Minding Each Moment

Growing up, Atman ’02 and Ali Smith ’01 didn’t find it strange to go downstairs in the morning and find their father doing a headstand. They meditated before heading off to a Friends school and attended a nondenominational church that borrowed from the Bible, Bhagavad Gita and Native American traditions. Raised as vegans, they brought soybean hot dogs to cookouts.

So when the Smiths (Atman pictured at right, Ali above) and their friend Andres Gonzalez ’01 (pictured at left) began supplementing sports, parties and homework during their senior year at the University of Maryland with heady conversations about the meaning of life, they found a place to start: 4 a.m. at Lake Montebello in Baltimore with a family friend, learning yoga movements, poses and breathing.

“It planted a lot of seeds,” Atman says. “We were searching for why are we here, what’s our purpose?”

That search turned into the Holistic Life Foundation (HLF), a Baltimore nonprofit that for 16 years has sought to help children and adults in distressed communities through yoga mindfulness and self-care techniques.

The project began humbly, first at a single Baltimore elementary school: “How about instead of teaching them football, we teach them yoga?” Today, HLF has programs serving 17 city schools, with trainings for adults in the corporate, education and public safety sectors. Sessions are also conducted at drug rehab locations and the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center.

The goal is to make yoga as practical as possible for kids, Gonzalez says. Although yoga is less exotic in popular culture than it used to be, talking about its benefits for playing basketball or using rap and magic tricks to break the ice help. Fun and authenticity, he says, are key.

HLF has been growing exponentially the past few years, he says. Once just an effort of the three Terps, the organization now has more than 40 employees, several of whom are original students.

Although it’s not a panacea for children who come from difficult backgrounds, says Tayamisha Von Hendricks, a Baltimore elementary school teacher who has worked with HLF, the techniques are a great way to deescalate student confrontations that could otherwise lead to fights.

“They still had their issues, but they would talk or do breathing exercises,” she says. “You could tell the children who were in the program and who weren’t just because of their behavior.”

Research has backed that up. A 2011 study by the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University and the Center for Adolescent Health and the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that HLF’s programs are successful at reducing stress behaviors such as intrusive thoughts and emotional arousal.

“This isn’t a luxury,” Gonzalez says. “It’s a survival skill.”