Flash-news:  The Art of Healing Magazine has released Melissa Thompson’s article “Shining the Spotlight of Awareness onto Mental Health and the Deaf Community with Yoga”  dated 1 March 2018.  See Auslan version of the article and the English version article ArtofHealingArticle1March2018

Why Yoga for the Deaf Community?

Karli Health Centre and Yoga Foundation have teamed up in November 2017 to provide accessible Yoga classes for deaf and hard of hearing children, adults and their families.

Expression of Interest

If you are Deaf and interested in being part of our yoga programs in Melbourne of Sydney you can download and please complete this form. Send this back to either Karli Health Centre or The Yoga Foundation.

What is Yoga and how it helps our mental and physcial health 

Yoga is a holistic mental health intervention that uses physical stretches, breathing techniques, relaxation, meditation as well as psychological, ethical and spiritual teachings for the promotion of wellbeing. Empirical research suggests that yoga can assist in the treatment of depression, anxiety, stress, trauma, sleeping difficulties and substance abuse disorders.

Many of the relaxation, breathing and meditation practices taught in yoga are identical to those used in evidence-based psychotherapies, including cognitive-behavioural therapy. Yoga therefore represents a cost-effective self-help strategy for teaching people the skills to improve their health and their emotional regulation skills.

Yoga is not easily accessible to all. Some Deaf people are disadvantaged by a lack of services in their language – Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Imagine how isolating it is to have health advice, engagement with support groups and activities in a language you can’t access.

Many Deaf people experience high levels of anxiety and depression due to their isolation and frustration with a world that is not attuned to their needs. Isolation is a major contributor to the higher prevalence of mental illness within this population: Yoga can meet many needs such as social inclusion, reduction in anxiety and depression and the cultivation of positive values, thoughts and attitudes, and lifestyle factors.

The problem

There are just a handful of Deaf yoga teachers in Australia and hardly any hearing teachers who use Auslan. This excludes Deaf adults and children from participating in an activity with many proven health benefits and we don’t think that’s fair.

Here’s what we’re doing about it

We are raising funds to pay highly trained Deaf teachers to deliver more Yoga classes in Auslan, designed specifically to meet the needs of Deaf people, with a focus on mental health. The Yoga Foundation is working closely with Deaf Yoga teacher and clinical counsellor Karli Dettman and her team at the Karli Health Centre.

Support us

We want to raise $4800 for four 10 week yoga programs for 40 Deaf people.

$4800 will pay for two highly trained Deaf Yoga teachers and a researcher to evaluate our programs.

Support this project: donate to our crowdfunding campaign now:

https://chuffed.org/project/deaf-yoga

We also have other Deaf programs to work on…watch this space for more info.