Help for Those Who Are Born into Trauma
Though the US has only 5% of the world’s population, it accounts for 80% of global opioid use. Over 11 million Americans abuse these drugs, and more than 130 die every day. Yet it’s not just the users who suffer damage. Many of those users are pregnant women. Once the...
How Technology Is (Re)Shaping Us
One of the problems with screen time is that it comes at the expense of activities kids need to be engaging in for healthy physical, cognitive, and emotional development – most vitally free play (physical and imaginative alike), face-to-face communication, and sleep....
Using Brain Breaks to Direct Energy Toward Learning
We’ve long said that Yoga Calm is more than just a curriculum; it’s a community. We see it in the ways that teachers, counselors, therapists, nurses, and other helping professionals connect with each other at events like our annual Oregon Summer Intensive. We see it...
Plan Some You-Time This Summer with Yoga Calm
With the promise of summer break is in sight, you may find yourself already thinking of ways you can rejuvenate yourself, while also developing new skills and strategies for managing your stress once the next academic year begins. It’s one reason we often hear people...
Do You Use Your Smartphone or Does It Use You? Addressing Digital Addiction through Mindfulness
Where were you during the Great Facebook Outage of 2019? Thanks to a server configuration change, Facebook – and Instagram and WhatsApp – went down for much of the world one day earlier this month. While some people welcomed the 12-hour outage as “a nice short...
Teens Speak Out About Why They Don’t Speak of Their Trauma & Its Effects
Silence isn’t singular. There are lots of different kinds. There’s the positive silence you experience in mindful meditation, for instance, or defiant silence, where the withholding of information becomes a form of power. And then there’s the silence that comes from...
The Need for a More Holistic Approach to PE
Physical education is a crucial part of a child’s overall education. It presents limitless opportunities for instilling healthy habits while supporting their growth and cognitive development. Yet ask a random group of adults what they remember about PE class, and...
Toward a Trauma-Informed Mindfulness Practice
It’s easy to think that if something works for us, it will work for anyone. How could the action that brought us peace, say, or joy not bring that same good feeling to everyone who tries it? We come to each moment from our own history, our own tastes, our own habits,...
Emotions Are Central to Learning
There are those who think bringing social-emotional learning into the classroom is some sort of fad. Not so, asserts a new national commission report from the Aspen Institute. “The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning…is the substance of education...
The Importance of Voice in Releasing Trauma
After trauma, it’s not just the brain that remembers. The body remembers, too. One thing that makes it even tougher on both is that trauma is often entwined with shame. We internalize the notion that we’re not supposed to talk about what happened to us. We believe...
The Yoga Calm Blog Year in Review, 2018
The end of year is a natural time for reflection – and for us, that includes some reflection on the life of this blog, which is now entering its 11th year. That alone is a little hard to believe. It seems just yesterday that we were creating our first post over at...
What Is Your Gift?
Think back to when you were small and grownups asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up. Your answers probably changed a lot over time. One month, you wanted to be a veterinarian, the next, an astronaut. Or teacher. Or cowboy. Or scientist. Maybe you did grow...