,”
Mendelson said. “We think this kind of program has the potential to help
kids increase their ability to control emotions and intrusive thoughts,
and put themselves on a more positive pathway.”
The
findings of the pilot study suggest that the program had a positive
impact on problematic responses to stress, including rumination
(continually thinking about the same thing), emotional arousal (being
overly reactive emotionally), and intrusive thoughts (having thought
patterns that create ongoing anxiety). Mendelson also reported that the
principals and teachers who participated in the pilot study “were
uniformly supportive of doing this kind of work with students.”
Now,
Mendelson and Greenberg have designed a study that would use a larger
population, extend over three years with follow-up assessments, and
measure more factors, including improvement in overall health from the
physical exercise at the core of the program.
The
pilot study prompted Holistic Life to develop a consistent curriculum
and organize it into a manual, so that others would be able to use its
techniques to benefit children at risk. “We would just naturally end up
talking with the kids about certain issues in their lives, but we needed
to make these topics a little more structured in the curriculum, so
others could do the same thing,” Ali Smith said. “We’d love to have this
expand to other parts of Baltimore, and then to other parts of the
country. We would like to be able to help as many people as we possibly
can.”
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