WATCH: Children from communities in Johannesburg enjoy yoga programmes

Everyone can benefit from yoga.

Thanks to non-governmental organisation, eduSOIL, children from Belly Delly Daycare Centre got an opportunity to benefit from yoga.

Since January, eduSOIL has enabled 195 children in at-risk communities in Johannesburg to access mindfulness and yoga programmes.

The participating schools have paid what they are able to afford since January, while EduSOIL has made a bold commitment to seek funding and investment support for operational costs.

“Such programmes are often only available to those children whose parents can afford it, or who are from the more affluent areas,” said Juanita Naidoo Rea, eduSOIL founder.

Rea said they are currently working with 195 children from the Streetlight Schools in Jeppestown, Kgololo Academy in Alexandra and the children from the daycare centre.

These eduSOIL lessons help schoolchildren to increase attentiveness, meta-cognition and self-motivation, and help them manage anxiety and impulsiveness with greater emotional resilience. It also helps them to increase body awareness and improve flexibility, strength, balance and develop empathy and self-compassion to reduce reactivity in difficult situations.

About three million children under the age of six face an increased loss of development potential due to toxic stress. As many as eight to 11 per cent of children and adolescents suffer from anxiety which effects their ability to get on with their lives and tools like mindfulness and yoga which promote mental and emotional health and well-being.

https://www.facebook.com/CityBuzzJHB/videos/1075678042563220/

Read: 67 minutes of yoga

Edited by Stacey Woensdregt