YIPS – Another Reason to Give Grandly

Yoga in Public Schools (“YIPS”) is a project of Lotus Center that launched at the start of the 2017/18 school year. As the title suggests, the mission of this project is to bring non-religious yoga classes, as part of their Physical Education curriculum, to public schools in Grant County, New Mexico. To date, Lotus Center has dispatched yoga instructors to teach students at seven different Grant County public schools and one Montessori school!

Thanks to the generosity of our community, we are able to offer YIPS at no cost to the students or the schools.

Yoga is an extremely effective and valuable means of promoting physical and emotional well-being for everyone, including young people. And it is because young people are in the heart of their formative years, that Lotus has made YIPS the cornerstone of our community service program.

Offering yoga to these youngsters is truly a special thing. At some level, it’s more than bringing yoga to these schools; it’s about providing a vehicle that invites mindfulness practice and stress-reduction techniques to a population that otherwise might not have been exposed to this type of instruction until much later in life. Many adults found our public education experience to be quite challenging at times, perhaps even traumatizing. We can’t help believing that their/our experience would have been positively supported by the availability of these tools. Everyone associated with Lotus is proud that we, collectively, are providing an alternate means for these young people to relate to themselves, their bodies, and the environments — both at school and at home — in which they/we live.

Are you able to help us build on our YIPS success in Grant County? If so, here are three ways to donate through Give Grandly over the next week…