Students Run Oakland: Teens Take Up Yoga
Shanti Michaels
Posted in Yogi Times
April 2007
As the popularity of yoga grows, the ripple effects are felt in increasingly diverse communities. Yoga studios are serving a widening range of people, with offerings such as prenatal yoga and senior yoga, but some of the most inspiring work is being done where teachers venture outside of the studio to bring the benefits of the ancient practice of yoga to communities not being served.
Laurence Korth is a French-American volunteer teacher who has introduced yoga to Oakland teens in a program that is changing lives. Students Run Oakland is a non-competitive, volunteer-run athletic program that for the past six years has been training self-selected groups of low-income high school students for the Los Angeles Marathon in the spring of each year. The program is free, rigorous and open to anybody at the participating high schools. The students are largely from high-crime neighborhoods, and many of them are the first in their families to earn a high school diploma. For a period of five months, students train after school three times a week and on the weekends. While only about one-third of the students stick with the program through the end, those that do gain a new love of their bodies, satisfaction in completing long-term goals, and an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles.
One of the reasons that Korth blends in so well with her yoga students, is that she shares the experience of immigrating to the United States. Few of her students have had experience with yoga. Laurence has been a teacher, a yogini and a mother for a long time, but only this year did she decide to merge these roles in her work with Students Run Oakland, a role in which she must balance the needs of this tender age group with her teaching style. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to sit in on one of Laurence’s yoga classes.
We enter a small, carpeted room on the top floor of the building. Jafet, a 10th grader from Castlemont High, wears a black bandana with yin yang symbols to class. He informs me that the yin represents good and the yang evil. When we are settled, Laurence “invites” students to take off their shoes. Jafet mutters a half-joking comment under his breath about odor and foot fungus, a response Laurence says is very common among the teens. She sensitively offers the possibility of leaving socks on, but makes a less negotiable request for students to turn off cell phones and dispose of their chewing gum. She begins her narrative to bring the students inside their bodies and connect to their breathing. She asks the students to use an imaginary cell phone to call their feet, make a connection and find out how the toes are feeling today.
“The students are not used to adults making them feel or think the way Laurence does,” commented Christine Chapon, project director. Perhaps the most inspiring element in this class is the fact that Laurence’s students are not the only ones being nourished by her calm and steady voice, but that Laurence clearly feels nourished and fortunate to share her time with them as well. She radiates with satisfaction as she watches these young, unlikely yogi-runners finally embracing simple, yet invaluable skills such as closing their eyes and paying attention to their breath.
In this age of videogames and long workdays, these teens are receiving absolute presence from Laurence. She says she has learned from her two sons (ages 16 and 18) that teens need this most. She is a recent graduate of Piedmont Yoga Studio’s teacher training program, but her experience extends beyond this, including years as a children’s art and French teacher. In Students Run Oakland, she made a leap of faith and began working with teens for the first time, crediting her sons with helping her feel more at ease with the age group.
Laurence hopes her students in the program take away a more centered mind, respect for themselves and a greater understanding of their bodies. From the look of their faces during savasana, it appears that her message was felt. The teens confirm this when they talk with me at the end of class. They tell me that the yoga has helped prepare them for the Los Angeles Marathon this spring. Of course, what better than yoga to help these driven students find their way to the finish line?