Jyoti Manuel and Special Yoga
Jyoti Jo Manuel has been a yoga practitioner since 1974. She began teaching in 1989. As one of the pioneers of children’s yoga in the UK, she has become a leading teacher trainer and practitioner of therapeutic yoga for children with special needs. She is the founder of Special Yoga, a global training organization that was founded in 2003. The organization was established to provide and develop sustainable and accessible yoga-based programs for children with special and additional needs within education, therapeutic settings and within the family.
Today all special yoga training programs and resources are available online.
Her heartfelt mission is to implement and share sustainable therapeutic yoga programs and trainings, allowing children to receive its significant benefits so that each child is given the opportunity to thrive and reach theirfullest potential. She has travelled far and wide and her programmed are successfully working in many parts of the world including India, Sri Lanka, Peru, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Austria Spain, Russia, Nepal, Australia and Thailand.
Her depth of knowledge of therapeutic yoga for children with special and additional needs makes her a leader in her field.
She is published with co-author Mark Forstater The Spiritual Teachings of Yoga.
Ms. Manuel has worked within education for the National Health Service in UK, most recently with a pilot program for children with additional needs who were at risk of exclusion from school. Special Yoga also worked with ADAPT in Mumbai on a research study on the value of therapeutic yoga for adolescents with cerebral palsy.
More recently she is collaborating with Breath-Body-Mind to support the outreach of their work within education to improve mental and emotional resilience.
Breath-Body-Mind and Special Yoga (BBM-SY)
Breath-Body-Mind and Special Yoga are collaborating to support mental health and emotional resilience in children and young people, as well as in their teachers, therapists, and care givers, especially during these challenging times.
As care-givers, we often underestimate the impact and importance of our state of being for the children and young people around us. We tend to focus on trying to make everything right for the children, often creating an anxious state in ourselves and unintentionally transmitting our stress to them. In contrast, when we are calm and regulated, we create an unspoken communication circle of safety and care, wherein restorative co-regulation can occur. Positive co-regulation is essential for children to thrive and development self-regulation.
These practices help children calm down, self-regulate emotions, improve mental focus and learning in school, and reduce anxiety about taking tests, performing in recitals or competitions, or just manage chaos in their lives. For children who have experienced trauma, these techniques enable them to feel safer, less fearful, freer to laugh, play, sleep, connect with their own feelings, and relate to others.