Cali Alpert:

Welcome to Dropping In from Omega Institute. I'm Cali Alpert. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our Rhinebeck, New York campus is temporarily closed but we're still here for you. Now, instead of dropping in on campus in real time, we're dropping into our treasure trove of audio archives to offer you talks, teachings, and practices from some of Omega's most memorable workshops and conferences. Originally recorded at the Making Peace With the Earth conference in 2018, the co-founders of the Holistic Life Foundation began this 38 minute conversation with a 13 minute loving-kindness practice. Later, they shared the nature-based lessons from their childhoods that inform their work with underserved kids. So put some time aside for yourself, get comfortable, make sure you're not behind the wheel and drop in.

Atman Smith:

Hello everyone. Is it cool if we start off with a practice?

Andres Gonzalez:

No, I've always been waiting for them to say no.

Atman Smith:

All right. So, if everybody could just sit with your back, neck and head align. If you're sitting in a seat, maybe have your feet grounded and move to the edge of your seat, that'll prop your spine up. And I invite you all to close your eyes. We're going to do a loving-kindness practice. This is one of the practices that we do with our community where we're actually from and we focus our work in the epicenter of where all of the Freddie Gray uprising happen.

Atman Smith:

So as you can tell, there's a lot of undiagnosed trauma in that community. And this is one of the ways that we ease some of that trauma or chaos that our students are facing in their lives with this practice. All the breathing that we're going to be doing is in and out through our nose. And we're going to take a couple of deep breaths together to start off with. So if everybody could inhale long, slow and deep through your nose, filling your stomach up with air, like it's a balloon and exhale, push all that air out, push it all out, squeeze your stomach in.

Atman Smith:

Inhale deep again with that long slow deep breath, filling your stomach up with air like it's a balloon. And exhale, push all that air out, push it all out. Inhale deep one more time with that long slow deep breath. Once again, filling your stomach up with air like it's a balloon and exhale, push all the air out, push it all out.

Atman Smith:

Now you all can just breathe on your own at a nice natural pace. Don't put any effort into it. Just make sure you're breathing in and out through your nose. And we're going to start using our imaginations. With every inhale, we want to feel and see ourselves pulling in all the positive energy that the earth has to offer us inside our body with that in-breath, really feel and see that on that inhale and on that exhale, really feel and see yourself pushing out any negativity that's within you that you know, that's not healthy for you. Any stress, any anger, any jealousy, any sicknesses or ailments. Really use your imagination to see and feel it leave your body with the breath.

Atman Smith:

Once again, on that inhale, really feel and see yourself pulling in the positive energy from the earth, with that in breath. Whatever it looks and feels like to you feel and see that. And on that exhale, once again, push out any of the negativity that's within you, any stress, any anger, any jealousy, any sicknesses or ailments. Really use your imagination to feel and see it leave your body with the breath. Once again, whatever it looks and feels like to you, feel and see that on that exhale.

Atman Smith:

And just like in life, when you try to meditate or do a silent reflection, distractions can arise. If you do get distracted by a thought or a sound, never beat yourself up. Just acknowledge the distraction and then redirect yourself back to that breath. And once again on that inhale, pulling in that positive energy from the earth inside your body, with the breath. And on that exhale, pushing out that negativity from within any stress, anger, jealousy, sicknesses, or ailments, where we see it leave your body with the breath.

Atman Smith:

All right, we're going to use our imaginations again. And this time with every inhale, we want to feel and see ourselves pulling in all the healing oxygen from the trees, plants, and bodies of water inside our body. With that in-breath, energizing and replenishing our internal muscles, bones, and organs. So, whatever that looks and feels like to you, really feel and see that on that inhale and on that exhale. Really feel and see yourself pushing out all the stale carbon dioxide that's in your body and see it feeding the trees and plants that gave us oxygen.

Atman Smith:

Once again on that inhale, feel and see yourself pulling in all the healing oxygen and [purina 00:06:04] from the trees, plants, and bodies of water, energizing, your internal muscles, bones, and organs. And on that exhale, remember we're pushing out the stale carbon dioxide, feeding the trees and plants that gave us oxygen.

Atman Smith:

And meditation and silent reflection is all about extending the time that you can keep your mind focused. And if you can only stay focused for three breaths and you get distracted, once again just acknowledge the distraction, then redirect yourself back to the breath and try to get four breaths then five breaths. It's less of a battle with yourself than it is a play, but definitely try to extend the time that you can keep your mind focused.

Atman Smith:

And right now, once again, we're focused on that inhale pulling in that healing, oxygen and purina in from the trees, plants, and bodies of water, energizing, our muscles, bones, and organs. So whatever that looks and feels like to you, feel and see that on that inhale and on that exhale. Once again, we're pushing out that stale carbon dioxide, feeding the trees and plants that gave us oxygen.

Atman Smith:

All right, we're going to use our imaginations again. And this time we're going to think about all those people that we love, whether it's our family or friends, no matter how far away they live, no matter if they're living or not, love knows no boundaries. So with our breath, send our loved ones love with that breath. Whatever it looks and feels like to you, feel and see that with your breath, sending your loved ones love with your breath. Once again, no matter how far away they live, no matter if they're living or not, love knows no boundaries.

Atman Smith:

And once again, if distractions arise, never beat yourself up, just acknowledge the distraction, whether it's a thought or a sound. And then redirect yourself back to that breath and sending love to your loved ones with that breath. Remember whatever it looks and feels like to you, feel and see that with your breath.

Atman Smith:

All right, we're going to use our imaginations again. And this time we're going to focus on those people that stress us out or make us angry, whether it's family or friends, coworkers or clients, people in your community, politicians or policymakers, whoever it is that stresses you out or make you angry. We're going to send them love with the breath. Even though they're stressing you out and making you angry, they probably need love more than anyone else. And we all know whatever you put out there it comes back to you tenfold.

Atman Smith:

So don't let anyone make you put any anger or stress out there because it's going to come back tenfold. The only way to release that anger and stress is with love. So once again, with your breath send those people that stress you out or make you angry love with your breath. Whatever it looks and feels like to you, feel and see that sending those people that stress you out or make you angry, love with your breath.

Atman Smith:

All right, we're going to use our imaginations again. And we've sent love to people that we love. And we send love to people that stress us out or make us angry. Now it's time to send love to the most important person in your life, and that's yourself. If you start off with that foundation of self-love and taking care of yourself, it makes it that much easier to love and take care of other people going forward without burning yourself out. So really focus on sending yourself love with your breath. Whatever it looks and feels like to you, feel and see that filling your foundation up with self-love.

Atman Smith:

And once again to reiterate, this practice is all about extending the time that you can keep your mind focused. If you do ever lose your focus, just acknowledge what distracted you and then bring yourself back and then try to extend the time, try to get four breaths and five breaths. And once again, it's less of a battle with yourself than it is a play, but definitely try to extend the time that you can keep your mind focused. And right now we're focused on sending ourself love with the breath. Once again, whatever it looks and feels like to you, feel and see that with your breath.

Atman Smith:

All right, we're going to use our imaginations one more time. And this time, what we're going to do is we're going to send love to mother earth and all the living beings on it. Whatever it looks like and feels like to you to send love to Mother Earth and all the living beings on it with your breath, really feel and see that.(silence)

Atman Smith:

All right, if your eyes are closed, you can keep them closed. And we're going to slowly bring ourselves away from the breath and back to our bodies. So, we can start off just by wiggling our toes and wiggling our fingers, pulling our ankles and wrists. You can do a neck roll both ways just to stretch your neck out a little bit. And then you can slowly, slowly, whenever you're ready, blink your eyes open and come back to your senses.

Ali Smith:

All right. So, as the Holistic Life Foundation, most people know the three of us as like the yoga or mindfulness guys from Baltimore. And I feel like that's the direction the universe has guided us to push this through our journey over the last 17years, 18 years. That's a long time. But I feel like that's the direction we're being pushed in or guided. But when we started the Holistic Life Foundation, I feel like we were more about... And when we started asking the questions of why? And why things were the way they are. I feel like it was more about taking care of the planet.

Ali Smith:

When we first started, I feel like that's where our initial drive was. I know when we were sitting around in college and just partying and hanging out, and we decided that... I guess we didn't decide we're going to start. We started asking questions and it led us to starting our own little private book club and watching a lot of documentaries. We were... Most of them were about planet earth, about diversity and how it was being destroyed and how just people were pillaging the earth for profit.

Ali Smith:

And I think we initially looked at... I think that was one of our initial inspirations for starting the Holistic Life Foundation. We all, when we started our initial actual mission statement was, looking at the interconnectedness between the people and the planet and how you couldn't have healthy people without a healthy planet or healthy planet without healthy people. And I mean, like I said, things have changed a lot since then, but that was our initial inspiration, our initial spark to start the Holistic Life Foundation. Atman and I we've talked a lot when we speak about-

Atman Smith:

We're brothers by the way.

Ali Smith:

Yeah.

Atman Smith:

Yeah, look in the eyes.

Ali Smith:

And he... I know we talk a lot about how we got into the practice of yoga and mindfulness meditation, but I don't think we ever talked about... The two of us have a deep connection to the natural world and Mother Earth and the planet and being out in nature. But we've never actually talked about that. I don't think it's something that the two of us have talked about. With some I've been reflecting on a lot since last night.

Ali Smith:

I know the yoga part's easy because I mean, it's something that was always around us, our parents were into or our dad was in hatha growing up. So we meditated every morning before school. He practiced a lot of hatha as he's a PE teacher. So it was like his way of staying fit and he loved it. He got into transcendental meditation, him and our teacher, me and Atman's grandfather, studied a lot of Kundalini.

Ali Smith:

They studied a lot of different types of practices. They put us in a church that was based on Kriya Yoga. And so yoga was always around and meditation was always around in a part of our lives. But I think just being two kids from West Baltimore, it would be easy to not be connected to the natural world because our neighborhood was concrete. Other than for the most part, I'd say that the fields up at the high school and the baseball fields and the football field at the local high school, it was just, that was nature in our neighborhood.

Ali Smith:

But I think our mom did a good job of showing us that food and water definitely came from the earth and not from a grocery store on our faucet. We were a lot different than the kids in our neighborhood. Our parents raised us vegan. There was no salt, there was no sugar in the house. And I remember Saturday mornings or one of my most fun times before we watched Saturday cartoons, we would go to... Anybody from here from Baltimore, by any chance?

Speaker 5:

[inaudible 00:17:54]

Ali Smith:

So Harrington park?

Speaker 5:

Yes.

Ali Smith:

Back in the day, back in the early 80s, there was a spring in Harrington park where you can go and fill up water bottles. So, our parents had all these five gallon glass water bottles. So, Saturday mornings were a fun time for us because we would go and that was when we went to get water, we would go hike. There were salamanders and crayfish in a little stream next to us, which is sad because when I go there today, everything's dead, the whole park is dead. There aren't any crayfish, there definitely aren't any salamanders.

Ali Smith:

The spring has been cemented off. But growing up that was where water came from to us, was the earth, food. Being vegetarian and being vegan back then, our mom did a good job of taking us places where we could go and pick food. Like I remember going to the staw... You remember going to strawberry fields and going picking strawberries. She was consistently at farmer's markets because there weren't a lot of... There wasn't Whole Foods, there wasn't Trader Joe's, there wasn't MOM's back then.

Ali Smith:

She had to get creative and find those fresh fruits and vegetables. So we were always at farms and farmer's markets around the city. So that was where food came from to us. They put us in Friends School of Baltimore and we always talk about the mindfulness aspect of the Quakers. But I think one of the things we don't talk about a lot is the stewardship aspect and the stewardship of not just communities but the planet.

Ali Smith:

So I think giving back was to... And taking care of the planet was something that was important to us when the Holistic Life Foundation was started. And then we did a lot of camping at Friends. So every year we would do camping in the fall, in the spring, in the winter, just stay being out in the woods, doing a lot of hiking and just connecting ourselves to the planet.

Ali Smith:

I know something that when I did was even in our neighborhood, we were looking for life in our neighborhood. I remember one of the things we used to do is there was the football field at Douglass High School . Most people were well, I mean, I guess no one really used it at night, but I think one of the things that we noticed was that there were tons of bugs by the lights who would sit up there on the bleachers and watch the bats all night.

Ali Smith:

And that was like entertaining for us. Our friends didn't really go up there with us, but it was like us. And one of our not really physical like our real older brothers, but the guys was like our older brother growing up, we would go up there and we'd sit on the bleachers and watch the bats all night.

Ali Smith:

There were hawks then hunted at the pigeon coop up on the corner. We'd sit out in the backyard and watch the hawks during the day. So it's just something that was really important and ingrained in us. And I think it's just not something that comes up a lot. But I think just being here and reflecting on it and hearing all the other speakers, it was just something that we had... I was wondering why two kids from West Baltimore were so connected to the earth and why we wondered. And we were just sitting around, we were watching all these documentaries.

Ali Smith:

A lot of them were on how beautiful the planet was, but then we would sit and watch. We would switch to news and it was just like the total opposite people were destroying the planet and nobody seemed to care. And that was a big part. I remember we had these initial seven pillars of the Holistic Life Foundation and they were all colored like the chakra as we thought we were so creative for that back in the day. And most of them were around the environment. Yoga was one, I feel like healthy eating was another one, but the other five were all around taking care of the environment and being more sustainable and using alternative energy and renewable resources.

Ali Smith:

So it was just like, that was where our mind was then. I know when we started the Holistic Life Foundation we noticed a lot of things. We noticed the kids weren't connected to themselves. And I think that's where the practice, the mindfulness and yoga practice kind of came in, was getting the kids connected to themselves. Because a lot of the kids that we worked with, I say most of them, had no idea what was going on inside of them. I mean, and not just physically, but mentally and spiritually too, they had no... They weren't aware of their thoughts. They weren't aware of a deeper spiritual life that they were actually living.

Ali Smith:

And we were trying to figure out some way to connect them in the yoga and the mindfulness definitely did a great job of that. And then it was... We realized how disconnected they were to the natural world. And it was kind of scary to us that we were working with... It started off with a small group of 15 boys who were in the fifth grade, then the numbers kept growing. But no one seemed to be connected to anything other than the few concrete blocks that were their neighborhood we noticed. I don't know if... I mean for the people who have been to Baltimore, lived in Baltimore through Baltimore, you list the city, the streets in the city and the gutters are strewn with trash.

Ali Smith:

And it's pretty disgusting, the alleys are pretty scary to walk down, because there's so much trash and the rats are all over the place. And it's because people don't have a connection to where all that trash is going. Unless you go down to the Inner Harbor and you look in the water and you see thousands of [UTS 00:22:48] bags floating around in the Inner Harbor and the water looks black and it smells disgusting in the summer. Then you understand that. But without that there's no connection.

Ali Smith:

So we made it a point to take our kids down to the Inner Harbor to see the trash. I remember we would [inaudible 00:23:06].

Andres Gonzalez:

Go right ahead. [inaudible 00:23:06].

Ali Smith:

All right. Okay. So just something, I mean, and I remember we would be about to do community cleanups in our neighborhood to clean up the trash and the adults would tell the kids, "You're wasting your time. You don't have to do this. The trash in the gunner when it rains, it'll go down the drain and it'll wash away. You don't have to worry about cleaning." And you're like, "Well, that trash is going somewhere. It's not that, this doesn't magically disappear because of the rain."

Andres Gonzalez:

I think they thought the gutters were like black holes [crosstalk 00:23:36] disappear.

Ali Smith:

So it was just things like that. It was just kids taught like us driving to go to field trips, to go to a park or something or some natural space. And watch them throw trash out the window of the car, like it was, that's where trash went, was just you toss it out the window and you tossed on the streets or us doing community cleanup and the kids getting frustrated because they would see an adult walk by and toss trash on the street.

Ali Smith:

So it was just like, all these things were going on and we knew we needed to make a bigger impact on the kids than just the practice. Because I mean, if the neighborhood where they're practicing pranayama and the air's dirty and the streets do, it's not. So you defeating the purpose, you know what I mean? You need a... And I mean, we need something to sustain ourselves too, like when we can't live without Mother Earth. It's impossible to do.

Ali Smith:

So, we had to figure out some way to get the kids to connect with themselves but also to connect with the planet. And we started noticing, Andy is going to get into some of the things that we did. But I think one of the things that we noticed right away was that the kids that connected with themselves and then connected with the planet, achieving a lot higher level and dreamed on a lot higher level than the kids that didn't and their peers that weren't in our program.

Ali Smith:

Like the kids that weren't in our program were falling into all the traps that they live in, underserved, underrecognized, underappreciated urban community can fall into. They were a lot of wild on the streets, hustling to take care of their family and themselves. They ended up in jail. Some of them ended up dead. And the kids that we were working with, they were connected to themselves and the planet. And it was one of those things where they could see that everything was accessible to them.

Ali Smith:

We've had kids that have gone, we had one kid that told us he wanted to make films and do documentaries and take pictures. So he was one of those kids that had a practice and he ended up in China filming documentaries. We had another kid who dropped out of school, his junior year of high school then got back into school, started playing lacrosse, decided he wanted to go to college and play lacrosse, won a national championship. His senior year was the first team All-American.

Ali Smith:

We had another one that decided that he was going to really focus in school. And he wanted to go to Emory University. That was his dream school. He ended up going. So the kids that we were working with that were connected to themselves and the planet, they saw everything's accessible. It wasn't just a connection to their neighborhood and a lack of connection to themselves. They were just like, whatever's physically in front of them, that was their reality. Everything was their reality and whatever they wanted to access, they had access to. And it started with that connection themselves and the connection to the planet or the natural world. And they went out from there and had done some amazing things.

Andres Gonzalez:

So we started playing little games with the kids. I remember one of the first games we played was when we would be driving. We always had to drive the kids around to the afterschool program or to the YMCA. And if a kid threw a piece of trash out the window, everyone knew the rule was we would drive two more blocks. We'd stop, the kid would have to step out the car, pick up that piece of trash and another piece of trash. So, that was our rule with them. And it got so fun that if a new kid came into the program and he threw something out the window, all the other kids like, "Oh, you know what you got to do. You know what you're going to do." So we'd stop.

Andres Gonzalez:

And then I even remember one day, because we're educating, we're teaching them about what's going on here and how important is to take care of our planet and to be one with it and know that, stop creating these divisions, these imaginary lines that separate us and for them to understand that we are all together in this. And I remember one time, one of the kids had been there for a while, he threw an apple out the window and new kid is like, "Oh, do the rule." And the kid's like, "That's biodegradable, don't worry about it." It was hilarious, right?

Andres Gonzalez:

And we just tried to do more just to introduce them. I mean, these kids, some of these kids, I remember we would take them on a ski trip to go snowboarding. In their faces when they saw cows. Unbelievable to imagine that these kids are in the fifth, sixth, seventh grade had never seen a cow in real life, ever in their entire life. And their eyes were so big. They get crazy eyes. I get crazy eyes sometimes. I don't know if y'all noticed that when I talk, I get really excited. That's how they would be, we'd be driving and we're going down the road and you could see like, "Oh my God, that's a cow. Look at that." I'm like, "You've never seen a cow before?" It was mind blowing, right?

Andres Gonzalez:

So we just introducing them to new experiences. I remember the tree plantings we do at the Druid Hill Park and the fun the kids would have. I remember that the first time we did a raised bed gardens and the kids were looking at us like, "This's gross." You know what I mean? But until they started digging their hands into the earth and holding them up in the worm wiggling and the smiles on their faces.

Andres Gonzalez:

And they were so excited to do it, that it turned from a kid saying I don't like vegetables to a kid, pulling the radishes out and is eating them straight from the earth. In love and looking at us like so excited and you could see the connection but that comes from education. We need to teach them. We need to guide them. And that's what our mission is. And just like Ali said, "When we first started, that was our number one thing to show the interconnection between us and the planet."

Andres Gonzalez:

And I remember when I was a kid, I mean, I didn't have the same... the raising in terms of the yoga background as Ali and Atman did. I got that as a blessing, meeting them and all of us working together and really getting my own practice. But I remember as a youth, my mom hated me because I never would wear shoes. Never, I always ran around barefoot all the time, all the time. I mean, she was like, "You know, you're going to get worms in your feet. You're going to get worms in your feet." She'd always say that to me.

Andres Gonzalez:

I'm like, "I don't care, mom, it's fine." But I would always run around and just loved feeling the feel of the grass and the dirt. I can think of times when I was little and when it would rain, it would, one of my favorite times is running to the big tree in the yard, in the rain and letting it hit me and just feeling so connected to what the earth gave you. The power that it would infuse into you. And we wanted to provide it to the kids cause they only had their blocks so.

Ali Smith:

Yeah, I remember we were those weirdos when we graduated from college that all of our friends went on trips and we're buying suits to go get jobs and things like that. And we bought camping equipment and books and then we went out and we spent time out in the woods. We would set up to camp and go camp for a few days and read and do whatever. And then we would come back and then we'd go back again. And we were like, that's what we wanted to do.

Ali Smith:

We wanted to be out in nature. We wanted to spend time out away from the city and just be out there and look up like we would spend, I don't know. I feel like from the time the sun went down until the time we went to sleep, we were just staring up at the stars and that was what we bought even bought like a study. This is before we had iPhones and you had star maps on your iPhone. Like we bought star map books and we would just sit out and just stargaze for hours and hours and hours until we were ready to go to bed.

Andres Gonzalez:

So I remember this one time, this is the last thing I can think of what we do with the kids that really, I think something that really made us know how important it is to get them to be one with the earth and one with nature. So we took our first group of kids on a camping trip and it was so funny because these kids, I mean, they're surrounded by so much external stimuli all the time, gunshots, sirens, helicopters, all this violence and this craziness. And you get them in the woods and at nighttime, that orchestra of insects and they're in the tent like, "What is that? What is going on out there?"

Andres Gonzalez:

Freaking out, it was so amazing to us. These kids who are so tough and to see them just so overwhelmed by this experience. And we had them running through the creeks and we took them to this place with all these animals out there. This is the first time any of them had ever experienced anything like this. And years later when you see those kids and a lot of them are still in touch with us, but the ones that weren't, whenever you would see them, don't one thing they would always say was, "Man, that camping trip. I remember that camping trip, thank you so much for taking me out there and for getting that experience."

Andres Gonzalez:

And you can see the power of it, right? That if we can just introduce them to these things and show them that, "Hey, this earth is yours. This earth is you. And it's up to you to be responsible for taking care of it." And if we can keep getting that message out there, just imagine the difference we truly can make. And I know I started off with talking about-

Ali Smith:

Andres I going to say one thing about that camping trip that you left out. All right. So, Andy knew that they were really, really afraid of the woods and he had to go somewhere that night came back. And we had this gorilla mask that was just sitting around the house. So Andy parks at the top of the hill walks and it's probably half a mile, from the top of the hill down to where we were camping. He goes down and-

Atman Smith:

But we built the story and said that there was a zoo nearby and a gorilla escaped from the zoo.

Ali Smith:

So Andy walks in complete darkness all the way down this hill, down to where we are.

Andres Gonzalez:

And I'm like blind walk into like, "Oh, I know I'm going to hurt myself, but this is worth it. I know it's worth."

Ali Smith:

So gorilla mask is on, it's us in one tent, the kid's in another tent and he unzips the tent and he's like, "Oh." And all the kids go running, it was awesome.

Andres Gonzalez:

One of them threw a juice box at my face, it hit me. A memory forever for them.

Atman Smith:

I guess one of the main tools that we have when we are trying to heal these communities that are dealing with such high trauma, is creating teachers. One thing we noticed is that we were making great strides with our kids, with the practice of, the bending and stretching to get that restless energy out of their body, the breathing that still their mind. And then we'd get into the meditation to establish that inner peace inside of them.

Atman Smith:

But it went out the window as soon as they went home because they would go home to environments where people would not be mindful, wouldn't be present and we'll be yelling at them and not talking to them to where... It just seemed like during the course of the week, the kids would be getting better. And then when they would go home, we'd have to start from scratch on Monday. And so we knew that we wanted to try to create wraparound services for their parents as well.

Atman Smith:

So we did everything we could. We tried to create yoga nights. We tried to get elaborate meals to entice the parents to come in. We would have gift cards and to no avail, no parents would ever show up just because life is kind of busy and if you're just trying to survive and take care of your family, it's hard to create time for yourself. So our teacher, when he started teaching us, he told us, he was like, "Man, I'm not creating no devotees. I'm creating teachers." And that's what our policy was. So our whole model is a reciprocal teaching model, to where we teach our students not only the practice but the benefits of it, the practicality of it, and you know how to teach others the practice.

Atman Smith:

And we really didn't know that this was going on, that they were going home and taking the practices back to their parents. But until one day, if you've ever seen... We have a Ted Talk where there's a young lady, a dynamic young lady who is, I mean, just dynamic. Her mom, she used to fight all the time. Her brother was a boxer and taught her how to throw a mean right jab. So anybody... And she came from the same projects that Freddie Gray was from. So, she was not really dressing in the nicest of clothes. So people used to make fun of her and she used to just knock people out. But then-

Ali Smith:

Boys, girls, bigger, smaller. She was knocking everybody out.

Atman Smith:

But she eventually gravitated to the practice and got her emotions under control. And I remember one of the times that we saw this in action, we're walking around a corner into the afterschool program and she's jacking somebody up against the wall. And then she sees us, looks at the girl, looks at us, looks at the girl. And like, "You better be glad I'm doing my breathing." Drops the girl sits down and does some breathing. But this same little girl, she was one of our best teachers as well.

Atman Smith:

And her mom, she was dealing with a lot of stress at home. A just single mom. Didn't really have a constant job. And she used to come home and y'all know the trickle down system that if she's stressed out, she's going to take it out on her kids. And like I said, we teach our students the practicality of the practice and when to use it. So instead of the mom coming in the house, our student read her mom's face and see the stress written on her face.

Atman Smith:

And she let us know that the mother came in and told us like, "Man, I did had no idea that this is what y'all were teaching our kids. I didn't know what this yoga was. And we're like, "What are you talking about?" And she said, "Well, I came into the house and it must the stress must've been written on my face. And my daughter said, 'Hey, ma you need to sit down with me. I'm going to do some breathing with you.'"

Atman Smith:

And that happened time and time again. So we realized that, that's really how you really truly affect the family. Because like Andy said, "Drugs killed urban families and welfare system killed the urban families." So it's that in a broken system, the only way to heal it, I guess that we've seen is by the [babes 00:37:35] , like teaching them the practice and helping them infuse their family with the practice, not only their families, but their friends. And we kind of see the healing process going on with creating teachers. And once again, going back to educating people.

Cali Alpert:

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