For ages, people have been using the ancient art of yoga to bend, stretch and flex their way into states of better health and enlightenment. One woman is helping to introduce this technique to young ladies in an effort to not only get them in shape, but to boost their confidence levels as well.
Melissa Karp-Black of Dix Hills, a Yoga Alliance registered yoga instructor and licensed New York State speech language pathologist and audiologist, said that she discovered the physical, mental and spiritual benefits of yoga later in life. However, she also noted that its unique qualities would have served her well during her difficult, formative years as a teen. As a result, she’s making it her business to spread the word about the qualities of her patented “Yoga Wisdom” program and how it can help the girls of today.
“I became a yoga teacher about three years ago, although I’ve been doing yoga much longer myself. I decided that I really wanted to change the lives of young girls by empowering them with yoga,” she said. “You’re giving them the tools earlier in life so that down the road they have them…life is just easier to navigate when you have the proper tools and techniques to deal with what life throws at you.”
Karp-Black teaches on a regular monthly schedule, focusing specifically on tween girls and their mothers, at several local libraries. She recently conducted her class at the Syosset Public Library, where the basement meeting room had been converted into a serene, calming environment of dimmed lighting and encouraging music, all enveloped in a refreshing pine aroma intended to promote relaxation.
“If I had yoga growing up as a tween and throughout college, I could have handled stress so much better…stress is easier when you know how to breathe properly and how to move your body to clam your brain,” she said. “Yoga just resets your whole nervous system so that you can deal with problems in your life much easier than other coping mechanisms most people use, such as eating or other things. Yoga gets you centered…plus, it’s a great way to get you in shape at the same time.”
Positive body image is something Karp-Black tries to drive home to her students, she said. Each class has a discussion period, and that evening the talk centered on the “perfect” bodies kids see every day on television and in print, and the deceitful hand that technology plays in warping the concept of true beauty.
“I have print-outs that I show to the girls of before-and-after celebrity photos that have been blatantly Photoshopped,” she said. “It’s important to teach them that no one is perfect, and that everyone is beautiful in their own way…it’s really horrible how the media tries to distort that with the manipulated images they bombard impressionable kids with.”
Denise Saleh of Syosset and her daughter Zahra, 9, have attended Karp-Black’s “Yoga Wisdom” classes before.
“I really enjoy the benefits of yoga…it’s very claming, and when you have three children like I do, you need to be able to de-stress a little bit. Plus, I like that this is a mother-daughter class. Yoga is something I want to get my daughter into because it’s good for her,” she said. “It’s an enjoyable thing that you can do together, and I think Melissa’s class is great…she took it really slow for the younger kids and made it very enjoyable. It’s nice and relaxing, and it’s nice that the library offers this.”
“I did some yoga in school,” Zahra said. “I really like doing it, and this class is great.”
A big part of the confidence-building aspect of Karp-Black’s “Yoga Wisdom” takes place at the beginning of her classes, where she distributes her “I Am” cards. Each containing a positive and self-affirming phrase that each girl and mother reads aloud in front of the group.
“The words ’I am’ are two of the most powerful words in the world,” she said. “Whatever you put after them is what you’re going to become, energetically speaking. If you say, ‘I am nurturing,’ then you’ll be nurturing.”
That positive attitude, and the additional benefits of yoga, is something that Karp-Black has made sure to instill in her two daughters every day, she said, in addition to the many young ladies and mothers that attend her monthly classes.
To find out more about Melissa Karp-Black’s “Yoga Wisdom,” visit her on Facebook by searching for Yoga Wisdom LLC.
