Dr. Petering and the MyPath Program are part of an ongoing partnership supported by SPY’s 4-year Innovations contract with LA County’s Department of Mental Health.
“You need to try mindfulness and Yoga. It’s hard to live in the streets when you are homeless, people can’t live like that. The pain is too much, it’s too stressful and some people can’t handle it, so they take their own life. Let’s try these mindfulness techniques and yoga poses and see how much it will change, and things will come to you.” -MyPath Program Participant
These are the words of a homeless youth participating in Safe Place for Youth’s (SPY) MyPath Program, a mindfulness and yoga peer-ambassador intervention program designed to reduce violence among homeless youth. Violence is a complex phenomenon that impacts adolescents and young adults across America. It occurs in multiple ways including interpersonal violence, intimate partner violence, gang, and gun violence. Homeless youth experience all types of violence at higher rates than housed youth. This is the result of many contributing factors including childhood experiences of trauma, subsistence survival strategies, and exposure to perpetrators while living on the streets. The consequences of violence are severe. In addition to injury and/or death, violence can cause non-physical ailments such as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and externalizing behavior (delinquency and aggression), arrest, and interruption of receiving supportive services.
[For more on this story by guest author, go to https://www.smdp.com/yoga-mindfulness/173476]
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