It’s straightforward to consider yoga as a easy exercise routine, a technique to loosen up or shed pounds. However Elizabeth Thompson BBA ’07 has discovered a deeper goal for this in style train: supporting pediatric most cancers sufferers.
After graduating from the College of Georgia with a level in finance, Thompson began her profession in accounting. That have gave her the enterprise savvy she wanted to determine Jollie, a aware motion firm that focuses on yoga equipment. She has practiced yoga since she was a teen. When she was 18 and damage her again enjoying soccer, practising yoga helped rebuild the broken muscle groups, relieve the ache, and provides her a way of stability. This helped open her eyes to the makes use of of yoga in well being care.
“Transferring your physique is important for each kids and adults past the bodily advantages,” she says. “It’s good in your mind, for endorphins, and for managing your stress and feelings.”
Elizabeth Thompson has used her previous experiences to additional her data of yoga and its advantages for each the physique and thoughts. (Picture by Meredith Flaherty)
Thompson is dedicated to bringing these advantages to younger most cancers sufferers by donating yoga-themed video games and equipment to 13 main kids’s hospitals throughout the nation. Each time somebody purchases a yoga mat, Jollie donates one to a baby in want. These merchandise assist maintain yoga remedy applications the place Thompson says yoga could be practiced in any place together with “a hospital mattress, chair, or wheelchair.”
“Yoga is one thing completely different you could provide to a baby in such a annoying scenario,” says Thompson. “It’s one thing they will take with them to handle their anxiousness and confusion. Instructing them the best poses and respiratory strategies can have a serious affect on assuaging their stress and serving to regain management over their physique.”
Thompson finds yoga to be a satisfying technique to loosen up and regain power. She additionally makes use of yoga to attach along with her two younger daughters. They and the opposite kids who use Jollie yoga mats love the enjoyable prints and designs on mats which can be completely sized for them. Butterflies and rocket ships soar underneath their palms and ft as they follow their poses.
Transferring your physique is important for each kids and adults past the bodily advantages. It’s good in your mind, for endorphins, and for managing your stress and feelings.” — Elizabeth Thompson, founding father of the aware motion model, Jollie
Thompson spent years educating kids’s yoga lessons and a part of her motivation comes from not solely the bodily and psychological advantages however how a lot enjoyable the youngsters have. Like many yoga instructors, she used storybooks to show completely different poses. Youngsters stretch into butterfly pose throughout The Very Hungry Caterpillar and attain as much as the sky in tree pose throughout The Snowy Day.
“Even when they’re not doing yoga poses, they’re transferring creatively and studying the best way to inform a narrative with nothing however their our bodies and their imaginations,” says Thompson. “Having the ability to transfer round and get misplaced in your personal creativeness is a useful talent that we generally lose as adults and is particularly important for kids.”
