| Vision | Partners | Projects |
Our Vision |
Krama Yoga is a Cambodian-run Non-Governmental Organization dedicated to bringing Kids Yoga, Teen Yoga and Yoga therapy to underprivileged young people in Cambodia.
The purpose of Krama Yoga is to communicate healthy, empowering, community-oriented values to young people who are growing up in environments of extreme poverty and abuse, so that they can break out of destructive cycles of trauma and violence. Developing self-awareness, confidence and moral sensitivity through physical practice and compassionate teaching provides key emotional skills that young people need to succeed in the workplace, school and in relationships.
Krama Yoga offers teacher training, pre-teacher training, community classes, Kids’ classes, and yoga therapy. All classes are taught by graduates of the Krama Yoga two-year apprenticeship program, who come from the same social background as their Khmer students, and maintains a professional standard under the supervision of international senior and Master teachers.
Krama Yoga is the first NGO of its kind, dedicated to enhancing self-confidence and motivation in young people growing up in a new Cambodia that is rich with NGO education and vocational training programs, and equal opportunity employers. The individuals most likely to succeed in school and the workplace are those with a strong sense of personal values coupled with self-respect. Yoga training at Krama Yoga provides students with the means to discover in themselves a power that comes from knowing what you believe in, and the inner strength and focus to bring it to life.
The three key ingedients that make Yoga an effective form of therapy are
- physical practice,
- ethics and
- metaphysics.
Asana and Pranayama
Physical practice invites students to engage with their bodies and discover their own power in positive ways. Physical practice works on relaxation, self-esteem, deep stress release, and is a highly accessible form of self-awarness for young people with little or no formal education, hence minimal abstract thinking skills. Through a physical practice, students learn to identify and take control over emotions and physical sensations, and gains the means to peacefully overcome challenges that arise in their lives and their own minds.
Ethics
Why do yoga? Why turn one's awareness inwards when there is so much pain inside?
Krama Yoga motivates students by tapping into what they already believe in. Every young person we have worked with recognizes the value of kindness, peace and non-violence but do not always know how to practice them, do not have the confidence, or lack impulse control. Helping others is a more tangeable goal than self-love to a person who has learned to devalue themselves, and is a primary motivating factor towards facing the challenges of yoga.
Metaphysics
The students and teachers of Krama Yoga have grown up with religion and superstition as a way of understanding the world, as opposed to concepts of Western science as many Westerns have, and this extends to knowledge of the mind. Krama Yoga draws on metaphysics and spiritual volcabulary to communicate the idea that actions and behaviour stem from a deeper place than what is available to one's immediate awareness. To understand the depths of yoga, love and spiruality, one must first sort through many layers of self-knowledge.
We teach two metaphysical ideas at Krama Yoga that form the basis of our value system.
1. Cycles. What we take in, we put out. If we take in violence and anger, it comes out in one form or another. We think we can forget about our angers, frustrations and pains, but this does not get rid of it and it comes out in different ways that we cannot control. Yoga and self-awareness are ways of understanding and managing painful ideas and experiences so that we have control over how our feelings are expressed in our actions, and we do not act in ways that make us more unhappy or make others unhappy. Karma is how we present the importance and logic of self-awareness.
2. We do not use the word God or Buddha in our teaching, but every student understands at a visceral level the word Love, and sometimes Satya, Truth. We teach that every person is a vessel of love that is infinite and pure. Life experiences, samskaras, damaging relationships and high levels of stress obscure our capacity to recognize this truth inside ourselves and we lose touch with love. When we lose touch with this love inside us, we lose the ability to feel love when it is given to us and we get depressed or act in violent ways towards ourselves or each other. Joy comes not from having more money or fancy clothes, but from knowing love inside our own body.
Love is the higher value that our students orient by and seek to find in themselves and share with others.
The goal of yoga therapy is to remind our students that there is a possibility for change and over time they find in themselves that change is in their own hands, that they no longer have to lead a life determined by others.
back to topPartner Organizations |
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Transitions Global |
Nich and Neth lead two yoga therapy classes per week for the girls of Transitions Global, under senior teacher supervision. Yoga Therapy re-introduces girls to their own bodies in an environment they can trust, and they remember how to experience sensation in a positive way. Yoga teaches these girls how to recognize symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and how to address them on a physical level. Nich and Neth inspire their students as living examples of the regenerative capacity of yoga. |
AZAHAR Foundation |
Every week a group of teens and pre-teens from Kien Khleang government-run orphanage center come to the studio for yoga, sponsored by AZAHAR Foundation, a not-for-profit dedicated to creating promising futures for young people by investing in education and yoga classes. In the context of the yoga and the AZAHAR sponsorship program, these kids learn that they can work hard to get ahead in the world, and how to stand up tall to present themselves as important individuals. Given the culture of Cambodia, these concepts were previously foreign to them. Anyone who meets these young people after two years of yoga would see how well they are understood now. |
Indochina Starfish Foundation |
ISF provides education and social support to 120 children and their families who live in extreme poverty on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Channy, Lita and Piseth teach seven Kids' yoga classes per week for kids aged 4 to 11 years old, sharing yoga movement, games and values with the entire school. |
Aziza School, Village Earth |
Classes with the Aziza kids started after the violent Dey Krahom evictions of January 2009, when many of the Aziza kids lost their homes to buldozers and the school yard was bricked up by "developers." NataRaj Yoga provided a retreat space for the youngsters; and they have been coming back ever since. Some of the Krama Yoga teachers grew up in the community where Aziza school is or in surrounding communities that were also buldozed. With the Aziza classes, the Krama Yoga teachers went back to the places of their pasts as empowered adults, and are affecting a change in the lives of children who grew up like they did, and who face the same risks that they did. |
Riverkids Foundationwww.riverkidsproject.org |
Riverkids is an organization that stops trafficking before it begins by reaching out to the most at-risk populations in Phnom Penh, providing education and vocational skills for young people and social outreach to parents. Riverkids provides yoga classes to the teenage boys and another class to the teenage girls who are in the vocational training program that launches them into a world of independant living. |
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2010 Projects |
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Establishing Krama Yoga NGO |
The team are gathering all relevant information to submit an application to establish their own NGO. |
Krama Yoga Apprenticeship Program |
A year-long intensive for all the of the Krama Yoga teachers. This is a full immersion program that entails daily asana workshops and self-practice; teaching methodology for teen classes and kids classes; anatomy and physiology; philosophy; English classes; and hands-on teaching assistance. This program is taught by Isabelle Skaburskis and Oskar Nery, with the assistance of Yan Vannac. |
Phase 1 RYT Teacher Training with Hart Lazer (100 hours) |
Hart Lazer, Canada's top teacher trainer and specialist in trauma therapy, makes two annual visits to NataRaj Yoga every year. The NataRaj clientele join the Krama Yoga students teachers in the first part of this Yoga Alliance certification program. |
Samadhi Yoga Kids Yoga Teaching Certification |
Amanda Reid of Samadhi Yoga will be making a special trip to Cambodia to donate her time to train Krama Yoga teachers according to an RYT standard, and developing a professional Kids Yoga curriculum upon which Krama Yoga can base future Kids Yoga Teacher Training and pre-training program. Amanda will also be working hands-on in the Kids Yoga classes to give the teachers a boost of perspective and professionalism. Cambodian culture does not prize childhood, and the hardest thing for Cambodian adults to understand about Krama Yogs is why it is worth investing in chidlren's mental and physical health. Amanda will be woring with Krama Yoga staff to make sure they each have a working understanding of the value of Kids Yoga, and can communicate that value to others—including the kids themselves! |
Ongoing Kids and Teen Yoga classes with NGOs |
Continuing fourteen outreach classes per week for up to 250 kids in Phnom Penh. |
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